15 Structuralism: Levi Strauss and Edmund Leach

Vineet Kumar Verma

Table of Contents

Introduction

1.  Historical Context

2. Claude Levi-Strauss

₋         Method of Structuralism

₋         Structuralism in Kinship

₋         Meeting of Myth and Science

₋         Primitive Thinking’ and The ‘Civilized Mind’

3. Levi-Strauss’s Major Works and Publication

₋         Elementary Structures of Kinship

₋         Totemism

₋         Savage Mind

4. Edmund Leach

₋         Political Systems of Highland Burma

₋         Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon

5.  Post-Structuralist Summary

Learning Objective

• To introduce history of anthropological thought of Structuralism by tracing its historical development
• To classify the course of historical development, academic, and Anthropological importance in terms of its development
• An attempt to look Methodological approaches to the origin of culture

Introduction

The prevailing theoretical orientation in anthropology during the 19th century was based on a belief that culture generally evolves in a uniform and progressive manner; that is, most societies were believed to pass through the same series of stages, to arrive ultimately at a common end. Many scholars consider modern anthropology as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted to study human behaviour systematically, the known varieties of which had been increasing since the fifteenth century as a result of the first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part.

1. Historical Context

Structuralism represents a movement that began in the 1950’s and 1960’s in France. Emile Durkheim, a French anthropologist, generated the idea that human thought precedes observation and social and cultural phenomena derive from universal human cognition. Claude Levi-Strauss, consider the founder of Structuralism, expanded upon Durkheim’s basic concepts to generate the main ideas behind Structuralism. In his definition, there are 3 fundamental properties of the human mind:

1)  People follow rules,

2)  Reciprocity is the simplest way to create social relationships, and

3)  A gift binds both the giver and recipient in a continuing social relationship.

Such social structures, according to Levi-Strauss, mirrors cognitive structures, the way in which mankind thinks and understands. Structuralism is the approach which seeks to isolate, and decode, deep structures of meaning, organised through systems of signs inherent in human behaviour (language, ritual, dress and so on). According to structuralisms, the mind functions on binary opposite; humans see things in terms of two forces that are opposite to each other i.e. night and day. Binary opposites differ from society to society and are defined in a particular culture in a way that is logical to its members for example shoes are “good” when you wear them outside but “bad” if you put them on the table; the role of an anthropologist is to understand these rules to interpret the culture.

2. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Strauss was born November 28, 1908 in Brussels, Belgium and lived to see an entire century, passing on October 30th 2009. He began studying law at the University of Paris in 1927 and after five years started working as a teacher’s aid. Two years later, in 1934, he served as professor of sociology in Brazil at the University of Sao Paulo and began field work on the Brazilian Indians. Levi-Strauss taught almost all his life, moving to New York in 1941 as a visiting professor of The New School for Social Research till 1945. Levi-Strauss began his career with law and philosophy. In 1935 he left with his wife for Brazil to be the visiting professor of sociology at the Sao Paulo University while his wife, Dina, served as visiting professor of Ethnography. It was during this time that his wife was studying the natives of Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. More than halfway through the field work Dina sustained an injury preventing her from concluding the research which Strauss now had to complete alone. It was this experience that started Claude Levi Strauss’s career as an anthropologist. As founder of the structuralism school of thought, Claude Lévi-Strauss believed that certain cultural facts are universal due to physical, or structural, factors. For example, all human cultures tend to divide larger concepts into binary oppositions such as left and right, black and white, or hot and cold. Levi Strauss left his legacy to future structural anthropologists such as Edmond Leach, and post-structuralist philosophers Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida

-Method of Structuralism

Structuralism focuses on the effects of universal patterns in human thought on cultural phenomena. Although not attempting to explain these cultural patterns, it rather presents them as a result of the subconscious, of universal human knowledge. This link between societal norms and the mind’s thought process is ingrained so deeply within individual cultures, it becomes logical thought, taking specific actions, thoughts and activities and conceptualizing them. The process known as psychic unity, states that the human species, despite differences in race and culture, share the same basic psychological make-up. Even with this universal knowledge, every culture retains its own specific cultural structure.

Levi-Strauss presented the idea of binary oppositions. This concept coordinates certain ways of thinking. Examples of binary systems studied could be: “life vs. death,” “culture vs. nature,” or “self vs. other.” Each individual concept has an opposite concept that it is co-dependent on. This is known as unity of opposites; no one of these ideas can exist without the other. Every community takes these concepts and makes them specific to their individual culture. Presenting universal ideas and oppositions, and uniting them under a unique, cultural stand-point, eventually forming a structured and organized society. These ideas relate to linguistic anthropology, in that all humans have a common base for which can create complex sounds and develop different languages. Taking the idea of “phonemes,” pairs of sounds that create meaning, and bringing the same concept into structuralism that human share a common base for thought, leading to the development of different cultures stem from the same unconscious roots.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908-2009 (Source: http://neuroanthropology.net)

-Structuralism in Kinship

In the studies of the structure of kinship, the systems derive from deeply rooted patterns of human cognition based on logical oppositions of contrastive categories. For example, a contrasting category of kinship could be the relationship within different cultures of immediate family members and marriage. Universally, studies have shown that in almost all cultures there is an incest taboo, marrying a direct family member is not allowed. The taboo demonstrates a universal logical opposition within kin versus non-kin categories. Although every culture has its own ideals and values on the topic of marriage, some including matrilateral cross-cousin marriage or patrilateral cross-cousin marriages, there are no cultures that allow direct incest. The universal formation of ideas is the very basis of structuralism, allowing individual shifts in rules and structures of a society based on cultural history and tradition, yet still retaining a common base from which the culturally specific idea stems.

