26 Post Structuralism

Vineet Kumar Verma

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Historical Context

2. Rise of Post Structuralism

3. Post modernism

4. Structuralism vs. Post structuralism

5. Post structuralism Critique Summary

Learning Objectives

To introduce the history of anthropological thought by tracing its historical development of Post Structuralism
To classify the course of historical development, academic, and Anthropological importance of Post Structuralism development
To explore the formation and emergence of Post-Structuralism Critique to the late 20th century.
An attempt to look at how rise of Post Structuralism in anthropology might be related to other historical and academic thought

Introduction

One theoretical orientation will arise and may grow in popularity until another is proposed in opposition to it. Often, one orientation will capitalize on those aspects of a problem that a previous orientation ignored or played down. 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. The structuralism in poststructuralism is a linguistic approach derived from the work of the 19th century. Adapted to the examination of the production and circulation of signs – images, information, knowledges, rituals, etc., this structuralism became ‘the next big thing’ in France in the 1950s, with its declining influence lasting into the 1970s. French structuralism, whose influence quickly spread beyond the country, was characterised by a number of commitments. Instead of examining the conscious actions and intentions of people, they highlighted the role of symbolic systems, say the psyche or discourse, which govern individual actions and intentions, in most cases without people being aware of how they are influenced.

Historical Context

How long have anthropologists existed? Opinions are divided on this issue. The answer depends on what you mean by an anthropologist. If we restrict ourselves to anthropology as a scientific discipline, some would trace its roots back to the European Enlightenment during the eighteenth century; others would claim that anthropology did not arise as a science until the 1850s, others again would argue that anthropological research in its present-day sense only commenced after the First World War. Nor can avoid such ambiguities. It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as the science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly refer to as ‘the West’, notably in four ‘Western’ countries: France, Britain, the USA and Germany. Post structuralism is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of slippage in our systems of meaning as a way to identify—right there, in that ambiguous space—the ethical choices that we make, whether in our writings or in everyday life, when we overcome the ambiguity and move from indeterminacy to certainty of belief in an effort to understand, interpret, or shape our social environment.

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. Post structuralism fits within this framework because it levies an attack against the hegemony of western philosophy especially that rooted in Enlightenment ideals. In levelling this attack, it operates as critical theory—that is, as a radical philosophy seeking social change. Structuralism represents a movement that began in the 1950’s and 1960’s in France. 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.

Rise of Post Structuralism

Poststructuralism is an intellectual movement that grew out of and away from structuralism in the second half of the 1960s. Structuralism is a broad term which designates a range of different approaches in the human sciences. What they have in common is the conviction that the most productive entry point into examining society is the nature of the relations among the parts making up the investigated social system. This differs from individualism, which assumes that society does not exist as a phenomenon with either constitutive or causal powers, and that, therefore, all social analysis must start from the properties (the beliefs, interests, etc.) of individuals. In contrast, structuralism posits that any social element (persons, states, mythical gods, etc.) exists only in particularly patterned, or structured relations linking them to other elements in a system, and that one can only understand each element by analysing it in the context of its insertion into a structure of social relations.

The structuralism in poststructuralism is a linguistic approach derived from the work of the 19th century. Adapted to the examination of the production and circulation of signs – images, information, knowledges, rituals, etc., this structuralism became ‘the next big thing’ in France in the 1950s, with its declining influence lasting into the 1970s. French structuralism, whose influence quickly spread beyond the country, was characterised by a number of commitments. Instead of examining the conscious actions and intentions of people, they highlighted the role of symbolic systems, say the psyche or discourse, which govern individual actions and intentions, in most cases without people being aware of how they are influenced.

While post structuralism is difficult to define or summarize, it can be broadly understood as a body of distinct reactions to structuralism. There are two main reasons for this difficulty.

First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute ‘truths’ or facts about the world.

Second, very few people have willingly accepted the label ‘poststructuralist’ ;rather; they have been labelled as such by others.

Therefore no one has felt compelled to construct a ‘manifesto’ of post structuralism. Thus the exact nature of post structuralism and whether it can be considered a single philosophical movement is debated. It has been pointed out that the term is not widely used in Europe (where most supposedly “poststructuralist” theory originates) and that the concept of a poststructuralist theoretical paradigm is largely the invention of academics and publishers.

