Contribution:
- Structuralism
- Kinship studies
- Mythologies
- Totemic Study
(A) Alliance theory
Lévi-Strauss started writing The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1943 and finished it in 1947. This work offered a new approach to the study of kinship systems that has come to be known as ‘alliance theory’ in opposition to what is called ‘descent theory’, which was put forth by British anthropologists (such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Meyer Fortes) and was the dominant theory in kinship studies till then. The emphasis of descent theory was on the transmission of property, office, ritual complex, and rights and obligations across the generations (either in the father’s or mother’s line, or in both the lines), which produced solidarity among the members of the group related by the ties of consanguinity. Lineage was seen as a corporate group, property-holding and organising labour on the lines of blood ties. In this set of ideas, marriage was secondary: since one could not marry one’s sister or daughter, because of the rule of incest taboo, one married a woman from another group. The primary objective of marriage was the procreation of the descent group
Lévi-Strauss’s alliance theory brought marriage to the centre. The function of marriage was not just procreative. It was far more important, for it led to the building of a string of relations between groups, respectively called the ‘wife- givers’ and ‘wife-takers’. In this context, the concept of incest taboo acquires a central place. It is the ‘pre-social’ social fact; if society is a social fact, which explains and accounts for a number of other social facts, the fact that explains society, its emergence and functioning, is incest taboo. For Lévi-Strauss, it is the ‘cornerstone’ of human society. The logical outcome of the prohibition of incest is a system of exchange. It is not only the negative aspect of the rule of incest taboo that needs to be recognised, as was the case with the descent theorists. What was significant to Lévi-Strauss was the positive aspect – it is not only that I do not marry my sister but I also give her in marriage to another man whose sister I then marry. ‘Sister exchange’ creates a ‘federation’ between exchanging groups. Societies are also distinguished with respect to where there is a ‘positive rule of marriage’ (the genealogical specification of the relative to whom one should marry) and where such a rule does not exist. Lévi-Strauss’s work on kinship introduced a new approach to the study of kinship and exchange. That marriage is an ‘exchange of women’ – where women are a ‘value’ as well as a ‘sign’ – and groups are perpetually linked by cycles of reciprocity, was a fresh way of looking at systems of kinship.
(B)The Savage Mind(1962)
In The Savage Mind(1962) Lévi-Strauss’s central point was that the thoughts of the ‘primitive people’ were in no way inferior to those of the ‘Westerners’.
Between 1964 and 1971 were published Lévi-Strauss’s magnum opus, the four volume Mythologiques series . 1.Volume 1 – The Raw and the Cooked analyses myths from South America, particularly central and eastern Brazil. 2.The second volume, From Honey to Ashes is also concerned with South America, but deals with myths both from the south and the north. 3.The Origin of Table Manners begins with a myth that is South American, but from further north. 4.The final volume, The Naked Man, is entirely North American The interesting fact Lévi-Strauss finds is that the “most apparent similarities between myths are found between the regions of the New World that are geographically most distant.” Beginning with the mythology of central Brazil and then moving out to other geographical areas, and then returning to Brazil, Lévi-Strauss realises that “depending upon the case, the myths of neighbouring peoples coincide, partially overlap, answer, or contradict one another.” Thus, the analysis of each myth ‘implied that of others’. Taken as the centre, the myth ‘radiates variants around it.’ It spreads from one neighbour to another in ‘several directions at once.’
(C) Social Structure.
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 – 2009) is widely regarded as the father of structural anthropology. In the 1940s, he proposed that the proper focus of anthropological investigations is on the underlying patterns of human thought that produce the cultural categories that organize worldviews hitherto studied . He believed these processes did not determine culture, but instead, operated within culture. His work was heavily influenced by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss as well as the Prague School of structural linguistics which include Roman Jakobson , and Nikolai Troubetzkoy . From the latter, he derived the concept of binary contrasts, later referred to in his work as binary oppositions, which became fundamental in his theory.
In 1972, his book Structuralism and Ecology detailed the tenets of what would become structural anthropology. In it, he proposed that culture, like language, is composed of hidden rules that govern the behavior of its practitioners. What makes cultures unique and different from one another are the hidden rules participants understand but are unable to articulate; thus, the goal of structural anthropology is to identify these rules. Levi-Strauss proposed a methodological means of discovering these rules—through the identification of binary oppositions. The structuralist paradigm in anthropology suggests that the structure of human thought processes is the same in all cultures, and that these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions (Winthrop 1991). Some of these oppositions include hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, and raw-cooked. Structuralists argue that binary oppositions are reflected in various cultural institutions (Lett 1987:80). Anthropologists may discover underlying thought processes by examining such things as kinship, myth, and language. It is proposed, then, that a hidden reality exists beneath all cultural expressions. Structuralists aim to understand the underlying meaning involved in human thought as expressed in cultural expressions.
Further, the theoretical approach offered by structuralism emphasizes that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to the entire system (Rubel and Rosman 1996:1263). This notion, that the whole is greater than the parts, draws upon the Gestalt school of psychology. Essentially, elements of culture are not explanatory in and of themselves, but rather form part of a meaningful system. As an analytical model, structuralism assumes the universality of human thought processes in an effort to explain the “deep structure” or underlying meaning existing in cultural phenomena. “…[S]tructuralism is a set of principles for studying the mental superstructure” (Harris 1979:166, from Lett 1987:101).
