Before talking about the text, I went back to Week 1 when I introduced Saussure's structuralism in the field of linguistics to see how Lévi-Strauss uses his theories to rethink the study of cultures in the field of anthropology and ethnography. We saw that his structural anthropology is founded on the investigation of binary oppositions that work within culture. We looked at a concrete example that Lévi-Strauss puts forth in his book The Raw and the Cooked published in 1964 (i.e., the culinary triangle raw/cooked/rotten, and how food articulates the opposition between nature and culture). 

After fixing the main points of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist approach, I left some time to answer a couple of questions in small groups, namely on the implications that the idea of "structures" / "patterns" carries with it in relation to other ideas encountered so far in the course (cultures and hierarchy, progress and development, etc.). 

After that, we started our discussion on Race and History, and we mentioned the role of the UNESCO in dealing with the "question of race" in a 1950 statement that preceded Lévi-Strauss' booklet. At the very end of class, we talked about the notion of race and how it has been progressively undermined and refuted by scientific knowledge, especially in the field of genetics. To be continued next week.