Structural anthropology
Encyclopedia
Structural anthropology is based on Claude Lévi-Strauss
' idea that people
think about the world in terms of binary opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, person
and animal
, life
and death
—and that every culture
can be understood in terms of these opposites. "From the very start," he wrote, "the process of visual perception makes use of binary oppositions." [Structuralism and Ecology, 1972]
Lévi-Strauss' approach arose, fundamentally, from the philosophy of Hegel who explains that in every situation there can be found two opposing things and their resolution; he called these "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
." Lévi-Strauss argued that, in fact, cultures have this structure. He showed, for example, how opposing ideas would fight and also be resolved in the rules of marriage
, in mythology
, and in ritual
. This approach, he felt, made for fresh new ideas. He stated:
His work in South America
is his best known. Early on he showed there are "dual organizations" throughout Amazon rainforest
cultures, and these "dual organizations" represent opposites and their synthesis. For instance, Gê tribes of the Amazon were found to divide their villages into two halves, which were rivals; however, the members of opposite halves married each other. This illustrated two opposites in conflict and also resolved; that is, it was the classical Hegelian trio of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. (See below for more detail.)
Such was the case in many aspects of life. Culture, he said, for example, has to take into account both life and death and needs to have a way of mediating between the two. Mythology (see his several-volume Mythologies) unites opposites in diverse ways.
Three of the most prominent structural anthropologists are Lévi-Strauss himself
and the British neo-structuralists Rodney Needham
and Edmund Leach
, the latter being the author of such essays as "Time and False Noses" [in Rethinking Anthropology]. In this essay, Edmund Leach sought an explanation of why human societies have solemn
or sacred
occasions, such as the Christian
celebration of Christmas
, followed in a short time by their opposite: a taboo
-breaking and "profane" celebration such as New Year
's.
(Ferdinand de Saussure
--who saw in the structure of language a series of oppositions or opposites—and Roman Jakobson
) as well as from Émile Durkheim
and particularly Marcel Mauss
. Saussure argued that linguists needed to move beyond the recording of parole (individual speech act
s) and come to an understanding of langue, the underlying structural patterns (grammar) of a language.
Lévi-Strauss applied this distinction in his search for the mental structures that underlie all acts of human behavior: Just as we are unaware of the grammar
of our language while we speak, he argues, we are unaware of the workings of social structure
s in our daily lives. The structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind
and operate in us unconscious
ly (albeit not in a Freudian sense).
Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, which employed so-called binary oppositions in their research. Roman Jakobson
and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features, such as voiceless vs. voiced. Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the universal structures of the mind. For him, opposites are at the basis of social structure and culture.
In his early work he argued that tribal kinship
groups
were usually found in pair
s, or in paired groups that both oppose one another and need one another. For example, in the Amazon basin, two different expanded families would build their houses in two facing semicircles that together make up a big circle. He showed too that the cognitive maps, the ways early folk categorized animals, tree
s, and so on, were based on a series of oppositions.
Later in his most popular work, The Raw and the Cooked
, he described the widely dispersed folk tales of tribal South America as all related to one another through a series of transformations—as one opposite in tales here changed into another opposite in tales there. For example, as the title implies, raw
becomes its opposite cook
ed. These particular opposites (raw/cooked) are symbolic of human culture itself, in which by means of thought
and labour (economics), raw materials become clothes, food
, weapon
s, art
, idea
s. Culture, explained Lévi-Strauss, is a dialectic
process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Other influences came from Émile Durkheim
and Marcel Mauss
. While Durkheim thought that taxonomies of the natural world are collective in origin (the "collective conscious"), meaning that social structures influence individual structures of cognition, Lévi-Strauss proposed the opposite, arguing that it is the latter that give rise to the former. Social structures mirror cognitive structures, meaning that patterns in social interaction can be treated as manifestations of cognitive structures. While structural-functionalists looked for structures within social organisation, structuralism therefore seeks to identify links between structures of thought and social structures. The possibly most significant influence on structuralism came from Mauss' The Gift
. In his seminal work, Mauss argued that gifts are not free but rather create an obligation to reciprocate. Through the gift, the givers give part of themselves, implying that the gift is imbued with a certain power that compels the recipient to reciprocate. Gift exchanges play therefore a crucial role in creating and maintaining social relationships by establishing bonds of obligations. The gift is therefore not merely physical but also has cultural and spiritual
properties. It is a "total prestation" as Mauss called it, as it carries the power to create a system of reciprocity in which the honour
of both giver and recipient are engaged. Social relationship
s are therefore based on exchange; Durkheimian solidarity, according to Mauss, is best achieved through structures of reciprocity and related systems of exchange. Lévi-Strauss took this idea and postulated three fundamental properties of the human mind: a) people follow rules; b) reciprocity is the simplest way to create social relationships; c) a gift binds both giver and recipient in a continuing social relationship (Layton, 1997:76).