Theoretical Orientation

Poststructuralists do doubt the existence of reality, or at the very least they emphasize the extent to which the widely understood difference between “ideas” and “reality” is one constructed through discourse. In other words, if there is a reality, it may have not bearing on our sense of “truth” at all. They tend to emphasize the incoherence of the systems of discourse, or at very least the tensions and ambiguities created by the existence of multiple systems. Poststructuralists, on will generally tend to focus on polysemy, that is the plurality of meaning and, indeed, the tendency for meanings to mushroom out of control. Poststructuralist too will be reductive in their own way, but they try to keep in focus the differences that are being ignored in carrying out the reduction. These differences, they suggest, create cracks or fissures in the system that can be utilized to challenge or even destroy the systems at work. Poststructuralists have given up the search for “Universal truths.” Whereas structuralists look for things that bind us together, poststructuralists tend to focus on that which makes us different. In their minds, this emphasizes the malleability of human kind—a kind of revival of the existentialist “existence precedes essence” just in a new guise. Poststructuralists are not humanists, exactly, since they also focus on the ways that language and discourse structures thought; however, they do tend to try to restore some small amount of power or creativity to the subject. While they recognize the power of systems of thought and action to set out the limits of the playing field, they want to retain some small degree of spontaneity, or at least unpredictability, for individuals moving within the playing field. Poststructuralists focus more on the reader/speaker who is operating within the structure.

Major works done by Strauss and Leach

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.

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. 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.

In the Savage Mind (1962) 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.

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) 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.

Structuralism vs. Post structuralism

Structuralism in anthropology is inextricably linked with its founder, Claude Lévi-Strauss. His principal contributions have been in the field of kinship and in the analysis of symbolism, particularly of myths. The characteristic approach of structuralist analysis is to categorize systems, not in terms of the composition or content of their component elements, but in terms of the structure of relationships between these elements.

The poststructuralist turn was evident in the famous 1966 conference on “Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man” at Johns Hopkins University, which featured an important intervention by Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Rejecting structuralist theories of language, Derrida stressed the instability and excess of meaning in language, as well as the ways in which heterogeneity and difference were generated. Derrida also questioned the binary opposition between nature and culture upon which Levi Strauss had erected his system, thus undermining a certain glorification of the human sciences in the humanities and opening the discipline for a greater appreciation of philosophy, literature, and less scientific modes of discourse. Post structuralism stressed the openness and heterogeneity of the text, how it is embedded in history and desire, its political and ideological dimensions, and its excess of meaning. This led critical theory to more multilevel interpretive methods and more radical political readings and critiques.

Post structuralism Critiques

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. Ultimately, both structuralism and post structuralism have contributed to tendencies on the part of many (but by no means all) anthropologists to call into question the characterization of their discipline as “science” and to reposition themselves more centrally in the humanities structuralism through its emphasis on the decoding of symbols, a domain often considered antithetical to strictly “scientific” approaches; and post structuralism by forcing anthropologists to call into question their own practices of representation. Critics from within the humanist camp, however, have pointed out that both structuralism and post structuralism are theoretically de-humanizing (that is, ignoring or minimizing the impact and importance of human agency). At best, such theories make any consideration of human agency problematic; at worst, they leave no place for it at all.

However, individuality does exist in society, especially through time. Which brings us to the next critique of Structuralism, it is a historical.

20th Century Developments

It arose in the mid-20th century, and it addresses the relation between the long-term changes that are characteristic of human culture in general and the short-term, localized social and ecological adjustments that cause specific cultures to differ from one another as they adapt to their own unique environments. This meagre statistic expanded in the 20th century to comprise anthropology departments in the majority of the world’s higher educational institutions, many thousands in number. Anthropology has diversified from a few major subdivisions to dozens more. Practical anthropology, the use of anthropological knowledge and technique to solve specific problems, has arrived; for example, the presence of buried victims might stimulate the use of a forensic archaeologist to recreate the final scene. Organization has reached global level. During the last three decades of the 19th century a proliferation of anthropological societies and associations occurred, most independent, most publishing their own journals, and all international in membership and association. The major theorists belonged to these organizations. They supported the gradual osmosis of anthropology curricula into the major institutions of higher learning.

Summary

Poststructuralism is an intellectual movement that grew out of and away from structuralism in the second half of the 1960s. Structuralism is a broad term which designates a range of different approaches in the human sciences. What they have in common is the conviction that the most productive entry point into examining society is the nature of the relations among the parts making up the investigated social system. 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. Levi-Strauss seems to be concerned with the flux of the history and with the perpetual struggle between established social systems and their history. A contextual structuralist by approach of Leach form of structuralism is more empirically based than the intellectual versions of it offered in Europe. Whereas Levi Strauss examined the ways in which humans use categories to distinguish between self and other, we and say, culture and nature.

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