The term ‘structuralism’ has been used in anthropology to designate a number of quite distinct theoretical positions, but recently it has normally only been used to label the theories which were originally developed from the 1940s onward by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
In the 1940s Levi-Strauss found himself in New York as a refugee. He came with some experience of fieldwork among South American Indians and with a fascination for the great wealth of accumulated ethnographic data on the North American Indians which had been published in a largely unanalysed form by the American Smithsonian Institution. This material was mainly transcription and translation of what elderly Native Americans could remember of their youth and the myths and stories that had been told to them. The sheer volume of this data seemed to require an analytical approach and, at first, Levi-Strauss was swayed by the Boasian tradition which, in its later developments, had become influenced by the psychological theory called Gestalt theory (Benedict 1934). This stressed how human beings coped with information and emotions by creating encompassing configurations of knowledge. Gestalt theory stressed how cultures formed ‘patterns’.
Levi-Strauss was, however, searching for something more precise and he found it in a sister subject to cultural anthropology: linguistics. By the end of the war he had obtained a post at the New School for Social Research in New York and there he became closely linked with another refugee, the linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson had become an advocate of a particular theory in linguistics called ‘structural linguistics’. This proved to be what Levi-Strauss was looking for.
Linguistics and anthropology
Understanding the history of structural linguistics is therefore essential to understanding the origins of structuralism in anthropology. The history of structural linguistics is the coming together of two distinct traditions, one European and the other American.
The origin of the European tradition lies in the shift of direction which the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure brought about as a result of his lectures (which were subsequently published by his students [Saussure 1960]). Saussure redirected linguistics away from studying the history of particular languages’ development (and demonstrating family links between them), and towards the study of the general principles according to which language in general worked. Saussure wanted to understand how the sounds produced by the human voice could convey the meaningful messages that were transmitted between individuals. In trying to account for this, he stressed how language worked by defining units which could be combined and recom-bined according to rules, such as those of syntax. His semantic theory, according to which the units were combinations of sounds (signifier) and concepts (signified), although naive, has often been solemnly discussed by many non-linguists including Levi-Strauss himself. (See Sperber (1976 [1974]) for a discussion of its limitations, especially when applied to anthropology.) The significance of Saussure’s work for structuralism is, however, more general: it is that he saw the task of linguistics as the study of meaningful communication, and that he suggested that the answer to the problem of how this came about lay in understanding how units are placed in structures.
In fact it was not the most general Saussurian programme which was taken up by linguists immediately following him, but a more modest part of what is usually called phoneme theory. Phonemes are the minimal sound units which every language distinguishes in order to make lexically significant combinations. Thus, to take a simple example, the English word ‘bat’ consists of three phonemes which are conveniently designated by three letters (it is not always the case that letters and phonemes correspond so neatly). However, not all languages have these same phonemes. Thus, although English distinguishes between the phonemes normally indicated by the letters p and b, a distinction which enables English-speakers to distinguish between the words ‘pat’ and ‘bat’, many languages make no such distinction. In other words native speakers, in order that they may use and understand their own language, have to be trained to pay special attention to certain sound contrasts and at the same time ignore others (which in another language might have been significant, but which in their own would just muddle them by introducing irrelevant and misleading information). Phonemes are thus arbitrarily defined non-meaningful sound units which are combined and recombined in order that we can then construct higher level units (for example words) which themselves carry meaning.
The general universal aspects of phoneme theory (i.e. the definition of units by means of establishing conventional arbitrary contrasts in what would otherwise be a continuum of variation), and the fact that the units so defined have the potential to be combined according to rules in order that they may carry messages, became the basis of all forms of structuralism. Phoneme theory was originally developed by a group of Eastern European linguists to which Roman Jakobson belonged. When he moved to the USA with other colleagues, phoneme theory was extended both by linguists and by anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss.
The linguists combined this theory with other American ones and in this way attempted to use the same model as had been used for phonemes for aspects of languages less concerned with sound and more with meaning. In this way they produced an all-embracing linguistic theory. What they retained from phoneme theory, however, was the idea that language works by: (1) defining units constructed through the emphasis of certain contrasts and the minimizing of others; and (2) combining and recombining these units according to rules of structure so that units plus structure produced the potential for meaningful communication. This general theory was ‘structural linguistics’. What became crucial for anthropology, above all, was the shift from understanding phonemes (or other elements of culture) as things in themselves, to understanding them as more or less arbitrary elements which only make sense in relationships with other elements.