The structures are universal; the contents will be culturally specific. Based on this concept, he argued that exchange is the universal basis of kinship
systems, the structures of which would depend on the type of marriage rules that are applied. Because of its strong focus on vertical social relations, Lévi-Strauss' model of kinship systems came to be called alliance theory
.
Lévi-Strauss' model attempted to offer a single explanation for cross-cousin marriage, sister-exchange, dual organization and rules of exogamy
. Marriage rules over time create social structures as marriages are primarily forged between groups and not just between the two individuals involved. When groups exchange women on a regular basis they marry together, with each marriage creating a debtor/creditor relationship which must be balanced through the "repayment" of wives, either directly or in next generation. Lévi-Strauss proposed that the initial motivation for the exchange of women was the incest taboo, which he deemed to be the beginning and essence of culture as it was the first rule to check natural impulses; and secondarily the sexual division of labour. The former, by prescribing exogamy, creates a distinction between marriageable and tabooed women and thus necessitates a search for women outside one's own kin group ("marry out or die out"), which fosters exchange relationships with other groups; the latter creates a need for women to do "women's tasks". By necessitating wife-exchange arrangements, exogamy therefore promotes inter-group alliances and serves to form structures of social networks.
Lévi-Strauss also discovered that a wide range of historically unrelated cultures had the rule that individuals should marry their cross-cousin, meaning children of siblings of the opposite sex - from a male perspective that is either the FZD (father's sister's daughter) or the MBD (mother's brother's daughter). Accordingly, he grouped all possible kinship systems into a scheme containing three basic kinship structures constructed out of two types of exchange. He called the three kinship structures elementary, semi-complex and complex.
Elementary structures are based on positive marriage rules that specify whom a person must marry, while complex systems specify negative marriage rules (whom one must not marry), thus leaving a certain amount of room for choice based on preference. Elementary structures can operate based on two forms of exchange: restricted (or direct) exchange, a symmetric form of exchange between two groups (also called moieties) of wife-givers and wife-takers; in an initial restricted exchange FZ marries MB, with all children then being bilateral cross-cousins (the daughter is both MBD and FZD). Continued restricted exchange means that the two lineages marry together. Restricted exchange structures are generally quite uncommon.
The second form of exchange within elementary structures is called generalised exchange, meaning that a man can only marry either his MBD (matrilateral
cross-cousin marriage) or his FZD (patrilateral cross-cousin marriage). This involves an asymmetric exchange between at least three groups. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage arrangements where the marriage of the parents is repeated by successive generations are very common in parts of Asia (e.g. amongst the Kachin). Lévi-Strauss considered generalised exchange to be superior to restricted exchange because it allows the integration of indefinite numbers of groups (cf. Barnard and Good, 1984:96). Examples of restricted exchange are found in e.g. Amazonia. These tribal societies are made up of multiple moieties which often split up, thus rendering them comparatively unstable. Generalised exchange is more integrative but contains an implicit hierarchy, as e.g. amongst the Kachin where wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. Consequently, the last wife-taking group in the chain is significantly inferior to the first wife-giving group to which it is supposed to give its wives. These status inequalities can destabilise the entire system or can at least lead to an accumulation of wives (and in the case of the Kachin also of bridewealth) at one end of the chain.
From a structural perspective matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is superior to its patrilateral counterpart; the latter has less potential to produce social cohesion since its exchange cycles are shorter (the direction of wife exchange is reversed in each successive generation). Lévi-Strauss' theory is supported by fact that patrilateral cross-cousin marriage is in fact the rarest of three types. However, matrilateral generalised exchange poses a risk as group A depends on being given a woman from a group that it has not itself given a woman to, meaning that there is a less immediate obligation to reciprocate compared to a restricted exchange system. The risk created by such a delayed return is obviously lowest in restricted exchange systems.
Lévi-Strauss proposed a third structure between elementary and complex structures, called semi-complex structure or Crow-Omaha system. Semi-complex structures contain so many negative marriage rules that they effectively come close to prescribing marriage to certain parties, thus somewhat resembling elementary structures. These structures are found amongst e.g. the Crow Nation
and Omaha
Native Americans in the United States
.
In Lévi-Strauss' order of things, the basic building block of kinship is not just the nuclear family, as in structural-functionalism, but the so-called kinship atom: the nuclear family together with the wife's brother. This "mother's brother" (from the perspective of the wife-seeking son) plays a crucial role in alliance theory, as he is the one who ultimately decides whom his daughter will marry. Moreover, it is not just the nuclear family as such but alliances between families that matter in regard to the creation of social structures, reflecting the typical structuralist argument that the position of an element in the structure is more significant than the element itself. Descent theory and alliance theory therefore look at two different sides of the same coin: the former emphasising bonds of consanguinity (kinship by blood), the latter stressing bonds of affinity (kinship by law or choice).
