Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) represents the high point of structural anthropology’s attempt to find universal laws of human kinship. His key claim was that kinship systems are “models of reality” rather than reflections of biological fact—“the law that rules is that of the mind.” In this view, kinship is a cognitive structure built through symbolic exchanges rather than a natural one grounded in bloodlines.

Central to his model is the idea that societies are organized around the “communication of women”—that is, the exchange of women between men through marriage. This exchange, he argued, was governed by two universal constraints: the incest taboo and the prohibition of parallel-cousin marriage, since such unions would “upset the exchange process.” His diagrams of kinship—often as intricate as “a classic Persian carpet”—visualize these exchanges as systems of balance and reciprocity.

However, as Akenson notes in Some Family, Lévi-Strauss’s model falters when confronted with ethnographic exceptions. Societies such as the Berbers and Basseri, which practice parallel-cousin marriage, expose the limits of his supposed universals. Likewise, his assumption that women are universally exchanged as items of positive value (as in bride-price societies) fails to explain cultures where dowries prevail—where, economically speaking, daughters carry negative value. In these cases, a simpler explanation grounded in “cost-benefit relationships” proves more persuasive than structuralist formalism. (Akenson 2007)

1. Akenson, Donald Harman. 2007. Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself. Montréal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press.