via The Independent

As an undergraduate studying social anthropology at the height of the romance with structuralism, I got lost in Levi-Strauss and ultimately disenchanted, when papers I wrote doing structuralist analysis of myths and other cultural phenomena were praised even though in my heart I thought what I had written was gobbledigook… that you could get away saying anything in a structural analysis if you knew how to couch it. I do think The Savage Mind is a paradigm-changing masterpiece, showing that other cultures’ ways of making sense of the world partake as much as ours do of ‘scientific method.’ But delving deeper into structuralism was my first experience of that ’emperor-has-no-clothes’ feeling about a venerated discipline that I have had so often about cornerstones of post-modernism. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be admitting this; perhaps it means I didn’t really understand structuralism, but in that case neither did those grading my papers, did they?)