"Wild Thought", published in 1962, includes the best exposition of the laws that, according to Levi-Strauss, govern human thought in societies without writing. The French anthropologist defined as "wild thought" the form of thought that emerged during the Neolithic period and led to the discovery of the "arts of civilization": ceramics, weaving, agriculture, and animal domestication, activities that continue to be the foundations of human life. The principle of these discoveries should be sought in the persistence of wild thought to observe empirical diversity and exploit it primarily theoretically, in order to give meaning to the real world.

In contrast to Western rationalism, the thought of non-Western societies continued to be based on sensory data, thus reaching the creation of a "science of the concrete".

The name Levi-Strauss is associated with the methodological example of "structural anthropology", which was based on the selective transfer of certain principles of F. De Saussure's structural linguistics, as modified by the phonology of N. Trubetzkoy and R. Jakobson. The approach proposed by Levi-Strauss went beyond the boundaries of anthropological theory and influenced a range of scientific disciplines such as psychoanalysis, political theory, philosophy, and literary criticism, among others.

Despite the fact that today the structural approach has branched out into various transmission streams, Levi-Strauss's work remains "classic", both for the new paths it opened for anthropological thought and for his vision of an equal assessment of cultural expressions of all social groups, whether they belong to the Western world or to the rapidly disappearing societies of the so-called "wild".

E.K.