Structural Anthropology

Summary

Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structurale) is a collection of seventeen essays by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, published by Plon in Paris in 1958 and translated into English by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf for Basic Books in 1963. In his preface Lévi-Strauss explains that he chose them from roughly a hundred papers written over some thirty years; most had appeared in journals between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, and two were printed for the first time in the book. Together they set out the method that made his name: the study of social life as a set of systems of relations, modelled on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. The work is under copyright, so the library holds no text and this record gives a summary and study guide only. The introductory essay, History and Anthropology, argues that history and anthropology share a subject, social life, but differ in perspective: history studies the conscious expressions of social life, anthropology its unconscious foundations. A group of essays on language and kinship follows. The most famous of them, Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology (1945), proposes that kinship terms and attitudes form a system like the sound system of a language. Taking the old problem of the avunculate, the special relation between a mother's brother and his sister's son, Lévi-Strauss argues that the relation can be understood only within a unit of four relations, brother and sister, husband and wife, father and son, mother's brother and sister's son, whose attitudes balance one another. The essays on social organization examine the dual organizations of peoples in central Brazil and North America, asking whether the division of villages into halves reflects real social structure or a model in the people's own minds. Under the heading Magic and Religion come three of the most widely read pieces. The Sorcerer and His Magic retells the story of Quesalid, a Kwakiutl man who set out to expose the tricks of shamans and became a celebrated healer, and argues that the efficacy of magic depends on the belief of the healer, the patient and the group. The Effectiveness of Symbols analyses a Cuna song sung by a shaman during a difficult childbirth and compares the shaman's cure with psychoanalysis. The Structural Study of Myth, first published in English in 1955, breaks myths into their smallest units, which Lévi-Strauss calls mythemes, and arranges the episodes of the Oedipus story in columns to show recurring oppositions, proposing that a myth consists of all its versions. The remaining essays treat split representation in the art of the Northwest Coast, China and the Maori, the general concept of social structure, and the place of anthropology among the social sciences and in teaching.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction: History and Anthropology

  History and anthropology study the same object; history organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, anthropology in relation to its unconscious conditions, which linguistics shows how to reach.

• Language and Kinship

  Kinship systems, like phonological systems, are systems of differences; the avunculate is explained by a four-term atom of kinship in which the attitudes between pairs of relatives are correlated and opposed.

• Social Organization

  Studies of village layouts and moieties in Brazil and North America ask how far the dual organizations people describe correspond to the actual structure of their society.

• Magic and Religion: the sorcerer and the cure

  Quesalid's story and a Zuni sorcery trial show that magic works within a consensus of belief; the Cuna childbirth song shows a symbolic cure acting on the patient through a structured narrative, compared with psychoanalytic treatment.

• Magic and Religion: the structural study of myth

  Myth is language at a higher level; its units are relations bundled into mythemes; the Oedipus story and a Zuni emergence myth are analysed as attempts to mediate oppositions, and every version belongs to the myth.

• Art

  Split representation, the depiction of a face or body as two profiles joined, appears in widely separated cultures; Lévi-Strauss seeks a structural rather than a diffusionist explanation.

• Problems of Method and Teaching

  The concept of social structure refers not to observable relations but to models built from them; anthropology must be taught as a discipline joining fieldwork and theory.

Lessons

• Meaning lies in relations

  Lévi-Strauss borrows from linguistics the idea that a sound has meaning only by its difference from other sounds. He applies it to kinship, myth and art: no single element explains itself, and the anthropologist must look for the system of oppositions.

  • Why can the avunculate not be explained by looking at the uncle and nephew alone?
  • What does Lévi-Strauss borrow from Trubetzkoy and Jakobson?
  • Can you think of a word or custom whose meaning depends on what it is contrasted with?

• Belief and healing

  In the essays on the sorcerer and on symbolic effectiveness, Lévi-Strauss argues that a cure works within a shared system of meaning: the patient believes, the healer believes, and the community confirms. Quesalid began as a sceptic and ended as a respected healer because his patients recovered.