Intellectual structures
At the time when Levi-Strauss became acquainted with structural linguistics it had also become caught up in a much more general theory of communication which went under the name of cybernetics. Cybernetics was a science which underlay the development of early computers. At that time, these computers were being incorporated into such military technology as guided missiles, and could perform tasks which no machine and only living beings had previously been capable of; for example, adjusting the trajectory of a missile in flight to compensate for the avoiding action of its target. In being able to perform such reflexive tasks, computers could therefore be said, in some ways, ‘to think’. If that were so, it was not an unreasonable supposition that at the same time as they had made computers, cyberneticians had discovered how the nervous system of animals in general, and of humans in particular, worked. Most cyberneticians did indeed make this supposition.
Because that was the way they thought their computers functioned, cyberneticians thought the brain worked by endlessly combining and recombining units defined through binary contrasts. Through these endless combinations and recombinations, messages could be encoded and problems solved. Put in this way the similarity between the way the structural linguists were arguing language worked and the way computers worked was strikingly similar. This came as no surprise to the cyberneticians because, since language was something processed by the human brain, it was inevitable that it would be structured in a way the human brain worked. Linguistics thus became, so it seemed for a time, part of the general science of cybernetics, which also took in such diverse fields as electronic engineering and neurology.
This is what Levi-Strauss found most exciting. He put it in the following way:
Of all the social sciences, to which it certainly belongs, linguistics is exceptional: it is not a social science like the others since it is the one which, by a long way, has achieved the most progress; it is probably the only one which can truly claim to be a science.
With such a conclusion, it was then only a small step to decide that cultural and social anthropology should follow the lead of linguistics and show that the general principles of cybernetics operated there too. This became the aim of structural anthropology.
It seemed that the principles of structural linguistics could easily be imported into the field of culture. Culture was, after all, most often seen, by American anthropologists at least, as the information which individuals shared and which was contained in their minds. Thus, since culture was, like language, a mental phenomenon, it too had to be organized in structures because that was the way the mind or the brain — the two terms are interchangeable in Levi-Strauss’s writings — stored, handled and communicated information. Levi-Strauss therefore set out to demonstrate the existence of such structures in cultural fields as diverse as kinship terms or mythology. In the field of the social too, mental structures were claimed to exist. This was because, even though the social was not a mental phenomenon in itself, what anthropologists inevitably have to do when studying the social is interpret it through the understandings of the people who operate it. In this way even the social is governed by psychological requirements and therefore it too must also be structured by the structures required by the human brain/mind.
Totemism and The Savage Mind
The fullest exposition of structuralist theory is to be found in two books which Levi-Strauss published in the 1960s – Le totemisme aujourd’hui (1962), translated into English as Totemism (1963) and La pensee sauvage (1962) translated into English as The Savage Mind (1966).
The first of these books argues against fUnctionalist approaches to totemism which try to explain why specific totemic animals or plants are chosen in terms of either their usefulness, or alternatively because the totemic animals and plants are scarce and therefore need preserving by totemism as most totemic species are tabooed. These arguments, Levi-Strauss suggests, are quite unconvincing. Instead we should abandon explanations in terms of use and look into the patterns which sets of totems form, seeing these patterns as the structures imposed by human beings in order to be able to operate mentally in, and with, their environment.
In The Savage Mind the argument is developed further. Not only is it shown how the kind of structures which structural linguists saw in the arrangements of phonemes is present in such things as plant and animal classification, but Levi-Strauss begins a discussion of the operations which can be carried out with the units of structures he isolates, in this case plant and animal species. These operations correspond to the way phonemes can be combined and recombined to create messages which can carry meaning. With a structured system of classification, both mental and practical, experiments become possible. Levi-Strauss argues that this type of experimentation is what must have led to the first domestication of plants and animals (the Neolithic revolution), an advance which many consider to be the most significant in the history of humankind. This use of ‘concrete’ (i.e. referring to classes of empirically existing objects) units such as classes of plants and animals to investigate and solve problems is what Levi-Strauss calls ‘the science of the concrete’ or ‘the savage mind’.
There is, however, another element to the science of the concrete which is discussed at length. This concerns analogy. Levi-Strauss notes the frequency with which we talk of one kind of phenomenon, often abstract or difficult to grasp, in terms of quite different, more easily perceived, concrete objects (i.e. by using various types of metaphors). Totemism is a case in point. Totemism always involves social groups which may have no obvious empirical referents (like dispersed clans) being spoken of, and thought about, as though they were animal or plant species. This means that a metaphorical ‘evidence’ is given to clan identity and to differences between clans. This use of one concrete phenomenon to talk about another, more abstract, realm is part of a much more widespread aspect of human thought; by means of analogy the complexity, fluidity and inaccessibility of the real world can be visualized and approached through various ‘as if devices. These devices prove suitable for such operations because the devices themselves, unlike their targets, can easily be structured and therefore processed efficiently by the human mind or brain.
