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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Magic and Religion, The Effectiveness of Symbols

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

• Magic and Religion, The Structural Study of Myth

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