By Peter Grieco
“. . . various rules make it possible to marry,
to score a goal, to write a poem, to be impolite.”
Can it be that when Levi-Strauss admits
that “particular actions of individuals are never
symbolic in themselves” does he mean
to imply that they are thereby in themselves
unmeaningful? Structuralists focus
on the cultural. i.e. symbolic, meaning
of actions & see these as “determined by
sets of impersonal rules & norms.”
Cultural signs, whether linguistic ones
(like the elements of a sentence) or non-
linguistic ones (like the whiteness
of a wedding dress) are arbitrary & have
no intrinsic meaning. It follows that
intrinsic meaning lies elsewhere, outside of symbols.