French anthropologist and founder of structuralism, a name applied to the analysis of cultures, viewed as systems, in terms of the structural relations among their elements. Structuralism has influenced social science, philosophy, comparative religion, literature, and film. According to Lévi-Strauss's theories, universal patterns in cultural systems are products of the invariant structure of the human mind. Structure referred exclusively to mental structure, although he found evidence of such structure in his far-ranging analyses of kinship, patterns in mythology, art, religion, ritual, and culinary traditions.