Totemic Study
In The Totemism (1962), an example of the application of the structural method, he tried to lay the ‘problem of totemism to rest’ once and forever, arguing that totems were modes of classification; they were ‘good to think’ rather than ‘good to eat’. The binary opposition of nature and culture that evolved in his kinship study was further developed here.
Lévi-Strauss says that totemism covers relations between things falling in two series – one natural (animals, plants) and the other cultural (persons, clans). Further, ‘The natural series comprises on the one hand categories, on the other particulars; the cultural series comprises groups and persons.’
| NATURE | Category | Particular |
| CULTURE | Group | Person |
These two sets of terms can be associated in four ways, as is the case with the example given earlier.
1 2 3 4
NATURE Category Category Particular Particular
CULTURE Group Person Person Group
Totemism thus establishes a relationship between human beings (culture) and nature, and, as shown above, this relationship can be divided into four types, and we can find empirical examples of each one of them. Lévi-Strauss says that the example of the first is the Australian totemism (‘sex totems’ and ‘social totems’) that postulates a relationship between a natural category and a cultural group. The example of the second is the ‘individual’ totemism of the North American Indians. Among them, an individual reconciles himself with a natural category. For an example of the third combination, Lévi-Strauss takes the case of the Mota (in the Banks Islands) where a child is thought to be the ‘incarnation of an animal or plant found or eaten by the mother when she first became aware that she was pregnant’ , or what has come to be known as ‘incarnational totemism’. The fourth combination (group-particular combination) may be exemplified with cases from tribes of Polynesia and Africa, where certain animals (such as garden lisards in New Zealand, sacred crocodiles and lions and leopards in Africa) are protected and venerated (the sacred animal totemism).
The four combinations are equivalent. It is because they result from the same operation (i.e., the permutation of the elements that comprise a phenomenon). But, in the anthropological literature that Lévi-Strauss examines, it is only the first two that have been included in the domain of totemism, while the other two have only been related to totemism in an indirect way. Some authors have not considered the last two variants of totemism in their discussion. Here, Lévi-Strauss observes that the ‘problem of totemism’ (or what is called the ‘totemic illusion’) results from the ‘distortion of a semantic field to which belong phenomena of the same type.’ The outcome of this is that certain aspects (or the first and second types of totemic phenomena) have been singled out at the expense of others (the third and fourth types), which gives an impression of ‘originality’ and ‘strangeness’ that they do not in reality possess.
Lévi-Strauss has given that totemism is able to adapt to changes. To illustrate this, a hypothetical example may be taken up. Suppose a society has three clans totemically associated respectively with bear (land), eagle (sky), and turtle (water). Because of demographic changes, the bear clan becomes extinct, but the turtle clan enlarges, and in course of time, splits into two parts. The society faces this change in two ways. First, the same totemic association might be preserved in a damaged form so that the only classificatory/symbolic correlation is now between sky (eagle) and water (turtle). Second, a new correlation may be generated by using the defining characteristics of the species turtle to distinguish between two clans still identified with it. This becomes the basis for the formation of a new symbolic opposition. If, for example, colour is used, yellow and grey turtles may become totemic associations. Yellow and grey may be regarded as expressive of the basic distinction between day and night perhaps. A second system of the same formal type as the first is easily formed through the process of differentiation and opposition . As it is clear, the opposition between sky (eagle) and water (turtle) is split and a new opposition is created by the contrast of day (yellow) and night (grey). In this way, the problems caused by demographic imbalances (i.e., extinction of a clan or the enlargement of the other) are structurally resolved, and the system continues.
(D) Mythologies
Myths and folktales are the oral literature of nonliterate societies. Levi-Strauss used structuralism to analyze the these cultural creations of such societies, including their myths. Structuralism rests on Levi Strauss’s belief that human minds have certain characteristics which originate in features of the Homo sapiens brain. These common mental structures lead people everywhere to think similarly regardless of their society or cultural background. The universal mental characteristics are are evolved for the need to classify: to impose order on aspects of nature , on peoples relation to nature , and on relations between people.
According to Levi-Strauss, a universal aspect of classification is opposition, or contrast i.e using binary opposition. Good and evil, white and black, old and young, high and low are oppositions , that, according to Levi-Strauss, reflect the human need to convert differences of degree into differences of kind.
Levi-Strauss has applied his assumptions about classification and binary opposition to myths and folk tales. He has shown that these narratives(myths) have simple building blocks – elementary structures of “mythemes”. Examining the myths of different cultures, Levi-Strauss shows that one tale can be converted into another through a series of simple operations, for example, by doing the following:
1. Converting positive element of a myth into its negative
2. Reversing the order of the elements
3. Replacing a male hero with a female hero
4. Preserving or repeating certain key element
Through such operations, two apparently dissimilar myths can be shown to be variations on a common structure, that is, to be transformations of each other. One example is Levi-Strauss’s analysis of ” Cinderella(1967) , a widespread tale who elements vary between neighboring cultures. Through reversals , oppositions and negotiations , as the tale is told, retold, diffused and incorporated within the traditions of successive societies, “Cinderella” becomes “Ash Boy”, after a series of contrasts related to the change in hero’s gender.
Structuralism has – been widely applied to the myths of nonindustrial cultures, but we can also use it to analyze narratives in our own society.