STRUCTURALISM : CLAUDE LEVI STRAUSS

 

STRUCTURALISM

Arrived in Britain in the late 1960

Provides answers to some questions that academic sociology never raised before

• Rigorous and systematic theory and methods
• Offered interdisciplinary outlook
• Did not carve up social world into pre conceived areas
• Anti capitalist
• Anti imperialist
• Challenges bourgeoisie justification of capitalism and imperialism

Link between theory and practice (differ from structural functionalism)

STRUCTURALIST	SAUSSURE	LINGUISTIC	All use structure to give meaning to raw material they study All observes such phenomena in terms of interrelationship of its constituent elements
	JAKOBSON
	LACAN	PSYCHOANALYSIS
	LAGACHE
	FOUCAULT	HISTORY OF IDEAS
	GODELIER	ANTHROPOLOGY

Analogy of Marxism and Existentialism

SOCIAL STRUCTURE:

HERBERT SPENCER used the term structure into sociology from biology  in 19^th century.

• Analogy between social and natural world
• structure is the organization of observable part of whole.
• Natural connection between structure and function

RADCLIFFE BROWN (structural functionalist)

• Units of social structure were individual persons in role.
• Structure was the arrangement of persons in institutionally defined positions.
• No radical distinction between social relation and social structure.
• Naturalist
• Empiricist
• Particular type of comparative method

LOUIS ALTHUSSER (materialist)

• It is possible for men to challenge the world  consciously
• Philosophy is an auxiliary revolutionary weapon

LEVI STRAUSS (idealist or psychological reductionist)

• Men possess certain inbuilt innate categories
• They have always a mystified conception of social reality

FIVE IMPORTANT ELEMENTS

EPISTEMOLOGY: Theory of acquisition of knowledge

PHILOSOPHY: Substantive World view

THEORY: Substantive hypothesis to account for the object to study

METHODOLOGY: Lower level perception as to method eg. thought experiment

FIELD STUDY: Actual object of study (Kinship , Myth)

CLAUDE LEVI STRAUSS

Belgium born French intellectual

Anthropologist by profession

Born – 1908

Died- 2009

From 1927-1932 studied law and philosophy at the university of Sorbonne in Paris

From 1932-35 studied sociology under Marcel Mauss

He taught both in France as well as in America.

During his studies in Paris he became acquainted with French sociology notably the works of Comte, Durkheim and Marcel Mauss

His interest soon shifted to cultural anthropology when he moved to Brazil first in a teaching capacity at the University of Sao Paulo then on a research expedition funded by the French Government.

During the second World war he fled to the United States and taught at the New School of Social Research. It was there he  met Roman Jakobson deeply influenced his way of thinking.

Jacobson influence turned Levi Strauss towards Structuralism.

Levi Strauss took many of his ideas from structural linguistic (Ferdinand de Saussure) who saw in the structure of language a series of opposites and Roman Jakobson as well as from Emile Durkheim and particularly Marcel Mauss. Saussure argued that linguistic needed to move beyond the recorded of Parole (individual speech act) and come to an understanding of Langue, the underlying structural pattern (grammar of language) 

Levi Strauss applied this distinction in his search for the mental structures that underlie all acts of human behavior. Just as we are unaware of the grammar of our language while we speak, he argues we are unaware of the workings of social structure in our daily lives. The structure that forms the DEEP GRAMMAR of society originated in the mind and operates in us unconsciously. 

FERDINAND SAUSSURE (STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS)

 

SOCIOLOGY	METHODOLOGY	Elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overreaching system of structure
ANTHROPOLOGY		Works to uncover the structure that underlie all the things that human do, think and perceive
LINGUISTIC

FEATURES OF STRUCTURAL LINGUISTIC

Ø  Dealt with language at particular point in time (synchronic) rather than throughout their historical development (diachronic)

Ø  Father of modern structural linguistic (Ferdinand de Saussure)

Ø  Saussure believed that language as a systematic structure serving as a link between thought and sound

Ø  Structuralist are interested in the interrelationship between

UNITS (also called surface phenomena)

  & 

RULES (the ways that units can be put together)

 

LANGUAGE

UNITS :          WORDS

RULES:          FORMS OF GRAMMAR WHICH ORDER WORDS

(In different languages the grammar rules are different as are the words but the structure is still the same in all languages).

Words are put together within the grammatical system to make meaning.