, Netherlands
, which focused frequently on the relationship between apparent cultural phenomena and subsurface structures found in the numerous cultures in the Indonesian archipelago
: Batak
, Minangkabau, Moluccas, etc., though it was primarily aimed at training governors for colonial Indonesia
. This type of anthropology, developed by the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthropologists, was eventually called "de Leidse Richting," or "de Leidse School," and a continuous flow of researchers was educated in this type of anthropology. It was this type of anthropological theory which attracted students and researchers alike; those interested in a type of anthropology that was holistic, that was broad and deep at the same time, that related economic circumstances with mythological and spatial classifications or cognitive subsurface structures, and that explored the relationship between the botanical world and religious, symbol
ic systems. This was long before what became internationally known as structuralism. From the "Leiden" perspective much research was done for many decades, thus influencing successive generations of anthropologists educated at Leiden University.
The most recent chairs were held by J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong
(chair: 1922-1956, + 1964) - who coined the concept of the Field of Ethnological Study in 1935 - and later his nephew P.E. de Josselin de Jong
(chair: 1956-1987, + 1999).
was mainly espoused by Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach
, who were both critical towards the structural-functionalist perspective and who drew on Lévi-Strauss as well as Arthur Maurice Hocart
. However, they also found grounds for critiquing Lévi-Strauss. Leach, who in stark contrast to Lévi-Strauss was more concerned with researching people's actual lives than with the discovery of universal mental structures, found that the latter's analysis of the Kachin contained serious flaws. According to Leach, Lévi-Strauss' project had been overly ambitious, meaning that his analyses were too superficial and the available data treated with too little care. While part of his analysis of the Kachin was simply based on incorrect ethnographic information, the rest reflected Kachin ideology but not actual practice.
In theory, Kachin groups were supposed to marry in a circle ideally consisting of five groups. In reality, the system was strongly imbalanced with built-in status differences between superior wife-givers and inferior wife-takers. Lévi-Strauss had incorrectly assumed that wife-takers would be of higher rank than wife-givers; in reality, it was the other way round, and the former usually had to make substantial bridewealth payments to obtain wives. Overall, some lineages would accumulate more wives and material wealth than others, meaning that the system cannot be said to be driven primarily by reciprocity. In actual reality, the marriage system was quite messy and the chance of it breaking down increased with the number of groups involved. In generalised exchange systems, the more groups there are the more complex it becomes to keep track of all transactions and to ensure that all wife-givers will eventually be on the receiving end, an issue that Lévi-Strauss had already foreseen. He thought that in practice there will be competition for women, leading to accumulation and therefore asymmetries in the system. According to Leach, in Kachin reality instabilities arose primarily from competition for bridewealth. Men sought to get the maximum profit in forms of either bridewealth or political advantage out of the marriage of their daughters. Lévi-Strauss had only accorded a symbolic role to marriage prestations, effectively overlooking their significance within the system. Leach argued that they are also (or even primarily) economic and political transactions, and are frequently connected to transfers of rights over land, too.
Kinship is therefore not an isolated domain but linked to economic and political structures. Marriage exchanges need to be analysed within their wider economic and political context rather than in isolation, as Lévi-Strauss tended to do. Leach charged the latter with neglecting the effects of material conditions on social relations. He also challenged the claims to universality made by Lévi-Strauss about the model, doubting whether structures generated by marriage rules would be the same in different social contexts.
theories went out of fashion. However, there were also a number of internal incoherences and a range of intrinsic limitations that reduced its appeal.
By overstressing the structural significance of affinal ties, alliance theory effectively neglected the importance of descent and genealogical ties. Some societies (e.g. African tribal societies) employ descent as the primary organizational principle. In others, alliances are of primary significance, as in e.g. many Southeast-Asian societies and amongst Amazonian tribes; and still others place emphasis on both. The Yanomamö fit very well into the alliance theory mold while the Tallensi
or Azande
do not. Holy (1996) pointed out that some Middle-Eastern societies cannot be conclusively explained by either descent or alliance theory. Critics also saw weaknesses in Lévi-Strauss' methods, in the fact that he looked for ideal structures, thereby neglecting the reality and complexity of actual practices. On the other hand, though, his model was ironically too powerful. As Kuper (1988:223) pointed out, if the structures of the mind really are universal and Lévi-Strauss' model is correct, then why is it that not all human societies act accordingly and structure their kinship systems around alliances and exchanges? A central assumption of his was that exchange is the universal form of marriage, but there could be other significant factors. And even if reciprocity was the primary principle that underlies marriages, the return does not have to be in kind but could take other forms (such as money, livestock, services or favours of various kinds). Also, social cohesion through reciprocity does not have to rest primarily on the exchange of women. Mauss' definition of the gift showed that different cultures use all kinds of gifts to create and maintain alliances. Feminists in particular took offense at Lévi-Strauss' claim that the underlying principle according to which all societies work is the exchange of women by men, who dispose of them as if they were objects. Others, for example Godelier, critiqued structuralism's synchronic approach that led it to be essentially ahistorical.
