Structuralist anthropology: what is it, its basic concepts and representatives?

This is structuralist anthropology, a current promoted by authors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Structuralist anthropology is one of the main anthropological currents that maintains that social phenomena can be approached that maintains that social phenomena can be approached as systems of signs or symbols.

One of its main referents was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who considered that in all human cultures there are deep and immutable structures, evidenced by the fact that in most of them there are terms that refer to opposite concepts.

Next we will try to see a little about this school of thought, some of its referents and major influences as well as what is the opinion about kinship and the prohibition of incest as universal rules.

What is structuralist anthropology?

In its most general idea, structuralist anthropology is a theoretical theoretical current of anthropology that holds that social phenomena can be approached as systems of signs or symbols.Therefore, the anthropologist must be careful not to treat them neither solely nor principally as events, but also as meanings. Some of the referents of this current are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach.

It is not possible to speak of structuralist anthropology without mentioning the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who is considered the founder of this school or, at least, it is recognized that this current draws heavily from the philosophy of this French anthropologist. He considered that that there are deep and immutable structures in all human cultures. which makes it possible to find in all of them pairs of opposing concepts homologous in all cultures, such as the idea of good and evil or high and low.

Influences and referents

Within the structuralist anthropology led by Lévi-Strauss, there are several great referents that have influenced this school of thought. Among them are the structuralist linguists, including Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (Prague School). Saussure argued that linguists need to move beyond simply recording "parole," that is, individual speech acts, to understanding "langue," that is, the "language" of the spoken word.and go on to understand the "langue", which would refer to the grammar of each language, ideas and concepts that words do not convey separately.

Lévi-Strauss emphasized this distinction in his search for the mental structures that underlie all acts of human behavior. He considered that in the same way that when we speak we are not always aware of the grammatical rules even though we are applying them, it also makes sense that human beings are not aware of the work of social structures in our daily lives. These structures would be the "deep grammar" of society and are unconscious.

According to Lévi-Strauss, within the social category there are other very specific phenomena that need to be approached in a particular way, something that Durkheim's sociology had introduced and would later develop with ethnology. Durkheim considered that social phenomena in "primitive" societies were "privileged cases" in the sense that they were simpler cases to analyze.. In these cultures the relations between facts are more apparent than in more developed societies, apparently more symbolic.

On the other hand, Marcel Mauss, disciple and nephew of Émile Durkheim, considered that social facts exist in themselves. However, these facts possessed certain specificities depending on the sphere in which they were found and that only some of them are capable of mobilizing various dimensions of the life of a society, that is, that they are sufficiently important for a change in them to entail some kind of alteration in society as a whole. Mauss called these acts "total social acts" and believed that they were the object of the study. and believed them to be sociology's most promising object of study.

What is a structure?

Lévi-Strauss explicitly speaks of "structure" as a theoretical pattern that reconstructs or couples constant elements but which, in turn, gives rise to changes, alterations, differences and similarities in different cultures.

These structures were aspects such as brain structure, the behavior of the human "spirit", different languages, kinship links....

To understand it, one could say that the structures are those properly human aspects that are present in all cultures even if they vary in appearance and that explain how people behave and behave as humans. explain how the cultural diversity of the planet behaves and shapes itself.. All cultures have languages, all have a system of kinship ties, all have a religiosity, but not all share the same language, way of seeing kinship and believe in the same gods.

Lévi-Strauss considered these elements to be universal in scope and to have existed throughout human history, among them being the capacity of human beings to perceive and describe reality in a dichotomous way in multiple issues, an aspect that we will see in more detail below.

On binary systems

Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropological point of view is considered to have emerged as a result of having delved into the dialectics of Karl Marx and Friedrich Hegel. Hegel considered that every situation can present two opposing things or concepts, an idea that would be taken up by Lévi-Strauss who maintained that cultures are also governed by a conceptual structure with opposing categories..

