Check relationships in the national epic of Iran from the perspective of structuralist anthropology

Regarded as one of the most important concepts in Structuralism, the Theory of Binary Opposition has long been used as a yardstick against which Structuralists measure their researches in the wide realms of Linguistics, Narratives, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Psychology. Employing Binary Opposition in Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss aimed to discover human’s cognitive structure in mythology and other various cultural practices, believing that such inevitable oppositions tend to be the first steps of human being has taken to appreciate the world around him. One of the most widely-discussed oppositions in Strauss’ theory tends to be the one between culture and the nature. Regarded as the primary social bond and the outset of human culture, family and kinship, according to him, is against the nature. He discusses that the opposition between exogamy and endogamy (when the members of the same family marry each other) exemplifies the culture/nature opposition. Owing to the high frequency of exogamy in Shah nameh and the following national epics, the present study aimed to examine the afore-said trend in Persian epics as well as to apply the theories of Lévi-Strauss in the analysis of such oppositions. Through these approache, the social background, religion, life, social relationships and kinship contracts governing the society have been investigated. In this regard, according to the structural anthropology theory and the principle of binary oppositions which is the main basis of this theory, oppositions between Iran/Aniran, male/female, patriarchy/matriarchy, father/mother originality and some kinship oppositions between father/son, father/daughter and mother/son have been studied