  • Why does Quesalid continue to practise after discovering the shamans' tricks?
  • How does the Cuna song act on the woman in labour, according to Lévi-Strauss?
  • What does his comparison between the shaman and the psychoanalyst suggest about modern therapies?

• Reading myths as systems

  The Structural Study of Myth proposes that a myth is made of all its versions and that its meaning lies in the arrangement of recurring oppositions rather than in the plot. The analysis of the Oedipus story is the most famous illustration of the method, and also its most debated.

  • How does Lévi-Strauss arrange the Oedipus episodes, and what oppositions does he find?
  • Why does he count Freud's version as part of the myth?
  • What might be lost when a story is read as a structure rather than a narrative?

Context

The essays were written between the Second World War and the late 1950s, when Lévi-Strauss moved from fieldwork in Brazil and wartime exile in New York to the centre of French intellectual life. They joined the anthropology of Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, the American ethnography of Franz Boas, and the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson. In the 1960s the term structuralism came to cover a wider movement in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and philosophy, associated with Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and others.

Composition

Plon published Anthropologie structurale in 1958 as a collection of papers from roughly 1944 to 1957, including Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology from the journal Word (1945), The Sorcerer and His Magic and The Effectiveness of Symbols (both 1949), and The Structural Study of Myth, first printed in English in the Journal of American Folklore (1955). Basic Books published the English translation by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf in 1963. A second collection, Structural Anthropology, Volume 2, followed in 1973.

Reception

The book became a founding text of structuralism and influenced anthropology, literary theory and the study of religion. Anthropologists such as Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas engaged and adapted the method; others, including Clifford Geertz, criticized it for abstraction, and historically minded critics objected to its treatment of myths apart from their tellers and settings. The essays on shamanic healing remain widely cited in medical anthropology and in discussions of the placebo response.

Comparisons

• frazer-the-golden-bough

  Frazer arranged world myth and magic into an evolutionary sequence from magic to religion to science; Lévi-Strauss rejects the evolutionary scheme and seeks the logical structures common to all thought.

• the-theban-plays

  Sophocles' Oedipus is the test case of The Structural Study of Myth, where the episodes of the Theban cycle are rearranged into columns of opposed relations.

• the-interpretation-of-dreams

  Lévi-Strauss compares the shaman's cure with psychoanalysis and treats Freud's account of Oedipus as one more version of the myth.

• rousseau-discourse-on-inequality

  Lévi-Strauss honoured Rousseau as a founder of anthropology; the Discourse's conjectures about early society and language lie behind his own questions about nature and culture.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The contrast in History and Anthropology between conscious and unconscious foundations of social life.
• The four relations of the atom of kinship in the essay on structural analysis in linguistics.
• Quesalid's path from sceptic to healer in The Sorcerer and His Magic.
• The comparison of shaman and psychoanalyst in The Effectiveness of Symbols.
• The columns of the Oedipus myth and the claim that a myth consists of all its versions.

Key terms and names

Structure

For Lévi-Strauss, a model of the relations among elements of a system, built by the analyst, rather than the visible social arrangements themselves.

Avunculate

The special relation between a mother's brother and his sister's son, which Lévi-Strauss explains through the atom of kinship.

Mytheme

His term for the smallest meaningful unit of a myth, a relation between a subject and a predicate, grouped with others into bundles.

Structural linguistics

The study of language as a system of differences, developed by Saussure, Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, and the model for Lévi-Strauss's method.

Quesalid

A Kwakiutl man, known from Franz Boas's records, who trained as a shaman to expose its tricks and became a famous healer.

Symbolic effectiveness

The power of a ritual or narrative to act on a patient through shared meanings, as in the Cuna childbirth song.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the four relations in Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship?
2. Comprehension How does Quesalid become a shaman, and why does he keep practising?
3. Comprehension What is a mytheme, and how does Lévi-Strauss arrange the Oedipus story?
4. Interpretation Why does Lévi-Strauss say history studies the conscious and anthropology the unconscious side of social life?
5. Interpretation Is Lévi-Strauss saying that the shaman's cure is real, or only that it works because people believe in it?
6. Interpretation What does it mean to say that Freud's version of Oedipus belongs to the myth?
7. Big Question Do human minds everywhere think by the same logic, and if so, what makes cultures different?

