Structural anthropology
Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equatable.
Lévi-Strauss' approach arose in large part from dialectics expounded on by Marx and Hegel, though dialectics dates back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Hegel explains that every situation presents two opposing things and their resolution; Fichte had termed these "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Lévi-Strauss argued that cultures also have this structure. He showed, for example, how opposing ideas would fight and were resolved to establish the rules of marriage, mythology and ritual. This approach, he felt, made for fresh new ideas. He stated:
Only those who practice structural analysis are aware of what they are actually trying to do: that is, to reunite perspectives that the "narrow" scientific outlook of recent centuries believed to be mutually exclusive: sensibility and intellect, quality and quantity, the concrete and the geometrical, or as we say today, the "etic" and the "emic."
In South America he showed that there are "dual organizations" throughout Amazon rainforest cultures, and that these "dual organizations" represent opposites and their synthesis. As an illustration, Gê tribes of the Amazon were found to divide their villages into two rival halves; however, members from each half married each other, resolving the opposition.
Culture, he claimed, has to take into account both life and death and needs to have a way of mediating between the two. Mythology unites opposites in diverse ways.
Three of the most prominent structural anthropologists are Lévi-Strauss himself and the British neo-structuralists Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach. The latter was the author of such essays as "Time and False Noses".
Influences
Lévi-Strauss took many ideas from structural linguistics, including those of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Saussure argued that linguists needed to move beyond the recording of parole and come to an understanding of langue, the grammar of each language.Lévi-Strauss applied this distinction in his search for mental structures that underlie all acts of human behavior: Just as speakers can talk without awareness of grammar, he argued, humans are unaware of the workings of social structures in daily life. The structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate unconsciously.
Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, which employed so-called binary oppositions in their research. Roman Jakobson and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features, such as "voiceless" vs. "voiced." Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the mind's universal structures. For him, opposites formed the basis of social structure and culture.
Kinship
In his early work Lévi-Strauss argued that tribal kinship groups were usually found in pairs, or in paired groups that oppose each other yet need one another. For example, in the Amazon basin, two extended families would build their houses in two facing semicircles that together form a big circle. He showed too that the ways people initially categorized animals, trees, and other natural features, were based on a series of oppositions.In his most popular work, The Raw and the Cooked, he described folk tales of tribal South America as related to one another through a series of transformations—as one opposite in tales here changed into its opposite in tales there. For example, as the title implies, raw becomes its opposite cooked. These particular opposites are symbolic of human culture itself, in which by means of thought and labour, raw materials become clothes, food, weapons, art and ideas.
While Durkheim thought that taxonomies of the natural world are collective in origin, meaning that social structures influence individual cognitive structures, Lévi-Strauss proposed the opposite, arguing that it is the latter that gives rise to the former. Social structures mirror cognitive structures, meaning that patterns in social interaction can be treated as their manifestations. While structural-functionalists looked for structures within social organisation, structuralism seeks to identify links between structures of thought and social structures. Possibly the most significant influence on structuralism came from Mauss' The Gift. Mauss argued that gifts are not free, but rather oblige the recipient to reciprocate. Through the gift, the givers give part of themselves, imbuing the gift a certain power that compels a response. Gift exchanges, therefore play a crucial role in creating and maintaining social relationships by establishing bonds of obligations. Gifts are not merely physical, incidental objects; they possess cultural and spiritual properties. It is a "total prestation" as Mauss called it, as it carries the power to create a system of reciprocity in which the honour of both giver and recipient are engaged. Social relationships are therefore based on exchange; Durkheimian solidarity, according to Mauss, is best achieved through structures of reciprocity and related systems of exchange.
Lévi-Strauss took this idea and postulated three fundamental properties of the human mind: a) people follow rules; b) reciprocity is the simplest way to create social relationships; c) a gift binds both giver and recipient in a continuing social relationship.
Structures are universal; their realization is culturally specific. Lévi-Strauss argued that exchange is the universal basis of kinship systems, the structures of which depend on the type of marriage rules that apply. Because of its strong focus on vertical social relations, Lévi-Strauss' model of kinship systems came to be called alliance theory.
