Lévi-Strauss defined culture as signifying practices categorizing existence via language.

Evidence

First, he conceptualized “culture” as the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which different societies classified out their conditions of existence—above all (since Lé vi-Strauss was an anthropologist), the relations between the human and the natural worlds. Second, he thought of the manner and practice through which these categories and mental frameworks were produced and transformed, largely on an analogy with the ways in which language itself—the principal medium of “culture”—operated. He identified what was specific to them and their operation as the “production of meaning”: they were, above all, signifying practices. Third, after some early flirtations with Durkheim and Mauss’s social categories of thought, he largely gave up the question of the relation between signifying and non-signifying practices—between “culture” and “not-culture,” to use other terms—for the sake of concentrating on the internal relations within signifying practices by means of which the categories of meaning were produced. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 194

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the structuralist concept of culture as signifying practices analyzed through language analogy.
• XREF: Distinguishes Lévi-Strauss from Williams’s culturalism and Goldmann’s genetic structuralism, echoing the earlier typology in this chapter.