Example : three characters : STORY OF CINDRELLA

PRINCESS	A princess is persecuted by a stepmother and rescued (married by a prince
STEPMOTHER
PRINCE

 

UNITS:           Princess, Stepmother and Prince

RULES: -       Stepmother:     Evil

                        Princess:          Victim

                        Prince:             Prince and Princess have to marry

STRUCTURALIST NOTION ON UNITS AND RULES: Believes that the underlying structures which organize units and rules into meaningful system are :

generated by : human mind itself not by sense perception

Saussure re-examined philology’s definition of a word. Saussure proposed that words are signs made up of two parts

SIGNS (WORDS)     = SIGNIFIER                        +          SIGNIFIED  

                                    (sound pattern of word)                      (concept of meaning of word)

SIGNS : made up of the union of concept and sound image.

Language is a system of signs

Signs functions like a coin of two sides

First side : consists of the form of sign

Second side: concept of sign (a mental image which registers in mind)

SIGNIFIER (SOUND)

SIGNIFIED (MENTAL IMAGE)

ü  Thought is a shapeless mass

ü  Only can be ordered by language

ü  Language itself gives shape to ideas and makes them expressible

ü  Determination of Value of sign: Not by what signifier gets signified but rather by the whole system of signs used within a community

ü  Structuralist analysis posits these system as universal.

1   Every human mind in every culture at every point of time in history has used some sort of structuring principles to organize and understand cultural phenomena.

2     Every human culture has some sort of language which has the basic structure of all language. Words/Phonemes are combine according to a grammar of rules to produce meaning.

3        Every human culture similarly has some sort of social organization.

4    All of these organizations are governed (according to structuralist ) by structures which are universal.

STRUCTURE	THREE PROPERTIES
WHOLENESS	TRANSFORMATION	SELF REGULATION
System functions as a whole not just a collection of independent parts	System is not static. New units can enter the system but they are governed by the rules of system	Elements can be added but cannot change the basic structure of the system. Transformation never leads to anything outside the system

SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC STUDY

 Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure introduced these two branches of linguistic (1916)

Synchrony and diachronic refer to a language state and to an evolutionary phase of language

SYNCHRONIC STUDY

Refers to geographical study

Explains that linguistic is the study of a language at a particular time or at a given point in history

Descriptive -analyze how the parts of a language or grammar work together

Static - though languages continually evolve but it’s slow enough that people don’t notice it much while it happening

Synchronic linguistic is descriptive linguistic such as the study of how parts of a language (morph or morphemes) combine to form words and phrases and how proper syntax gives a sentence meaning.

Study of dead language can be synchronic .

DIACHRONIC STUDY

The branch of linguistic that study language through different periods  in history

Evolutionary study

Focus on comparative linguistic, etymology, language evolution etc.

For ex tracing the development of English language from the old English period to the 20^th century is a diachronic study

According to Saussure diachronic change originates In the social activity of speech

Change occur in individual patterns of speaking before becoming more widely accepted as a part of language.  

During the second World War Levi Strauss fled to the United States and taught at the New School of Social Research in New York. It was there he met the linguist Jakobson –an encounter which would lastingly shaped him.

Levi Strauss repeatedly makes an assumption that other modes of cultural expression, such as kinship systems and folk taxonomies are organized like human language.. He sets about deriving his cultural generalizations from his linguistic base. His discussion of the CULINARY TRIANGLE provides a case in point.

Levi Strauss’ starting point is that human being have certain features in common, one of these being the way they construct and divide up the external world. The surrounding world is potentially open to many categorization but human being employ particular ones. They interpret their surrounding by reducing them to discontinuous units.

Levi Strauss comes to this conclusion through generalizing from Jakobson’s structuralist treatment of language. According to this theory people have an in built ability to discriminate vowels (high nose energy) from consonants (less loud). People also able to distinguish compact sounds (a or k) from diffuse sounds (u, p, i or t) and acute sounds with a high frequency pith such as (i or t) from grave sound with a low frequency pitch such as (u or p). So one arrives at Jakobson’s primary vowels and consonant triangle.  

Jakobson primary vowel and consonant triangle

Levi Strauss's primary culinary triangle

According to Jakobson’s triangle people unwittingly process linguistic information through binary oppositions. Levi Strauss used this simple idea to use non-linguistic cultural phenomena. For example Food and Culinary activities simple binary oppositions (Nature versus Culture and altered versus unaltered) are at work here. It is obvious that ordinary raw food has not undergone any transformation where as cooked or rotten food has. But there is a difference between cooked and rotten food. The former has been altered through cultural means whereas the latter has been transformed through nature. So Levi Strauss arrived at a primary culinary triangle which allows him to distinguish and analyze the main types of culinary activities. Boiling for instance is similar to rotting because it also leads to the decomposition of food. But it is different from rotting in that it can only take place through the medium of water plus cultural means (one needs a container). Smoking leads to complete cooking with the medium of air but without any cultural means. Roasting leads to only partial transformation and it is accomplished without the medium of air, water or any cultural means. Levi Strauss thus arrived at his developed culinary triangle. This example gives some indication of how through simple binary opposition Levi Strauss tried to tackle elaborate cultural procedure .

