Page "Structural anthropology" Paragraph 11

Later in his most popular work, The Raw and the Cooked, he described the widely dispersed folk tales of tribal South America as all related to one another through a series of transformations — as one opposite in tales here changed into another opposite in tales there.

For example, as the title implies, raw becomes its opposite cooked.

These particular opposites ( raw / cooked ) are symbolic of human culture itself, in which by means of thought and labour ( economics ), raw materials become clothes, food, weapons, art, ideas.

Culture, explained Lévi-Strauss, is a dialectic process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.