Structuralism in Social Anthropology: Key Concepts
The Main Theories and Schools
Structuralism
C. Levi-Strauss was undoubtedly the great representative of structuralism in social anthropology in the sixties. His interest in language stemmed from the conviction that it held a top position in all the social sciences. This field had made the most progress, claiming the name of science and achieving a positive method to understand the facts of nature. [C. Levi-Strauss, 1985:37]. This method has mainly been applied in France to the structures of kinship, myths, and food, which were very interesting for C. Lévi-Strauss.
According to Levi-Strauss, the subject of structural analysis is to look for the deductive method, particularly aware that the structures can be evidenced from the empirical data of ethnography, such as the rules of kinship, mythology, culinary practices, classifications, culinary art, etc.
The structures do not correspond to empirical reality but to models built upon it, which must meet three conditions:
- to introduce a character system where all elements are supportive of each other, so that no one can change without this change affecting all the others;
- make possible an ordered series of transformations, leading to one or several groups of models of this kind;
- allow to predict how the model will react if one or more of its elements is modified [Levi-Strauss, 1985].
The notion of structure is old, as well as its use in social anthropology, whose definition varies according to the authors. A social structure is the set of concrete elements of a system and corresponds to static pictures of social organization, like a social status that makes individuals and groups interdependent.
As seen, the perspective is different in the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. The structure is revealed only on the evidence that it combines: The fundamental principle is that the notion of social structure does not refer to empirical reality, but the model constructed from it [ibid: 305]. It is in this sense that the author defines the structure: a structure provides a system of nature. The model should be constructed so that its operation can account for all the observed facts [ibid: 306].
It does not seem to deny the scientific character of structuralism, even if not successful in all its applications, but this aspect was not the only one. Exactly, its merit is less objectionable to have extended in a systematic manner, the inventory of relevance. Another characteristic of structuralism of Levi-Strauss is to want to explain the relation of universal to particular, based on relations of models transformation social. However, it was especially criticized for having paid more attention to the study of formal models and less to the actual social relations to which they relate.
Some critics thought his perspective was a static view of society and accused him of acting outside the time of the logical structures that are supposed to control the companies. For the author, the story is not rejectable; it is a reality that must be considered with the greatest attention.
The central question in Levi-Strauss is the explanation of the type of phenomenon in question: the essence of human nature. In fact, he put in a strict and complex way the problem of relations between history and anthropology, making it as follows: that our science seeks to address the diachronic dimension of the phenomena, that is about your order on time, and they are unable to do his story, or they try to work the way the historian, and the dimension of time escapes them.
Wanting to reconstruct a past that is impossible to achieve the story, or wanting to do this without a history of past drama of ethnology in one case, the ethnographer in the other, this is in any case, the dilemma … [Levi-Strauss, 1985: 5].
The French scientist had in mind particularly small companies of tropical America, where the use of history is different from Europe. It meant only that those companies are not aware of a past identical to that of Europeans, which transcends mere collective memory. Whenever a significant change happens, and they do not realize it, all efforts are developed to restore the situation as it is imagined to have been, which of course is not going to happen. This illusion of the possibility of replacement of the previous situations, usually made on the basis of social representations, limits the awareness and control of events in the long term: The nature of the wild is thought to be timeless, and he wants to grab the world while as synchronic and diachronic totality and the knowledge that it has looks like the offer of a room, mirrors fixed on opposite walls and are reflected in each other (as well as items placed in the space that separates them), but although not strictly parallel [C. Levi-Strauss, 1962: 348].
It is precisely the study of myths that Lévi-Strauss will also apply to structural analysis after his monumental work on the Elementary Structures of Kinship [1982]. Structural analysis allows the author to introduce an order in apparent disorder, making sense of the chaotic invariants to emerge in the infinite variety of mythical narratives, and finally reveal the substrate sociological explanation common to them all: in some, the explanation of the appearance of fire, in others the emergence of human life, etc.
The major criticism of French structuralism was the suggestion that the same structures, active in all human societies, may, as appropriate, subtend different manifestations of the principle that all cultural variations may result from a responsible human invariant [Dan Sperber, 1985]. But specifically, according to Dan Sperber [1968], a positive aspect of the work of C. Levi-Strauss is to refocus the study of anthropology on its first subject: human nature.
However, anthropological structuralism is not restricted to Levi-Strauss. It is not exactly the same as that of sociologists or anthropologists like Radcliffe-Brown in particular, who defines the structure as having an ordered arrangement of parts or components. Under this proposal, elements of structure are people, human beings, considered not as bodies but as occupying a place in the social structure. As for the social structure, that designates the complex network of social relations really existing individual human beings and bringing a certain natural environment.
Such a structure definition was widely criticized by Levi-Strauss, who noted the fact that this appears as an intermediary concept between social anthropology and biology. Even Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski share some inspiration from the English naturalist school, he opposes the systematic and formal attitude required.
According to the French author, the empiricist position of Radcliffe-Brown stopped him from clearly distinguishing social structure and social relations, thereby reducing the notion of social structure to the set of concrete social relations in a society. Hence, according to the French author, it is clear that Radcliffe-Brown did not give greater importance to the distinction between structure and structural form, between model and reality. To emphasize the importance of the distinction and strengthen his criticism, Levi-Strauss cites M. Strong, who wrote that, as he thought, the structure cannot be directly understood in ‘reality’.
The prospect of Radcliffe-Brown was never revealed, in the modern sense of the definition of the word, an approach to social phenomena said to be structuralist. For this reason, Radcliffe-Brown is not considered a structuralist, but fundamentally a structural functionalist.