Marxists shifted the attention within anthropology from an almost exclusive preoccupation with kinship to an emphasis on the economic dimension. For them, social structures were primarily shaped by material conditions, property relations and class struggles.
Finally, a great weakness of structuralism is that its main propositions were not formulated in a way so that they could be subject to verification or falsification
(cf. D'Andrade, 1995:249; Barnes, 1971:165-171). Lévi-Strauss did not develop a framework that could prove the existence of his concept of the fundamental structures of human thought but simply assumed them to be there, an unfortunate mistake considering that this concept underpinned all of his work. Consequently, it was comparatively easy for post-structuralists such as Derrida to simply reject this notion.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
' idea that people
People
People is a plurality of human beings or other beings possessing enough qualities constituting personhood. It has two usages:* as the plural of person or a group of people People is a plurality of human beings or other beings possessing enough qualities constituting personhood. It has two usages:*...
think about the world in terms of binary opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, person
Person
A person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...
and animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
, life
Life
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
and death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
—and that every culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
can be understood in terms of these opposites. "From the very start," he wrote, "the process of visual perception makes use of binary oppositions." [Structuralism and Ecology, 1972]
Lévi-Strauss' approach arose, fundamentally, from the philosophy of Hegel who explains that in every situation there can be found two opposing things and their resolution; he called these "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
The triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel never used the term himself, and almost all of his biographers have been eager to discredit it....
." Lévi-Strauss argued that, in fact, cultures have this structure. He showed, for example, how opposing ideas would fight and also be resolved in the rules of marriage
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
, in mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
, and in ritual
Ritual
A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....
. This approach, he felt, made for fresh new ideas. He stated:
- Only those who practice structural analysis are made aware by their daily work of what they are actually trying to do: that is, to reunite perspectives which the narrow scientific outlook of the last centuries has for too long believed to be mutually exclusive: sensibility and intellect, quality and quantity, the concrete and the geometrical, or as we say today, the "etic" and the "emic." [1972]
His work in South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
is his best known. Early on he showed there are "dual organizations" throughout Amazon rainforest
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon Rainforest , also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America...
cultures, and these "dual organizations" represent opposites and their synthesis. For instance, Gê tribes of the Amazon were found to divide their villages into two halves, which were rivals; however, the members of opposite halves married each other. This illustrated two opposites in conflict and also resolved; that is, it was the classical Hegelian trio of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. (See below for more detail.)
Such was the case in many aspects of life. Culture, he said, for example, has to take into account both life and death and needs to have a way of mediating between the two. Mythology (see his several-volume Mythologies) unites opposites in diverse ways.
Three of the most prominent structural anthropologists are Lévi-Strauss himself
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
and the British neo-structuralists Rodney Needham
Rodney Needham
Rodney Needham was one of the leading British social anthropologists.Born as Rodney Phillip Needham Green, Needham changed his name in 1947,the same year he married Claudia Brysz....
and Edmund Leach
Edmund Leach
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist of whom it has been said:"It is no exaggeration to say that in sheer versatility, originality, and range of writing he was and still is difficult to match among the anthropologists of the English speaking world".-Personal and academic...
, the latter being the author of such essays as "Time and False Noses" [in Rethinking Anthropology]. In this essay, Edmund Leach sought an explanation of why human societies have solemn
Solemnity
A Solemnity of the Roman Catholic Church is a principal holy day in the liturgical calendar, usually commemorating an event in the life of Jesus, his mother Mary, or other important saints. The observance begins with the vigil on the evening before the actual date of the feast...
or sacred
Sacred
Holiness, or sanctity, is in general the state of being holy or sacred...
occasions, such as the Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
celebration of Christmas
Christmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
, followed in a short time by their opposite: a taboo
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
-breaking and "profane" celebration such as New Year
New Year
The New Year is the day that marks the time of the beginning of a new calendar year, and is the day on which the year count of the specific calendar used is incremented. For many cultures, the event is celebrated in some manner....
's.
The Structural Anthropology of Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss took many of his ideas from structural linguisticsStructural Linguistics
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
(Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
--who saw in the structure of language a series of oppositions or opposites—and Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
) as well as from Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
and particularly Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
. Saussure argued that linguists needed to move beyond the recording of parole (individual speech act
Speech act
Speech Act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts...
s) and come to an understanding of langue, the underlying structural patterns (grammar) of a language.
