Analysis Of Lévi-Strauss 'The Gift'

Why did Lévi-Strauss compare women to gifts?

“All French anthropologists are the children of Lévi-Strauss” Le Monde stated in its obituary for the deceased anthropologist in 2009 (Meany, 2011). As the main founder of structuralism, the impact he had on modern anthropology and also the humanities in general, is significant. Some might even say that Lévi-Strauss replaced Sartre’s existentialism with structuralism in world of French thinkers (Meany, 2011).

One of his earliest works was Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship), which examines kinship not in terms of lineage but through alliances. He explores how societies are based on the principles of the incest-taboo and the exchange of women. In his alliance

An anthropologist, whose ideas obviously influenced large part of his work, especially concerning the exchange of women, is Marcel Mauss. While he neglected Mauss’ seminars on gift exchange at the Collège de France in his early student years (Meany, 2011), Lévi-Strauss grew to become an ardent admirer, referring to him regularly in his writings.

In his work ‘The Gift’ Marcel Mauss stresses the significance of gift exchange in social interactions. He divides gift exchange into three actions: the giving of a gift, the acceptance of the gift and its reciprocation, which is all obligatory. Gift exchange serves to strengthen social bonds and if a part of the exchange is not fulfilled it affects the social standing of the persons involved. Therefor there is no such thing as a free or selfless gift.

Lévi-Strauss transfers this theory onto women, describing them as the most valuable gift, as the bonds created through their exchange are the strongest, namely marriage alliances. Here the reciprocation of the gift is also obligatory, which in its most basic form would be two men exchanging

In 1949 when he published ‘The Elementary Structures’, kinship was a widely discussed anthropological subject of the time. And as Lévi-Strauss himself, other famous researchers of kinship of the 1950s neglected to examine developed gender roles too: “When reading the classic studies of Boas, Kroeber, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes today, the absence of analyses of gender and the social and cultural production of gender differences is striking. In studies of kinship, a male perspective is often taken for granted. Certainly, women have a place in these studies; they sometimes appear as wives, mothers and sisters, but rarely as independently acting persons.” (Eriksen, 1995, p.