  

The Culinary triangle (developed form)

Food is an especially appropriate mediator because when we eat we do establish in a literal sense a direct identity between ourselves (culture) and our food (nature). Cooking is thus universally a means by which nature is transformed into culture, and categories of cooking are always peculiarly appropriate for use as symbols of social differentiation.  

In his most popular work ‘The Raw and Cooked” he described the widely dispersed folk tales of tribal South America, as all related to one another through a series of transformation. For example as the title implies raw becomes its opposite cooked. These particular opposites (raw/cooked) are symbolic of human culture itself in which by means of thought and labor (economics) raw material becomes clothes, food, weapons, art etc. Culture explained Levi Strauss is a dialectic process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  

LEVI STRAUSS MYTH

Levi Strauss’s treatment of myth which amongst other thing will give some indication of the extent to which both structuralism and psychoanalysis have influenced his work. He started by pointing out a particular ambiguity in the study of myths. that is one the one hand a myth is one amongst many linguistic manifestation and on the other hand it belongs to a more complex order than other linguistic phenomena, they employ a dual time referent.

On the one hand they allude to reversible time in that they refer to events which have taken place a long time ago. On the other hand they operate outside time in that they inform us not only about the meaning of past but also about the present and future.

Now this means that in order to understand myths they need to be analyzed at both temporal levels. Levi Strauss invoked the example of an Orchestra score to support his method of analysis. In order to find harmony one needs to read the Orchestra score both diachronically and synchronically. The former means that it is read as if it were a book from left to right and top to bottom starting with page one and then two etc. The latter means that one tries to conceive of the notes along each axis as one bundle of relations. Now Levi Strauss invites us to read myth in a similar fashion.  

LEVI STRAUSS TREATMENT OF OEDIPUS MYTH

1	2	3	4
Cadmos seeks his sister Europa, ravished by Zeus		Cadmos kills the Dragon
	The Spartoi kill one another		Labdacos: Laios father (lame)
	Oedipus kills his father Laios		Laios: Oedipus father (left sided)
Oedipus marries his mother Jocasta		Oedipus kills the Sphinx
	Eteocles kills his brother, Polynices		Oedipus (swollen foot)
Antigone buries her brother Polynices despite prohibition

 

The way Levi Strauss analyses this mythic narrative or parole is to first segregate it to the level of mytheme. Mytheme are the constituent unit of a myth. Levi Strauss first reduced the Oedipus myth to the level of individual mytheme which are its constituent building block. He then arranges them in a unit pattern – rows and columns.

As far as the mythic structure is concerned mytheme are equivalence of the word sound. when we study language the word sound considered as the constituent unit so just like word sound are constituent unit of language.

All the units listed in the above chart are individual mytheme. Cadmos seeks his sister Europa is one mytheme. Cadmos kills the dragon is another mytheme. The Spartoi kills one another is other mytheme and so on. Each unit present one mytheme. If we read the mytheme horizontally we will get a narration of myth (Parole). In order to understand the structuring of the myth we need to study it vertically.

First two columns in the left are having oppositional relations to one another. Last two columns are in oppositional relation to one another. Grammar of relationship = Binary opposites

Two left columns : column 1 and column 2 (something or the other to do with family relations)

Column 1 : overrating of family relations (Cadmos seeks his sister Europa, Oedipus marries his mother Jocasta (intimacy) Antigone buries her brother despite prohibitions)

Column 2: underrating of family relations: (Spartoi kills one another, Oedipus kills his father)

Column 3: Denial of chthonic existence

Column 4: Assertion of chthonic existence (all of them have defect –typical character born out of earth)

Two sets of binaries

Overrating of blood relations (column 1)

Underrating of blood relations (column 2)

 

Denial  of chthonic existence (column 3)

Assertion of chthonic existence  (column 4)

This then reduces the mythic narrative in a neat set of structural opposition. But it does not produce any copious explanation about how underlying mythic structure provides human being with a tool to negotiate his or her sense of being in a world or how does it structure his or her world.