Lévi-Strauss applied this distinction in his search for the mental structures that underlie all acts of human behavior: Just as we are unaware of the grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
of our language while we speak, he argues, we are unaware of the workings of social structure
Social structure
Social structure is a term used in the social sciences to refer to patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of the individuals. The usage of the term "social structure" has changed over time and may reflect the various levels of analysis...
s in our daily lives. The structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
and operate in us unconscious
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
ly (albeit not in a Freudian sense).
Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, which employed so-called binary oppositions in their research. Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features, such as voiceless vs. voiced. Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the universal structures of the mind. For him, opposites are at the basis of social structure and culture.
In his early work he argued that tribal kinship
Kinship
Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. And descent groups, lineages, etc. are treated in their own subsections....
groups
Group (sociology)
In the social sciences a social group can be defined as two or more humans who interact with one another, share similar characteristics and collectively have a sense of unity...
were usually found in pair
Pair
The word pair, derived via the French words pair/paire from the Latin par 'equal', can refer to:* 2 , two of something* Topological pair, an inclusion of topological spaces.* Tuple* Product type* Au pair, a work agreement...
s, or in paired groups that both oppose one another and need one another. For example, in the Amazon basin, two different expanded families would build their houses in two facing semicircles that together make up a big circle. He showed too that the cognitive maps, the ways early folk categorized animals, tree
Tree
A tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...
s, and so on, were based on a series of oppositions.
Later in his most popular work, The Raw and the Cooked
The Raw and the Cooked
The Raw and the Cooked is the first volume from Mythologiques written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The original French title was Le Cru et le cuit....
, he described the widely dispersed folk tales of tribal South America as all related to one another through a series of transformations—as one opposite in tales here changed into another opposite in tales there. For example, as the title implies, raw
Raw
Raw is a term referring to food that has not been cooked.RAW or raw may refer to:-Technology:* Raw audio format, a file type used to represent sound as pulse-code modulation data...
becomes its opposite cook
Cooking
Cooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...
ed. These particular opposites (raw/cooked) are symbolic of human culture itself, in which by means of thought
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
and labour (economics), raw materials become clothes, food
Food
Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals...
, weapon
Weapon
A weapon, arm, or armament is a tool or instrument used with the aim of causing damage or harm to living beings or artificial structures or systems...
s, art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
, idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s. Culture, explained Lévi-Strauss, is a dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Other influences came from Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
and Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
. While Durkheim thought that taxonomies of the natural world are collective in origin (the "collective conscious"), meaning that social structures influence individual structures of cognition, Lévi-Strauss proposed the opposite, arguing that it is the latter that give rise to the former. Social structures mirror cognitive structures, meaning that patterns in social interaction can be treated as manifestations of cognitive structures. While structural-functionalists looked for structures within social organisation, structuralism therefore seeks to identify links between structures of thought and social structures. The possibly most significant influence on structuralism came from Mauss' The Gift
The Gift (book)
The Gift is a 1923 short book by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss and is best known for being one of the earliest and most important studies of reciprocity and gift exchange.Mauss's original piece was entitled Essai sur le don...
. In his seminal work, Mauss argued that gifts are not free but rather create an obligation to reciprocate. Through the gift, the givers give part of themselves, implying that the gift is imbued with a certain power that compels the recipient to reciprocate. Gift exchanges play therefore a crucial role in creating and maintaining social relationships by establishing bonds of obligations. The gift is therefore not merely physical but also has cultural and spiritual
Spirituality
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
properties. It is a "total prestation" as Mauss called it, as it carries the power to create a system of reciprocity in which the honour
Honour
Honour or honor is an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or corporate body such as a family, school, regiment or nation...
of both giver and recipient are engaged. Social relationship
Interpersonal relationship
An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...
s are therefore based on exchange; Durkheimian solidarity, according to Mauss, is best achieved through structures of reciprocity and related systems of exchange. Lévi-Strauss took this idea and postulated three fundamental properties of the human mind: a) people follow rules; b) reciprocity is the simplest way to create social relationships; c) a gift binds both giver and recipient in a continuing social relationship (Layton, 1997:76).
The structures are universal; the contents will be culturally specific. Based on this concept, he argued that exchange is the universal basis of kinship
Kinship
Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. And descent groups, lineages, etc. are treated in their own subsections....
systems, the structures of which would depend on the type of marriage rules that are applied. Because of its strong focus on vertical social relations, Lévi-Strauss' model of kinship systems came to be called alliance theory
Alliance theory
The Alliance Theory is the name given to the structural method of studying kinship relations. It finds its origins in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship , and is opposed to the functionalist theory of Radcliffe-Brown...
