Levi Strauss - Binary Opposition

Claude Levi-Strauss studied many myths and legends from all around the world and came to the conclusion that we make sense of the world using binary opposition. He found that narratives are arranged around the concept of binary opposites.
Binary opposites used in narrative have a simple meaning. This meaning was thought up by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes who were major academic European thinkers. Binary opposition is where simply in a narrative, two characters have the complete opposite character to each other. This theory is not only to do with characters, but the miss-en-scene and whole narrative of the film.
Some examples of this would be:
1. Boy vs Girl, War vs Peace, Good vs Evil, Black vs White, Strong vs Weak, Ugly vs Attractive, Young vs Old, Man vs Nature, Humanity vs Technology, Man vs Woman, Democracy vs Dictatorship, Ignorance vs Wisdom, Civilisation vs Savagery.
To summarise, Levi-Strauss' theory is based around binary opposites, and that the binary opposites are the central climax of the narrative structure.

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	Created by Jody Cook over 7 years ago