Myths and transformations
In The Savage Mind and Totemism. Levi-Strauss is principally concerned with the way structured knowledge is used for practical ends, although he is keen to emphasize that human thought is never limited to the practical. In other works, especially in the many articles and books concerned with mythology, he explores types of human intellectual activity which are, according to him, purely speculative. In this area too he attempts to isolate units which correspond to the phonemes of structural linguistics and, since he is dealing with myth, at one point he calls these units ‘mythemes’. Having isolated the mythemes, he then goes on to show how, in particular myths, structures can be shown to govern the way mythemes are combined and recombined. He is, however, more interested in the way different versions of a myth represent transformations of its basic structure. What is meant by ‘transformation’ here is the way in which, although different versions of a myth may seem totally different, they may nonetheless have a systematic relation to one another. A simple example of this would be total rigorous inversion.
Levi-Strauss is particularly interested in transformations because they enable him to expand his theory of structuralism into a theory of history. According to this theory, human beings are continually trying to make sense of their world and they do this by imposing structures on it because that is the only way in which the human brain can handle information. However, this structuring of the world can only be partial because the world obviously does not conform to the cognitive requirements of knowing minds. The drive towards structuring is therefore always finally incomplete and unsatisfactory. This is all the more so because the world itself is in a continual process of change as events succeed events, events which may be human in origin (e.g. the spread of a new technology), or non-human (e.g. natural disasters). Human beings therefore have to adjust their knowledge while maintaining its structured character; thus they transform it according to principles which owe something to the events which cause the change and something to the previous structures by which they had organized what they knew. This leads to a further contrast. In some societies, because they are isolated and live in a fairly stable environment, the structures which people construct as a way of interpreting the world need little modification as events rarely challenge them. In other societies, however, where there is much external contact and internal differentiation, and where the environment is continually changing, structures have to be continually adapted and readapted, transformed, in order to catch up. But these very transformations bring about events which require further transformation, creating continual movement and innovation. The former types of societies he qualifies as "’cold societies’ and the latter as ‘hot societies’, though these two terms are intended to mark extremes of a continuum in the middle of which most actual cases find their place.
Levi-Strauss’s theory of structuralism is unusually coherent for the discipline of anthropology. Indeed it could be said that it is the only fully fledged theory to have been formulated in social or cultural anthropology since the demise of evolutionism. Because of its boldness it is easy to point to its errors and limitations and these will be discussed below. However, it would be misleading to judge Levi-Strauss’s work purely in theoretical terms. Levi-Strauss is not only interested in structuralism as such, but also in the richness and complexity of the ethnographic record and most of his work is an attempt to analyse this in a non-reductionist way, nonetheless inspired by the general theory. In fact, as has been pointed out by Sperber (1985), in practice Levi-Strauss seems to proceed as much by intuition and artistry as anything else, but his intuitions have proved amazingly suggestive. He has been able to lay bare extraordinarily important themes in human thought which had often been overlooked by anthropologists and ethnographers but which, having been pointed out, enable us to go forward in understanding.
For example, in his work on mythology he stresses the way we order food in terms of whether it is cooked or raw or rotten, and how these oppositions serve for further human speculation and attempts at organization. This is a theme which has revealed itself to be of central importance in many parts of the world which Levi-Strauss was hardly aware of. It is never entirely clear how he uses his structuralist method but it is important to note that somehow, and often bafflingly, it has proved extraordinarily productive and suggestive.
Criticisms
The limitations as well as the strengths of structuralism are now well known. The basis of the theory rests on the two pillars of structural linguistics and cybernetics and both these have crumbled. The general theory of structural linguistics assumed that from an empirical analysis of what language was like one could discover structures which were the same as those used by the brains of speakers and hearers. This hypothesis would not now be acceptable to most linguists and psychologists because of the revolutionary change brought about by the linguistic theories of Chomsky. Indeed, the use of the model derived from phoneme theory for other levels of language has now been abandoned, though the phoneme theory itself is still, to a certain extent, accepted.
Similarly the cybernetic model of the brain is now seen as far too simple. As Sperber notes, it is very unconvincing to argue, as did the cyber-neticians by implication, that the structure of the human brain is simpler than the structure of the human hand. Information is probably not stored lineally and the binary computer is not a good model for artificial intelligence.