.
Lévi-Strauss' model attempted to offer a single explanation for cross-cousin marriage, sister-exchange, dual organization and rules of exogamy
Exogamy
Exogamy is a social arrangement where marriage is allowed only outside of a social group. The social groups define the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. In social studies, exogamy is viewed as a combination of two related aspects:...
. Marriage rules over time create social structures as marriages are primarily forged between groups and not just between the two individuals involved. When groups exchange women on a regular basis they marry together, with each marriage creating a debtor/creditor relationship which must be balanced through the "repayment" of wives, either directly or in next generation. Lévi-Strauss proposed that the initial motivation for the exchange of women was the incest taboo, which he deemed to be the beginning and essence of culture as it was the first rule to check natural impulses; and secondarily the sexual division of labour. The former, by prescribing exogamy, creates a distinction between marriageable and tabooed women and thus necessitates a search for women outside one's own kin group ("marry out or die out"), which fosters exchange relationships with other groups; the latter creates a need for women to do "women's tasks". By necessitating wife-exchange arrangements, exogamy therefore promotes inter-group alliances and serves to form structures of social networks.
Lévi-Strauss also discovered that a wide range of historically unrelated cultures had the rule that individuals should marry their cross-cousin, meaning children of siblings of the opposite sex - from a male perspective that is either the FZD (father's sister's daughter) or the MBD (mother's brother's daughter). Accordingly, he grouped all possible kinship systems into a scheme containing three basic kinship structures constructed out of two types of exchange. He called the three kinship structures elementary, semi-complex and complex.
Elementary structures are based on positive marriage rules that specify whom a person must marry, while complex systems specify negative marriage rules (whom one must not marry), thus leaving a certain amount of room for choice based on preference. Elementary structures can operate based on two forms of exchange: restricted (or direct) exchange, a symmetric form of exchange between two groups (also called moieties) of wife-givers and wife-takers; in an initial restricted exchange FZ marries MB, with all children then being bilateral cross-cousins (the daughter is both MBD and FZD). Continued restricted exchange means that the two lineages marry together. Restricted exchange structures are generally quite uncommon.
The second form of exchange within elementary structures is called generalised exchange, meaning that a man can only marry either his MBD (matrilateral
Matrilateral
The term Matrilateral describes kin 'on the mother's side'.Social anthropologists have underlined that even where a social group demonstrates a strong emphasis on one or other line of inheritance , relatives who fall outside this unilineal grouping will not simply be ignored...
cross-cousin marriage) or his FZD (patrilateral cross-cousin marriage). This involves an asymmetric exchange between at least three groups. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage arrangements where the marriage of the parents is repeated by successive generations are very common in parts of Asia (e.g. amongst the Kachin). Lévi-Strauss considered generalised exchange to be superior to restricted exchange because it allows the integration of indefinite numbers of groups (cf. Barnard and Good, 1984:96). Examples of restricted exchange are found in e.g. Amazonia. These tribal societies are made up of multiple moieties which often split up, thus rendering them comparatively unstable. Generalised exchange is more integrative but contains an implicit hierarchy, as e.g. amongst the Kachin where wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. Consequently, the last wife-taking group in the chain is significantly inferior to the first wife-giving group to which it is supposed to give its wives. These status inequalities can destabilise the entire system or can at least lead to an accumulation of wives (and in the case of the Kachin also of bridewealth) at one end of the chain.
From a structural perspective matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is superior to its patrilateral counterpart; the latter has less potential to produce social cohesion since its exchange cycles are shorter (the direction of wife exchange is reversed in each successive generation). Lévi-Strauss' theory is supported by fact that patrilateral cross-cousin marriage is in fact the rarest of three types. However, matrilateral generalised exchange poses a risk as group A depends on being given a woman from a group that it has not itself given a woman to, meaning that there is a less immediate obligation to reciprocate compared to a restricted exchange system. The risk created by such a delayed return is obviously lowest in restricted exchange systems.
Lévi-Strauss proposed a third structure between elementary and complex structures, called semi-complex structure or Crow-Omaha system. Semi-complex structures contain so many negative marriage rules that they effectively come close to prescribing marriage to certain parties, thus somewhat resembling elementary structures. These structures are found amongst e.g. the Crow Nation
Crow Nation
The Crow, also called the Absaroka or Apsáalooke, are a Siouan people of Native Americans who historically lived in the Yellowstone River valley, which extends from present-day Wyoming, through Montana and into North Dakota. They now live on a reservation south of Billings, Montana and in several...
and Omaha
Omaha (tribe)
The Omaha are a federally recognized Native American nation which lives on the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska and western Iowa, United States...
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
.