Marriage
Lévi-Strauss' model attempted to offer a single explanation for cross-cousin marriage, sister-exchange, dual organization and rules of exogamy. Over time, marriage rules create social structures because marriages are primarily forged between groups and not just between spouses. When groups exchange women on a regular basis, they marry together; consequently, each marriage creates a debtor/creditor relationship that must be balanced through the "repayment" of wives, either immediately or in the next generation.Lévi-Strauss proposed that the initial motivation for the exchange of women was the incest taboo. He deemed this the beginning and essence of culture, as it was the first prohibition to check natural impulses; secondarily, it divides labor by gender. Prescribing exogamy creates a distinction between marriageable and tabooed women that necessitates a search for women outside one's own kin group and fosters exchange relationships with other groups. Exogamy promotes inter-group alliances and forms structures of social networks.
Lévi-Strauss also discovered that a wide range of historically unrelated cultures had the rule that individuals should marry their cross-cousin, meaning children of siblings of the opposite sex—from a male perspective that is either the FZD or the MBD. Accordingly, he grouped all possible kinship systems into a scheme containing three basic kinship structures constructed out of two types of exchange. He called the three kinship structures elementary, semi-complex and complex.
Elementary structures are based on positive marriage rules that specify whom a person must marry, while complex systems specify negative marriage rules, thus leaving room for choice based on preference. Elementary structures can operate based on two forms of exchange: restricted exchange, a symmetric form of exchange between two groups of wife-givers and wife-takers; in an initial restricted exchange FZ marries MB, with all children then being bilateral cross-cousins. Continued restricted exchange means that the two lineages marry together. Restricted exchange structures are generally uncommon.
The second form of exchange within elementary structures is called generalised exchange, meaning that a man can only marry either his MBD or his FZD. This involves an asymmetric exchange between at least three groups. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage arrangements where the marriage of the parents is repeated by successive generations are very common in parts of Asia. Lévi-Strauss considered generalised exchange to be superior to restricted exchange because it allows the integration of indefinite numbers of groups. Examples of restricted exchange are found, for instance, in the Amazon basin. These tribal societies are made up of multiple moieties that often split up, rendering them comparatively unstable. Generalised exchange is more integrative but contains an implicit hierarchy, as e.g. amongst the Kachin where wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. Consequently, the last wife-taking group in the chain is significantly inferior to the first wife-giving group to which it is supposed to give its wives. These status inequalities can destabilise the entire system or can at least lead to an accumulation of wives at one end of the chain.
From a structural perspective matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is superior to its patrilateral counterpart; the latter has less potential to produce social cohesion since its exchange cycles are shorter. Lévi-Strauss' theory is supported by fact that patrilateral cross-cousin marriage is in fact the rarest of three types. However, matrilateral generalised exchange poses a risk as group A depends on receiving a woman from a group that it has not itself given a woman to, producing a less immediate obligation to reciprocate compared to a restricted exchange system. The risk created by such a delayed return is obviously lowest in restricted exchange systems.
Lévi-Strauss proposed a third structure between elementary and complex structures, called semi-complex structure or Crow-Omaha system. Semi-complex structures contain so many negative marriage rules that they effectively prescribe marriage to specific parties, thus somewhat resembling elementary structures. These structures are found, for example, among the Crow Nation and Omaha Native Americans in the United States.
In Lévi-Strauss' view, the basic building block of kinship is not just the nuclear family, as in structural-functionalism, but the so-called kinship atom: the nuclear family together with the wife's brother. This "mother's brother" plays a crucial role in alliance theory, as he is the one who ultimately decides whom his daughter will marry. Moreover, it is not just the nuclear family as such, but alliances between families that matter in regard to the creation of social structures, reflecting the typical structuralist argument that the position of an element in the structure is more significant than the element itself. Descent theory and alliance theory therefore look at two sides of one coin: the former emphasising bonds of consanguinity, the latter stressing bonds of affinity.