Science Quote by Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss pulls a neat switch: the real object of study isn’t “primitive thinking” but the hidden machinery inside everyone’s thinking. The line is a rebuke to the condescending museum-glass view of myth, where modern people stand outside it like enlightened spectators. His intent is methodological and quietly polemical: stop treating myth as a quaint story people tell; treat it as an operating system that runs in the background, shaping perception, categories, and “common sense” even when we swear we’re being rational.

The phrasing matters. “Operate” is the verb of a scientist, not a storyteller. Myths aren’t defended as beautiful or dismissed as false; they function. And “without their being aware” lands the punch: myth’s power is precisely its invisibility. It naturalizes cultural arrangements by making them feel inevitable, pre-political, simply “how things are.” That’s why you can’t defeat myth by debunking it the way you might correct a bad fact. You have to map its structure: the oppositions it organizes (nature/culture, raw/cooked, male/female, civilized/savage) and the bargains it offers to resolve tensions a society can’t admit directly.

Context sharpens the stakes. Writing in the mid-20th century, Levi-Strauss is building structural anthropology against both romantic folklore and crude evolutionism. He’s also anticipating a broader postwar suspicion: that ideology isn’t just propaganda shouted at crowds, but a pattern woven into language, rituals, family life, even “objective” institutions. The quote isn’t asking us to stop believing in myths. It’s warning that we already do, and that the most persuasive myths are the ones that don’t announce themselves as myths at all.