In Lévi-Strauss' order of things, the basic building block of kinship is not just the nuclear family, as in structural-functionalism, but the so-called kinship atom: the nuclear family together with the wife's brother. This "mother's brother" (from the perspective of the wife-seeking son) plays a crucial role in alliance theory, as he is the one who ultimately decides whom his daughter will marry. Moreover, it is not just the nuclear family as such but alliances between families that matter in regard to the creation of social structures, reflecting the typical structuralist argument that the position of an element in the structure is more significant than the element itself. Descent theory and alliance theory therefore look at two different sides of the same coin: the former emphasising bonds of consanguinity (kinship by blood), the latter stressing bonds of affinity (kinship by law or choice).
The Leiden School
Much earlier, and some 450 miles north of Paris, a specific type of applied anthropology emerged at Leiden UniversityLeiden University
Leiden University , located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The royal Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and Leiden University still have a close...
, Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, which focused frequently on the relationship between apparent cultural phenomena and subsurface structures found in the numerous cultures in the Indonesian archipelago
Archipelago
An archipelago , sometimes called an island group, is a chain or cluster of islands. The word archipelago is derived from the Greek ἄρχι- – arkhi- and πέλαγος – pélagos through the Italian arcipelago...
: Batak
Batak (Indonesia)
Batak is a collective term used to identify a number of ethnic groups predominantly found in North Sumatra, Indonesia. The term is used to include the Toba, Karo, Pakpak, Simalungun, Angkola and Mandailing, each of which are distinct but related groups with distinct, albeit related, languages and...
, Minangkabau, Moluccas, etc., though it was primarily aimed at training governors for colonial Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
. This type of anthropology, developed by the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthropologists, was eventually called "de Leidse Richting," or "de Leidse School," and a continuous flow of researchers was educated in this type of anthropology. It was this type of anthropological theory which attracted students and researchers alike; those interested in a type of anthropology that was holistic, that was broad and deep at the same time, that related economic circumstances with mythological and spatial classifications or cognitive subsurface structures, and that explored the relationship between the botanical world and religious, symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ic systems. This was long before what became internationally known as structuralism. From the "Leiden" perspective much research was done for many decades, thus influencing successive generations of anthropologists educated at Leiden University.
The most recent chairs were held by J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong
J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong
Jan Petrus Benjamin de Josselin de Jong was a founding father of modern Dutch anthropology and of structural anthropology at Leiden University. In his early career, he was a museum curator. His area of specialty was American and Indonesian ethnography...
(chair: 1922-1956, + 1964) - who coined the concept of the Field of Ethnological Study in 1935 - and later his nephew P.E. de Josselin de Jong
P.E. de Josselin de Jong
Professor Patrick Edward de Josselin de Jong was a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Leiden for over 30 years, and department chair from 1957 through 1987...
(chair: 1956-1987, + 1999).
British Neo-Structuralism
The British brand of structuralismStructuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
was mainly espoused by Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach
Edmund Leach
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist of whom it has been said:"It is no exaggeration to say that in sheer versatility, originality, and range of writing he was and still is difficult to match among the anthropologists of the English speaking world".-Personal and academic...
, who were both critical towards the structural-functionalist perspective and who drew on Lévi-Strauss as well as Arthur Maurice Hocart
Arthur Maurice Hocart
Arthur Maurice Hocart was an anthropologist best known for his eccentric and often far-seeing works on Polynesia, Melanesia and Sri Lanka.-About the Man:...
. However, they also found grounds for critiquing Lévi-Strauss. Leach, who in stark contrast to Lévi-Strauss was more concerned with researching people's actual lives than with the discovery of universal mental structures, found that the latter's analysis of the Kachin contained serious flaws. According to Leach, Lévi-Strauss' project had been overly ambitious, meaning that his analyses were too superficial and the available data treated with too little care. While part of his analysis of the Kachin was simply based on incorrect ethnographic information, the rest reflected Kachin ideology but not actual practice.
In theory, Kachin groups were supposed to marry in a circle ideally consisting of five groups. In reality, the system was strongly imbalanced with built-in status differences between superior wife-givers and inferior wife-takers. Lévi-Strauss had incorrectly assumed that wife-takers would be of higher rank than wife-givers; in reality, it was the other way round, and the former usually had to make substantial bridewealth payments to obtain wives. Overall, some lineages would accumulate more wives and material wealth than others, meaning that the system cannot be said to be driven primarily by reciprocity. In actual reality, the marriage system was quite messy and the chance of it breaking down increased with the number of groups involved. In generalised exchange systems, the more groups there are the more complex it becomes to keep track of all transactions and to ensure that all wife-givers will eventually be on the receiving end, an issue that Lévi-Strauss had already foreseen. He thought that in practice there will be competition for women, leading to accumulation and therefore asymmetries in the system. According to Leach, in Kachin reality instabilities arose primarily from competition for bridewealth. Men sought to get the maximum profit in forms of either bridewealth or political advantage out of the marriage of their daughters. Lévi-Strauss had only accorded a symbolic role to marriage prestations, effectively overlooking their significance within the system. Leach argued that they are also (or even primarily) economic and political transactions, and are frequently connected to transfers of rights over land, too.
