Excursus: Structuralist Analysis

Non-LDS scholar Seth D. Kunin of the Department of Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen, examined the allegory of the olive tree in the Book of Mormon from the viewpoint of structuralist theory as used in anthropology. Classic structuralist theory began with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to understand mythology in ways that go deeper than the text of the myth. As Kunin describes it, structuralism “is ultimately concerned with establishing the underlying, unconscious patterns of the brain that shape the way we categorise the world and thus ultimately how we think and act.”