Occasionally, among the small tribes and towns from whose myths the book of Genesis would ultimately come, there must have appeared someone who lived a life longer than anyone around them. Not just a measly 10 years more into their 60s, or even 70s, but well beyond that. Into their 80s, 90s. Everyone who knew them then had died. Their children had died. How old were they, the tribe muttered? The age became amplified in the retelling. They were a 100, 200, 400 years old. Thus was the legend of Methuselah born.

When he died, they must have felt the way many of us do today on hearing of the death of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, at the age of 100. How was it possible that he was still alive? The work he did has been so influential that it is impossible to imagine a whole intellectual climate without it. Those who were influenced by him, such as the critic Roland Barthes, have been dead for 30 years. Even the second generation, such as the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, or the “nihilist” Jean Baudrillard, are gone. Levi-Strauss kept on.

A French Jew who did field work in Brazil, and spent WW2 in the US before returning to a life’s teaching in Paris, his working life began at a time when an anthropologist’s work still took him to colonies of the European empires. He was in living connection with the great 19th-century founders of sociology, such as Emile Durkheim — a time when you could still take a boat down a river and find a tribe who had barely encountered a European.

He leaves at a time when the world is wreathed in layers of communication that have radically changed its nature.

Levi-Strauss’ claim to fame is as the founder of “structural anthropology” or “structuralism” in the humanities. I am already feeling sick in contemplation at the moronic articles The Australian and Arts and Letters Daily will run on the occasion of his death — but let’s try and put it as simply as possible. The rise of serious anthropology in the late 19th century prompted study of the dynamics of tribal societies — many of them Australian Aboriginal — as legitimate forms in their own right, rather than simply people lacking modernity.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Emile Durkheim produced a general theory from these studies — all societies build worlds of meaning from binary oppositions, some of which are naturally given. Men and women is the key “given” one. Night and day, earth and sky, etc. These oppositions are lashed together in different ways — man is night, woman is day, or vice versa — and the different ways of doing this create distinct cultures.

Cultures explain the way they divide up the world by stories about how things came to be differentiated from a single whole — or myths as we call them. The Eden myth, for example, differentiates men and women, humans and animals, god and humans, the sacred and the profane, etc.

These binaries are encoded in traditional languages (thus aboriginal languages have “classifiers” — words or endings that tell us that something is of a class that may include women, trees, the sea, etc. This survives in vestigial form in noun “gender” in most European languages). In the 1910s the Swiss linguistician de Saussure adapted this to suggest that language could be understood as a series of oppositions, in which meaning was defined by difference — the identity of a word or concept in a language came from what it was not, not what it was. Dog is not-cat, not-log, not-frog, etc.

It was among Levi-Strauss’ strokes of genius to fold this observation back from language into the study of cultures. Cultures were like a language. They established themselves through complex systems of difference. Where anthropologists had looked for the function of certain cultural practices — why were shellfish taboo in one culture, while scaled fish were taboo in another — they now looked for the different systems of belief and meaning that made such judgements possible.

Levi-Strauss, at least in his earlier work, never intended that his “structuralism” would ignore the fact that there were certain anchoring points in nature, for the construction of cultural meaning. Every culture has to deal with the fact that there are men and women, birth and death, a sun and a moon, and so on. But what is built upon them can be substantially arbitrary. In the Raw and the Cooked, he looked at the way in which food cultures seem, from the inside, to have a logic to them, while from the outside they seem mad.

Of course we eat eggs for breakfast — but not the meat of the animal from which they come. Of course we eat bacon — but not pork. Of course red wine goes with meat, white wine with fish. And so on. Within broad limits, any system can be assembled in any combination, and make sense through a series of oppositions and differences.

