In a famous but often misunderstood article, Lévi-Strauss defines the notions of structure and model, and asserts the significance of these notions for the social sciences. We find there notions such as "group", "topology" and "order", as well as the distinction between "mechanical models" and "statistical models", and a classification of the social sciences (history, sociology, etnography and ethnology) based on such notions. It this a residue of "scientificism", to be discarded in later works, and to be contrasted with the "humanism" of Tristes Tropiques, for instance? The answer is no, not only because such notions stay alive in Lévi-Strauss’ later works, but also because some of the most basic ideas on society and history, present in Tristes Tropiques, spring from them. It is true that Lévi-Strauss uses such notions in a metaphorical mode, so that it is useless to seek in his texts precise scientific definitions. By employing such notions, always guided by a conscious effort towards combining sensibility and reason, and disrespecting the currently trendy cleavage between "Geistwissenschaften" and "Naturwissenchaften", Lévi-Strauss has expressed some of his central themes. One of them is the significance of symmetry as a fundamental property of culture and nature alike. Another theme is the view of history as a loss of symmetry. These basic themes are interspersed in his analyses of kinship and myth, and also in many texts on music and painting. The research program formulated by Lévi-Strauss in his article on "The Notion of Structure in Anthropology", as well as in La Pensée Sauvage, often treated as if it were outdated, remains influential outside the anthropological mainstream, in disciplines such as neuroscience, ethnoscience and the theory of self-organizing systems. This article tries to explain why.
structuralism; structure; entropy; symmetry; mathematical groups