Lâevi-Strauss - Structural Anthropology

F OR THE PAST DECADE and a half, Claude Lvi-Strauss has been the most influential anthropological theorist in France. He has attracted a large following in Europe and evoked wide interest in the United States. Standing in the mainstream of the French sociological school, he has carried Durkheims and Mausss theories to a totally new level of conceptualization.

This book, first published in France in 1958, is a collection of papers, written between 1944 and 1957, which constitute what Lvi-Strauss regards as his most representative work. More than any of his other writings, Structural Anthropology offers a comprehensive view of Lvi-Strausss theories.

Each of these papers is a self-contained whole in which he applies the structural method to particular problems and data. Lvi-Strauss is primarily concerned with universals, that is, basic social and mental processes of which cultural institutions are the concrete external projections or manifestations. Anthropology should be a science of general principles; the theories which the anthropologist formulates should be applicable to all societies and valid for all possible observers.

Lvi-Strauss has long been one of the chief exponents of the structural method; he considers the relations among phenomena, rather than the nature of the phenomena themselves, and the systems into which these relations enter. He persuasively argues that the attainment of a general science of man is contingent on structural considerations, which must include unconscious as well as conscious social processes, and he time and again develops his thesis in dealing with some of the major aspects of culturelanguage, kinship, social organization, magic, religion, and art.

How does structural analysis proceed? The first step is the definition of the constituent units of an institution; these are conceptually equivalent to the phonemes or morphemes of a language and, therefore, comparable cross-culturally. Once the various aspects of culture have been reduced to their structural elements, relationships of opposition and correlation and permutation and transformation among these elements can be defined. Homologies between institutions within the same society or among various societies can be explained, not in terms of a mechanical causality, but rather in dialectical terms. Correspondences or isomorphisms should be sought, not between empirical data pertaining to different institutions, but between systematized forms, or models, which are abstracted on different levels and which can be compared either intra- or cross-culturally. To Lvi-Strauss, the building of such models is the basic aim of anthropology.

The author proposes bold and at times frankly speculative hypotheses, in which he attempts to relate aspects of culture which no one has previously thought to connect in this particular manner. His originality lies in the emphasis on form, on the primacy of relations over entities, and on the search for constant relationships among phenomena at the most abstract level. His generalizations, however, always depart from empirical observation and return to it. To document his hypotheses, he sifts masses of data pertinent to various aspects of culture and to various societies. Though he deals with the major world areas, his use of ethnographic source materials is highly selective; he employs only those monographs which provide a thorough, intensive, and reliable coverage of a society. In addition, he draws on his own field work in central Brazil, as well as on observations of life in contemporary Western society.

Lvi-Strausss anthropology emphasizes the close relationship between field work and theory, between the description of social phenomena and structural analysis, as two phases of the same process. The ethnographic study of societies must have a concrete, almost microscopic character; fluid, uncrystallized attitudes, the subjective aspects of institutions, must be observed and described with the same care as institutionalized and sanctioned norms and behavior. At the same time, a systematic, comparative, and generalizing perspective must complement the close-range view, so that the patterns which underlie the various manifestations of social life may be uncovered.

Lvi-Strausss approach is holistic and integrative. In this sense, he has not deviated from the major concerns of Boas, Lowie, Kroeber, and other pioneering figures in the field to whom he often refers. He conceives of anthropology in the broadest sense, as the study of man, past and present, in all his aspectsphysical, linguistic, cultural, conscious, and unconscious. In his elaboration of Mausss concept of the total social phenomenon, he is concerned with relating the synchronic to the diachronic, the individual to the cultural, the physiological to the psychological, the objective analysis of institutions to the subjective experience of individuals.

In , Lvi-Strauss outlines his position; he defines the aims, scope, and methods of anthropology and discusses the complementary role of history in providing a perspective to the study of social life. According to him, anthropology has in the past suffered from a surfeit of empiricism on the one hand and culture-bound theorizing on the other. Rejecting the atomistic and mechanistic interpretations of evolutionism and diffusionism, as well as the naturalistic and empirical approach of British functionalism, the author formulates a critique of arbitrary concepts and classifications and exposes fallacious generalizations and truisms extant in much anthropological theory. He returns to this critique in other parts of the book, apropos of specific problems whose analysis and interpretation, he thinks, were misconstrued by his predecessors.