-Meeting of Myth and Science

Levi-Strauss discussing the differences between modern science and mythological thought and how they are connected; using mathematics as an example, he explains that the human mind is able to create a triangle with perfectly straight lines or a circle even though those things don’t exist in nature, they were imprinted on the human mind, being an example of mind versus experience. While exploring the differences of “experience versus mind” he mentions his upbringing. He talks about his various interests in music and painting and writing and explains how each thing is set in a different code, and that the important thing is to find something common between the different “codes”. Levi-Strauss also talks about the two different ways of proceeding with science, reductionist or structuralism. When it’s possible to reduce a very complex phenomena to a simpler level, it’s reductionist. He believes modern science to be very important, but he also believes that basic ‘mythological thought’ is just as important.

-Primitive Thinking’ and ‘Civilized Mind’

Levi-Strauss suggests the elimination of stark contrasts between the idea of primitive and civilized society, that there is a similarity of minds between all kinds of people and that we should treat primitive cosmologies as rational, coherent and logical.

3. Levi-Strauss’s Major Works and Publication:

-Elementary Structures of Kinship

In his first major theoretical work- The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949, Levi-Strauss showed that many marriage rules can be understood on the basis of the principles of reciprocity and exchange and, thus, can be reduced to variation of few basic marriage types. In Structural Anthropology, published in 1958, Levi-Strauss explained his structural method, which he applied later to the study of primitive thought. In this book the author argued that in French terminology there are two types of realities that is reality and concrete reality. He pointed out that social structure is a concrete reality. He, however, holds the view that “social structure can be no means be reduced to the ensemble of social relation to be described in given community”. Thus, he is interested in structure not from the aspect of interpersonal relationship, but he wants, first and foremost, to discover the structure of human thought process.

-Totemism

In “Totemism” (1962) Levi-Strauss shows are useful as that animals and natural object are chosen as symbols of clans or families because they are useful as linguistic and classificatory devices to conceptualise and organise social relationships and groups. In this book Levi-Strauss discuss the different aspects of totems as practised by the tribes of central Brazil with special reference to the Borolo and the Arandi. Writing on the totemic clans of another tribe, named Buganda, Levi-Strauss said: “there can be no doubt that the totemic clans of the Buganda also function as castes. And the first sight it seems that nothing could be more different than these two forms of institution. We have become used to associating totemic groups with the most “primitive” civilization and thinking of castes as a feature of highly developed sometimes even literate societies”.

Further, while making a comment on the old pattern of studying a totemistic group, Levi-Strauss pointed out that a strong tradition connects totemic institutions with the strict rule of exogamy while an anthropologist, when asked to define the concept of caste, would almost certainly begin by mentioning the rule of endogamy.

-Savage Mind

In the Savage Mind (1962) Levi-Strauss systematically demonstrated that primitives have a logical, although concrete, mode of thought. He demonstrates in this book how each culture has its own system of concepts and categories derived from experience and imposed by the surroundings natural world. Levi-Strauss pointed out through order in the naming of plants and animals, concepts of space and time, myths and rituals, how primitive societies do engage in a high level of abstract reasoning different from but not necessarily inferior to that evolved in cultivated systematic thought. Levi-Strauss seems to be concerned with the flux of the history and with the perpetual struggle between established social systems and their history. He refuges the idea that there is a dichotomy between “civilized” and “primitive” non-historic thought. Thus according to Levi-Strauss the role of history in anthropology is constantly debated.

Levi-Strauss’s four volumes of Mythologies (1964,1966,1968 and 1972) offer and impressive, although at times controversial, analysis of large body of myths, which are shown to be not explanations of natural phenomena but resolutions, in concrete language, of basic categorical paradoxes concerning human existence and the organisation of society.

4. Edmund Leach

Edmund Leach made a name for himself in an area which he had not studied as an undergraduate. After graduating from Clare College with a first in mechanical science (1932), he spent four years working with a trading firm in China. It has been suggested that this fuelled his interest in other cultures. He gained his PhD at the London School of Economics in 1947, where he secured his first Readership. He left to become a Lecturer in Cambridge in 1953, then a Reader. Leach’s field work took him to various locations in Asia, including Botel Tobago (an island off Taiwan), Kurdistan (the part which is now northern Iraq), Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). His interest in mechanical science is evident in his detailed field notes and sketches. Leach spent a great deal of time in Burma, including a period serving as a soldier in the Burmese jungle. It is his book ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma: a Study in Kachin Social Structure’ (1954) for which he is best known. The book’s impact was largely due to his use of innovative methods of addressing social and political change, by studying large and varied areas, rather than studying a single society or tribe. Over the course of his career, Leach’s attention shifted from the study of tribal kinship to structuralism. This led to significant discussion of the methodology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Leach’s structuralist analysis of ‘biblical myth’.