Faith Connections

• Acts 8:9-24 (Scripture)

  Simon the sorcerer, admired by the Samaritans, is confronted by Peter; the story makes a sharp contrast with Lévi-Strauss's account of the sorcerer whose power rests on public belief.

• Mark 5:25-34 (Scripture)

  Jesus tells the healed woman that her faith has made her whole; Christian readers can set this beside Lévi-Strauss's claims about belief and healing while noting that the Gospel places the power in Christ, not in the community's consensus.

• Genesis 11:1-9 (Scripture)

  Babel's confusion of tongues raises the question Lévi-Strauss's linguistics explores, whether beneath many languages and myths there lies a single shared structure of mind.

• C. S. Lewis, Myth Became Fact (1944) (Great Conversation)

  Lewis argued that the dying-god myths gathered by anthropologists find their fulfilment in the historical Christ; Lévi-Strauss treats myth as a logic of oppositions, and the two views make an illuminating contrast.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Language is a system in which elements have meaning only through their relations; kinship, myth, ritual and art are also systems of communication; therefore they can be analysed by the same method, which reveals unconscious structures common to the human mind beneath the variety of cultures.

Rhetorical device: analogy. Throughout the essays on language and kinship, Lévi-Strauss reasons from the phonologist's analysis of sounds to the anthropologist's analysis of kin terms and attitudes, treating the second as a case of the first.

Debate: Resolved: that myths are best understood by their structure rather than by their story.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using The Sorcerer and His Magic and The Effectiveness of Symbols, explain what Lévi-Strauss believes makes a cure effective, and evaluate his comparison of the shaman and the psychoanalyst.

Comparison with The Golden Bough (abridged edition): Compare how Frazer and Lévi-Strauss explain magic: is it a mistaken science on the road to true science, or a logic of its own?

Medical Lens

Two essays in the section on magic and religion are standard reading in medical anthropology. The Sorcerer and His Magic argues that healing depends on a three-way consensus of healer, patient and public, using Boas's materials on Quesalid, a Kwakiutl sceptic who learned the shamans' sleight of hand, including the bloody tuft of down presented as the extracted sickness, and became a renowned healer. The Effectiveness of Symbols reads a Cuna shaman's song for an obstructed labour as a symbolic manipulation that gives the patient a language for her pain, and compares it, point by point, with psychoanalytic abreaction and transference. These essays are often cited in later discussions of placebo and meaning responses, though Lévi-Strauss wrote before that literature and his account of the Cuna text rests on a published transcription rather than his own fieldwork.

• Magic and Religion, The Sorcerer and His Magic

  The career of Quesalid, the Zuni boy accused of sorcery who confesses and is spared, and the argument that magic is effective within a shared system of belief.

  Quackery Charlatans Physicians Doctors Mind Body
• Magic and Religion, The Effectiveness of Symbols

  The Cuna song for a difficult childbirth and its comparison with psychoanalytic cure.

  Childbirth Maternal Psychology Unconscious Philosophy AS Therapy
• Magic and Religion, The Structural Study of Myth

  The treatment of Freud's Oedipus complex as a modern version of the Oedipus myth.

  Psychology Unconscious

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Take a familiar story told in several versions, such as Cinderella, list its episodes on cards, and try arranging them in columns of recurring relations as Lévi-Strauss does with Oedipus.

• Essay

  Explain Lévi-Strauss's comparison between the Cuna shaman and the psychoanalyst, and assess what it gets right and what it leaves out.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Frazer and Lévi-Strauss about whether magic is bad science or a different kind of logic.

Further Reading

• Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss

  Lévi-Strauss's 1955 memoir of travel and fieldwork in Brazil.

• The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss

  His 1962 account of the logic of concrete, classificatory thought.

• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach

  Short critical introduction in the Fontana Modern Masters series by a British anthropologist.

• Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure

  The linguistic theory of signs and differences on which structural anthropology draws.