Levi Strauss stressed that this underlying language of Oedipus myth provides a tool to the primitive human being through which he articulate the conflicting notions of its origin. So according to him the society which produced this myth and was in turn structured by the myth was tone between the two notion of human origin.

how did human came into being? Human being is authchothonus (born out of the earth) or

human being origin from sexual union of a male and female within the social structure of a family. The deep structural grammar underlying the Oedipus myth does not help us to solve the conflict. It gives us a language through which we articulate this opposition

Assertion of birth through sexual union         =         denial of autochthonous origin

Denial of birth through sexual union              =          assertion of autochothonous origin

Summary

1 There is no intrinsic or invariable meaning to any mytheme or gross constituent unit. Their meaning depends on their opposition to other symbolic units within that myth.

2 Second myth should not be conceived in isolation from each other. A closer look shows the extent to which through necessary information like symmetrical inversion, one myth is related to other. whether we study Oedipus, Antigone or Phaedra myth express the basic polarities such as nature versus culture. god versus man or life versus death.

3 Third myth enable people to articulate and come to terms with the basic contradiction of human existence. The contradiction at stake are those between people’s unconscious wishes or anxieties on the one hand and their conscious experience on the other hand. myths have an existential value in that they enable people to transcend these contradictions, somehow to reduce these in built tensions.

Levi Strauss’s analysis of myth shows most effectively that his work meant a radical break with 19^th century ways of theorizing about social world. Against 19^th century unilinear evolutionism and its notion of progress he argued for the importance of synchronic analysis through which foreign cultures prima facie very different end up remarkably similar to us. 

 

ELEMENTARY STRUCTURE OF KINSHIP

 

Levi Strauss conducted cross cultural analysis of kinship, myths and religion in an attempt to understand the fundamental structure of human cognition.

Levi Strauss believes that the underlying logical processes that structure all human thought operate within different cultural context.

Consequently cultural phenomena are not identical but they are the products of an underlying universal patterns of thought.

In any society communication operates on three different levels

1 Communication of women                          --- Kinship

2 Communication of goods and services        --- Economics

3 Communication of messages                       --- Linguistic

Therefore kinship studies, economics and linguistic approach the same kind of problems on different strategies (i.e. methodological levels and really pertain to the same field).

For Levi Strauss culture like language is essentially a collection of arbitrary symbols.

He is not interested in the meanings of the symbols anymore than a linguist is interested in phonemes

He is concerned with the patterning of elements

The way the cultural elements relate to one another to form the overall system.

Levi Strauss tried to design a technique for studying the unconscious principles that structure human culture.

KINSHIP

A kinship system like a language exists only in human consciousness it is arbitrary system of representation but representation whose organizations reflect unconscious structures.

“The unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds-ancient and modern, primitive and civilized –it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious structure underlying each institutions and customs”.

Levi Strauss argued that the phonemes and kinship terms are both elements of meaning although meaningful only in reference to systems which are building on the mind on the level of unconscious thought.

The linguistic model of binary opposites dovetailed nicely with Durkheim’s distinction such as sacred and profane and Hertz’s proposition that right and left were fundamental part of the collective conscious

Analyzed kinship based on his notion of the binary structure of human thought.

Based on the work of Marcel Mauss

Mauss tried to demonstrate that exchange in primitive societies was not motivated by economic motives but instead by rules of reciprocity upon which the solidarity of the society depended.

 Levi Strauss took Mauss’s concept of reciprocity and applied it to marriage in primitive societies.

Levi Strauss argued that women are commodity that could be exchanged and kinship system is about the exchange of women.

Levi Strauss argued that one of the most important distinction a human make is between self and others.

Defining the categories of potential spouses and prohibited mates. This natural binary distinction then led to the formation of the incest taboo which necessitates choosing spouses from outside family.

In this way the binary distinction between kin and non-kin is resolved by the reciprocal exchange of women and formation of kin networks in primitive societies.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the exchange of women was motivated by two key factors: the principle of reciprocity and the incest taboo. The principle of reciprocity, or the idea that social exchange should be balanced and equal, played a crucial role in the exchange of women. Lévi-Strauss saw this exchange as a way for groups to establish social bonds with one another and to ensure that these bonds were maintained over time. 

       

The lineages are paired into moieties which in principle from a narrowly closed intermarrying social system which Levi Strauss termed restricted.

A rule which specifies that bilateral cross cousin must marry will establish a permanent marriage exchange between descent groups that take their ancestry from the original couples in this case patrilineage A and B.