There are also problems about the way Levi-Strauss deals with ethnography. He seems to forget the process of interpretation which is inevitably involved and so he treats ethnographic accounts as though they were the actual reality to which they refer. He overemphasizes the intellectual aspect of culture, paying insufficient attention to the emotive or, indeed, the practical. His choice of source material often seems arbitrary.
All this having been said, however, Levi-Strauss’s achievement is impressive. He constructed a theory which defined the relation between the mental and the social in a way which has been the basis for all subsequent work. He moved ethnographic analysis away from the naive reductionism which characterized much earlier work to a state where the content, as well as the form, of ethnographic data was examined seriously once again. He integrated many areas of enquiry in a way which has continued to be fruitful. He generated an immense wealth of medium-level hypotheses which continue to inform and stimulate a large part of the ethnographic enterprise. Finally, the extraordinary sensitivity and personal philosophical honesty which characterizes his thought make him a writer whose work is aesthetically arousing and often very moving.
Structuralism and structuralists
The success, ambitions, and even failures of Levi-Strauss’s structuralism are perhaps now being seen in some sort of perspective, but in the period from the 1960s to the early 1980s it dominated not only anthropology but many other domains. There was a structuralist vogue in literature, in philosophy, in history, even in cinema. Such very diverse writers as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser and many literary critics have sometimes been seen as inspired by Levi-Strauss and described as ‘structuralist’, even by themselves. Now, it is very difficult to see what they have in common except that they were contemporaries and they were French. Much of what was written about structuralism in literature and the arts is ridiculous. Levi-Strauss has for the most part denounced such enthusiasm for his work, sometimes with a good deal of irony, fuelled by his marked distaste for the intellectual fashions of the moment.
More serious have been the claims by a number of anthropologists to be following his principles. These can be divided into three groups.
The first are mainly French anthropologists and keep closely to certain aspects of the Levi-Straussian enterprise. Thus fF. Heritier and her collaborators have developed some aspects of his earlier work on kinship (Heritier 1981). A number of writers have developed his analyses of myth and symbolism, several of whom are represented in the work edited by Izard and Smith called Between Belief and Transgression (1982 [1979]). It is notable, however, that these close followers seem to steer clear of the wider theoretical claims of structuralism and limit themselves to specific applications of a structuralist methodology.
Then there is the group of writers who, in the 1970s and 1980s, attempted to marry the renewed Marxism of the time with structuralism. Levi-Strauss himself claims that he has been much influenced by Marxism, though this is far from obvious in much of his writing. The link was, however, first emphasized by a close collaborator, L. Sebag, who stressed how the notions of Hegelian dialectics, which so influenced Marx, are present in a similar way in Levi-Strauss (Sebag 1964). The theme was then taken up by a number of writers, most prominent of whom is fM. Godelier (1978 [1973]). Godelier understood structuralism to apply to the Marxist superstructure only, and to be quite compatible with a theory of infrastructural causation by the modes of production.
The third group was mainly British and is associated with the names of Edmund Leach and fRodney Needham. Leach was an advocate as well as a critic of the theories of Levi-Strauss and became their main exponent to the English-speaking world (Leach 1970). He also attempted a number of analyses which he himself described as ‘structuralist’. In particular he published several studies of biblical texts which demonstrated structures and transformations between related texts (Leach and Aycock 1983). These studies differ from those of Levi-Strauss in a number of ways. First of all, they are studies of written texts; something which Levi-Strauss did not believe would be fruitful. Second, the notion of transformation is used in a simpler way than it is in Levi-Strauss’s own work. Third and most important, Leach is always eager to demonstrate the social significance of the myths he analyses in a way which is closer to functionalism than structuralism.
Needham was also an early advocate of the theories of Levi-Strauss and defended them strongly against functionalist criticisms (Need-ham 1962). Later on he also attempted a number of analyses which have often been called structuralist because of similarity with some aspects of Levi-Strauss’s work. This type of analysis can be found in the work of a number of other anthropologists who were closely associated with Needham, such as D. Maybury Lewis (1967) and J. Fox (1975). In fact it is doubtful whether these types of work have any great relation to the ideas of Levi-Strauss. They demonstrate that the symbols of certain societies can be shown to form master patterns, often of a binary character, which organize the general cognitive outlook of the people concerned. Such an approach is more Durkheimian than structuralist in that it assumes a unified culture existing beyond the mind of individuals; while Levi-Strauss stresses how culture never forms coherent wholes, how it is a matter of continual communication and modification between individuals which leads to endless transformation, and how its nature is a consequence of specific neurological requirements of living people.
