A binary opposition is a pair of related
terms or concepts which are opposite in meaning.
Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist
who lived in the early 1900s. He argued that the way we understand certain
words doesn’t depend on any meaning they themselves directly have, but mostly
by our understanding of the difference between the word and it’s ‘opposite’, or
as Strauss referred to it as ‘binary opposite’. For example, our perceptive of
the word ‘rich’ depends on the difference between that word and the contrasting
word ‘poor’. Binary opposites are used frequently in media text and many action
genre films utilise binary opposition in their films.
Some examples of binary opposites are:
- · Man/woman
- · Good/bad
- · Young/old
- · Hero/villain
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