Once you understand that every culture is working off such systems, you begin to see how fantastically interconnected they all are. Earlier anthropologists (OK some of them) had become the first to realise that tribal societies were as complex and articulated as modern ones. In his 40s book The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss put that in structuralist terms pre-writing societies, conduct their affairs in modes of thinking fundamentally different to the more abstract processes of science and formal philosophy that dominate our own public lives. They emphasise concrete interconnection, difference, fine distinctions. Crucially, however, those modes of thinking survive in our own cultures, as stuff we just “know” within distinct cultures.

Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example, are enormous catalogues of savage thinking — why is it OK to bribe a waiter to get a good table, but not a chemist to get your prescription quicker? Whatever logical answer you come up with could equally justify the opposite.

Levi-Strauss, as his work developed, was wont to over-emphasise the structural in any cultural system — but that was nothing compared to what would happen when a later generation got hold of it, and combined it with a radical anti-naturalism. His work can be fairly cited as laying the basis for that dread phrase “the social construction of …” in which everything from aardvarks to zymurgy is worked through as a system of social codes, with no wider relation to history, material forces, or humanity’s setting within nature.

“Post-structuralism” took this radical approach and ran with it — most particularly in considerations of gender, the founding natural fact of social life. Or as the p-s’s would say “natural”, for, in the writings of people such as Judith Butler, gender would become a pure construct of language, systems and codes. Levi-Strauss had argued that men and women could be differently characterised in a wide range of ways in different cultural systems (consider, for example, by contemporary terms, what a bunch of neurotic gossip girls are the warrior-heroes of the Iliad). Butler and others argued that the whole idea of “men” and “women” was not a fixed given at all.

The humanities thus took the mad choo-choo turnoff to looneysville, just as the question of what it was to be human was coming back into full-force with the biotechnological revolutions of the 1980s. Structuralist ways of thinking came into disrepute, as both a certain type of gender-blind feminism faltered — and women admitted they quite liked babies, weren’t much interested in male centrefolds — and as the new discipline of “evolutionary psychology” came to find some quite interesting things.

The result has been a vacuum into which an equally idiotic oversimplification has rushed – a neo-Darwinism that manages to find genes for everything from love to vanilla Coke — and one which coincided with the disdain for “cultural relativism” expressed in the wake of 9/11. Levi-Strauss’ work had been done in the decades when French colonialism had struggled, at great human cost, to perpetuate itself a few decades more — his work was one way of explaining why the natives stubbornly failed to see the undeniable truth that Western culture was superior.

In the mad years of 9/11 and Iraq, even the idea that other people had cultural systems that were meaningful became a target. “Is Islam contrary to human nature?” Andrew Norton asked Francis Fukuyama in an interview in Policy magazine. “Aboriginal culture is the culture of the concentration camp,” the late Peter Howson remarked in an issue of Quadrant. In The Culture Cult the recovering anthropologist Roger Sandall derided those who saw anything worth preserving in kinship-based ways of life. There was a sort of gleeful triumphalism developed in part as a hysterical response to 9/11. How good it felt to throw off that Chinese restaurant culture sh-t, and just roll in the Starbucks.

That the West is emerging bloody, beaten and diminished from Iraq and Afghanistan is a reminder, in part, of an insight to be gained from Levi-Strauss — whatever looks crazy and arbitrary from the outside looks like something worth dying for from the inside, and you screw with other peoples’ meanings at your peril. When a culture of modernity becomes partially dominant in the world that still runs on closed cultural systems, that raises all sorts of problems.

If we feel we must do something about female circumcision in Africa, why do we still allow Queensland to jail women for seeking a safe abortion? Is the way in which we impose modernity rationally steered — or running off a set of closed meanings no less arbitrary than a Dreaming myth. One of the first things the US did in Iraq was to institute an anti-smoking campaign — rational, or simply a bunch of Plymouth Rock rejects recreating their puritan bodily rituals in a new setting?

Whatever will now be said in the ritual ceremonies of the Right, you can’t understand the world without a working knowledge of Levi-Strauss, without understanding how necessary it is to think differently. Incredibly, he survived to see that he had become an era. But now Methuselah is dead, the lamps are extinguished and the tribe moves on.