Kinship is therefore not an isolated domain but linked to economic and political structures. Marriage exchanges need to be analysed within their wider economic and political context rather than in isolation, as Lévi-Strauss tended to do. Leach charged the latter with neglecting the effects of material conditions on social relations. He also challenged the claims to universality made by Lévi-Strauss about the model, doubting whether structures generated by marriage rules would be the same in different social contexts.
Critiques of Structural Anthropology
By the late 1970s/early 1980s the heyday of alliance theory were over. With the advent of postmodern, interpretive-hermeneutic thought, structuralist and functionalistStructural functionalism
Structural functionalism is a broad perspective in sociology and anthropology which sets out to interpret society as a structure with interrelated parts. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions and institutions...
theories went out of fashion. However, there were also a number of internal incoherences and a range of intrinsic limitations that reduced its appeal.
By overstressing the structural significance of affinal ties, alliance theory effectively neglected the importance of descent and genealogical ties. Some societies (e.g. African tribal societies) employ descent as the primary organizational principle. In others, alliances are of primary significance, as in e.g. many Southeast-Asian societies and amongst Amazonian tribes; and still others place emphasis on both. The Yanomamö fit very well into the alliance theory mold while the Tallensi
Tallensi
The Tallensi are a tribe of the Frafra people of northern Ghana, numbering a few tens of thousands. They speak Talni, a dialect of the Frafra language, and maintain an agricultural mode of subsistence...
or Azande
Azande
The Azande are a tribe of north Central Africa. Their number is estimated by various sources at between 1 and 4 million....
do not. Holy (1996) pointed out that some Middle-Eastern societies cannot be conclusively explained by either descent or alliance theory. Critics also saw weaknesses in Lévi-Strauss' methods, in the fact that he looked for ideal structures, thereby neglecting the reality and complexity of actual practices. On the other hand, though, his model was ironically too powerful. As Kuper (1988:223) pointed out, if the structures of the mind really are universal and Lévi-Strauss' model is correct, then why is it that not all human societies act accordingly and structure their kinship systems around alliances and exchanges? A central assumption of his was that exchange is the universal form of marriage, but there could be other significant factors. And even if reciprocity was the primary principle that underlies marriages, the return does not have to be in kind but could take other forms (such as money, livestock, services or favours of various kinds). Also, social cohesion through reciprocity does not have to rest primarily on the exchange of women. Mauss' definition of the gift showed that different cultures use all kinds of gifts to create and maintain alliances. Feminists in particular took offense at Lévi-Strauss' claim that the underlying principle according to which all societies work is the exchange of women by men, who dispose of them as if they were objects. Others, for example Godelier, critiqued structuralism's synchronic approach that led it to be essentially ahistorical.
Marxists shifted the attention within anthropology from an almost exclusive preoccupation with kinship to an emphasis on the economic dimension. For them, social structures were primarily shaped by material conditions, property relations and class struggles.
Finally, a great weakness of structuralism is that its main propositions were not formulated in a way so that they could be subject to verification or falsification
Falsification
Falsification may refer to:* The act of disproving a proposition, hypothesis, or theory: see Falsifiability* Mathematical proof* Falsified evidence...
(cf. D'Andrade, 1995:249; Barnes, 1971:165-171). Lévi-Strauss did not develop a framework that could prove the existence of his concept of the fundamental structures of human thought but simply assumed them to be there, an unfortunate mistake considering that this concept underpinned all of his work. Consequently, it was comparatively easy for post-structuralists such as Derrida to simply reject this notion.
See also
- Alliance theoryAlliance theoryThe Alliance Theory is the name given to the structural method of studying kinship relations. It finds its origins in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship , and is opposed to the functionalist theory of Radcliffe-Brown...
- StructuralismStructuralismStructuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
- Post-structuralismPost-structuralismPost-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
- Structural functionalismStructural functionalismStructural functionalism is a broad perspective in sociology and anthropology which sets out to interpret society as a structure with interrelated parts. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions and institutions...
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
- Roman JakobsonRoman JakobsonRoman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
- Marcel MaussMarcel MaussMarcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
- Edmund LeachEdmund LeachSir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist of whom it has been said:"It is no exaggeration to say that in sheer versatility, originality, and range of writing he was and still is difficult to match among the anthropologists of the English speaking world".-Personal and academic...