The Savage Mind (French: La Pensée sauvage), also translated as Wild Thought, is a 1962 work of structural anthropology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The structure has been borrowed and transposed, appropriated because of its ability to generate a certain economy independently of its substrate.

These distinctions may have greater or lesser practical significance, but ultimately:[2] In other words, the operation of identifying with a totem is secondary to the underlying process of re-appropriating structure (for example, observed differences between animals) for the purposes of society.

[3] A new translation by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt was published under the title Wild Thought in 2021.

[5] The idea that social structures can be transposed and recontextualized also plays a large role in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia.