Folk Tales

       
     A anthropological theory from 1967 called Structuralism was mainly associated with a French man named Claude Levi- Strauss. He had a profound interest in structures of the human mind and aimed to discover connections between it and culture. He believed that human minds have universal characteristics and  that among these was the need to classify things. The most common means of classifying used by humans is binary opposition such as black and white, good and evil, old and young.

     Strauss applied his beliefs about classification to folk tales. He examined many tales and determined that many could be converted into another through a series of steps:

     1- Converting a positive element into a negative
     2- Reversing the order of the elements
     3- Replacing the male hero with a female hero
     4- Preserving certain key elements
   
     A good example is the tale of Cinderella and Ash Boy.

     I think it's interesting that even in very different cultures the basis of many folk tales are the same. This represents a unified more general human  culture shared by us all.