These opposing ideas can be found in all societies and are perceived as antagonistic concepts that either fight each other or complement each other, but whose meaning cannot be understood without the existence of their rival concept. Some examples of this would be: high and low, good and evil, man and woman, ethics and emic, intellect and emotion, quality and quantity... By means of this type of ideas, especially the concepts referring to ethics and religion, the codes governing marriage, mythology and rituals in societies (e.g., to do good and not evil) would have been established.

Structuralist anthropology it is argued that people think in mostly opposite binary terms and that each culture can be understood on the basis of these opposing terms. Whether forming more ethical and social ideas, such as the religion or marriage just discussed, or influencing the way the world is interpreted, communities throughout history have created labels that are mutually exclusive, even though they could be transformed into systems of varying degrees.

This binary view is "translatable" to other cultures and languages. In all languages of the world it is to be expected to have words for "high" and "low", since they are two very obvious antagonistic concepts.But what is not to be expected is to have more terms for height, even though height itself is not a dichotomous quality. That is, people are not tall or short, but we can go from taller to shorter, and we could even create a system of seven categories to designate height: very tall, tall, medium-high, medium, medium-low, low, low, very low.

However, our mind prefers to think in dichotomous terms and for this reason we do not have in any language with, for example, seven different words to designate seven different degrees of height. We directly use the words "medium" and "very" as in this case to be more specific. This applies to the other binary terms mentioned above. It is clear that life is not black and white, but to facilitate our perception and interpretation of the world, cultures choose to use dichotomous terms and, if necessary, to specify later.

Atom of kinship according to structural anthropology

Structural anthropology speaks of the "atom of kinship" as the basic unit of society, which revolves around marriage.. This atom would be composed of man and woman united by marriage, their most direct offspring and the wife's brother. The presence of these four elements implies the formation of different types of bonds: Children are linked to their parents by filiation, spouses by the conjugal bond and between the husband and his wife's brother by an alliance relationship.

In all cultures a value and rules to follow are established for each of these elements with respect to the kinship atom, among them the prohibition of incest as a method of pressure so that men of two different groups "exchange" women of the same groups, extending the social network and avoiding the appearance of congenital problems.

In the vast majority of cultures incest is frowned upon, especially between siblings.especially between siblings. This question has been investigated by anthropological structuralism, based on the assumption that marriage is the basis of societies and that it is the means by which links between different groups can be established through the union of their members. The anthropological analysis of this issue has been called the alliance theory.

While for structural functionalists the importance of kinship was found in the offspring of a marriage and the rules that define inheritance in each society, for structuralist anthropologists the essence of marriage is itself the marital alliance. That a man and a woman marry does not only imply a conjugal bond between the two of them, but also the creation of bonds between their families which leads to a strategic alliance between two different groups of people.

This alliance would not be possible if the union were performed by siblings or cousins, being this the main reason why societies would typify marriages between relatives as a crime and/or immoral act, besides being a strategically useless union. Marriage would have a function of creating, fostering and solidifying relationships between groups of people who are part of a society, making the social fabric stronger.

Marriage between siblings and cousins is neither positive nor beneficial to society as a whole. If families only married their children and nieces and nephews to each other, these families would become isolated lineages that would hardly support each other in economic, social or legal matters. With no link to groups of strangers, each group would have to fend for itself, so that over time the population would be nothing more than a collection of groups going their own way and, therefore, society would be highly fragmented and lacking in social cohesion.

Bibliographical references:

• Cucchetti, Humberto and María Virginia MELLADO (2001). "Estructuralismo y religión: Lévi-Strauss y el análisis de la vida religiosa". In Revista de Ciencias Sociales, (011): 158-170. Iquique: Universidad Arturo Prat.
• Harris, Marvin (1987). El desarrollo de la teoría antropológica: una historia de las teorías de la cultura. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España.
• Héritier, Françoise (1994): Les deux sœurs et leur mère : anthropologie de l'inceste. Paris: Odile Jacob.
• Korsbaek, Léif (2003). "Anthropology and linguistics." In: Ciencia ergo sum 10(2): 159-172. Toluca de Lerdo: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1977) [1961]. Antropología estructural. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.