Edmund Leach

Source: http://www.britac.ac.uk

A social anthropologist regarded as structuralist he is known for his technical studies in the fields of kinship, marriage, ritual and myth, moving rapidly from one topic to another. In his book Political Systems of Highland Burma he elaborates the notion of verbal categories. A contextual structuralist by approach his form of structuralism is more empirically based than the intellectual versions of it offered in Europe. He examined the ways in which humans use categories to distinguish between self and other, we and say, culture and nature. He criticized Radcliffe Brown and his successors who claim to construct typologies and infer social laws directly from ethnographic data.

-Political Systems of Highland Burma

Leach is perhaps best known for Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (1954). Like Malinowski’s unforeseen internship in the Trobriand Islands during World War I, Leach’s military service in Burma during World War II inadvertently facilitated his breaking loose from the anthropological model of intensive fieldwork in a single community, with limited generalization to larger social units. During the war, Leach travelled widely throughout Kachin country, obtaining a unique overview of the range of intracultural variation, particularly in relation to the Shan valley peoples. Furthermore, his notes were lost twice and the resulting ethnography was written from memory and subsequent archival research. Leach was thus forced to write a more sociological, historical and theoretical book than he doubtless envisioned at the start of his research. Leach identified two contrasting ideal types of political organization (gumlao/gumsa) which alternated historically between egalitarian and hierarchical modes (rather like the swing of a pendulum). This approach, combined with more traditional participant-observation fieldwork in a single community, demonstrated that anthropologists could move beyond ethnography.

-Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon (1961)

Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon (1961) provided a meticulous cataloguing of land tenure holdings in relation to kinship systems. Leach approached the ideal system on which individual and kin group strategies were based through interpretation of exhaustive statistical information on particular local arrangements. He helped move social theory from descent group to alliance theory. The socio-religious feudal structure of the Kandyan kingdom and its hierarchy of castes emerged from the social order implicit in these quantitative patterns. This is the most empirical and detailed of Leach’s major works but does not entirely omit his characteristic concern with how members of the culture construct their thought-worlds (clarified through case studies).

Leach was perhaps the most important British interpreter of the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. Leach’s version of structuralism critiqued the French anthropologist’s analysis of Burmese kinship data. More importantly, however, Leach insisted on an empirical basis for structuralist generalizations, rejecting Levi-Strauss’s emphasis on universal properties of the human mind and insisting that similarities of pattern across cultures be understood in ethnographic context as well as through species biology.

5.    Post-Structuralist

While Structuralism was very popular during the 1960’s and 70’s, it eventually fell to much criticism in the late 1970’s and 80’s, giving way to Post-Structuralism and other anthropological theories. To understand an object, it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object. Structuralism looks at society in the present without any regard for the past, completely ignoring the historical context of the development of ideas. Structuralism, therefore, does not account for social change which gives a weakness to structuralist claims. Levi-Strauss’ assumptions that the structures of human thought are universal gives room for criticism in that there is no scientific research demonstrating his contentions. Because of this, there is no empirical evidence showing the development of the human brain. History, like economies and societies, were completely irrelevant to Claude Levi-Strauss.

In this way, post-structuralism positioned itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.” Another popular distinction between the two anthropological theories is that Structuralism utilized a descriptive view while Post-Structuralism utilized a Historical view in accordance with their theories and claims. In response to Structuralism, Post-Structuralists imagined it would be more effective to “emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts” and support their claims. Post-Structuralism seems to have been built on Structuralist critiques, and while many Post-Structuralists don’t label themselves as such, Claude Lev-Strauss is often viewed as a prominent figure in this anthropoligal theory as well as in Structuralism. Post-Structuralism was built out of the Structuralist framework and is viewed as the new and improved version of Structuralism.

Summary

Structuralism is the approach which seeks to isolate, and decode, deep structures of meaning, organised through systems of signs inherent in human behaviour (language, ritual, dress and so on). According to structuralisms, the mind functions on binary opposite; humans see things in terms of two forces that are opposite to each other i.e. night and day. Binary opposites differ from society to society and are defined in a particular culture in a way that is logical to its members for example shoes are “good” when you wear them outside but “bad” if you put them on the table; the role of an anthropologist is to understand these rules to interpret the culture. Claude Levi-Strauss helped to formulate the principles of structuralism by stressing the interdependence of cultural systems and the way they relate to each other, maintaining that social and cultural life can be explained by a postulated unconscious reality concealed behind the reality by which people believe their lives to be ordered. Claude Lévi-Strauss developed the idea that totemism resulted from a universal mode of human classification that created homologies between the natural and cultural spheres. The important factor was not the way an individual totem related to an individual clan, but how relationships between totems reflected relations between social groups.

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