totality, analogous to a biological organism, in which indi-
viduals are linked together in a network of person-to-person
relationships. In the positivist tradition, Spencer assumed
that there are discoverable general laws which apply to all
such social organisms.
“Structural Functionalism.” Structuralism of the sort
associated with the name of Lévi-Strauss, which is central for
the present discussion, developed within the general field of
sociocultural anthropology in dialectical opposition to the
“structural functionalism” postulated by Spencer, which in
the early 1950s had become especially associated with the
name of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. At this period British social
anthropologists used the expression structural analysis (and
sometimes the term structuralism itself) to refer to the work
of Radcliffe-Brown and his close associates rather than to
that of Lévi-Strauss. Although this usage was dropped after
1960, the contrast is illuminating.
In Radcliffe-Brown’s vocabulary social structure denoted
a set of key, enduring relationships, perpetuated from gener-
ation to generation, which express the bonds of jural obliga-
tion that link together the individual members of a particular
society. He maintained that these relationships are empirical
phenomena which can be directly observed in the mutual in-
teractions of individual members of the system. Social struc-
ture, in this sense, was considered to typify the morphology
of the society in question, much as the bony structure of a
vertebrate animal provides the principal basis for fitting a
particular species into the Linnaean taxonomy of all species.
Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown believed that a taxonomy of all
human societies could be constructed from a comparison of
their social structures, societies with similar social structures
being placed in the same taxonomic class.
Lévi-Strauss’s formulation. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s radi-
cally different view of social structure was first formulated in
1945, but the nature of that difference was not immediately
apparent. His 1953 conference paper entitled “Social Struc-
ture” was an attack on Radcliffe-Brown’s position, but the
printed discussion (Tax, 1953, pp. 108–118) suggests that
none of the American and British anthropologists who heard
it understood what was at issue. This is not surprising, since
parts of the argument are notably obscure and oracular.
This has remained a characteristic, and perhaps essen-
tial, feature of Lévi-Strauss’s numerous pronouncements
about the nature of structuralism. There are many possible
interpretations of his thesis, so that even his closest disciples
are often at loggerheads with one another.
Perhaps the key point is that, whereas Radcliffe-Brown’s
social structure was “out there” in the world, supposedly ac-
cessible to direct observation, Lévi-Strauss’s social structure
was, as he put it, “a model in the human mind.” The general
idea was borrowed from Roman Jakobson’s theory of distinc-
tive features (Lévi-Strauss, 1945).
According to Jakobson, our human capacity to encode
and decode sound patterns into meaningful speech forms de-
pends on a capacity (which is innate in all human beings)
to discriminate sounds as bundles of binary oppositions. For
example, in English we discriminate the phoneme /p/ in pin
from the phoneme /b/ in bin because, in the matrix of dis-
tinctive features representing these sounds, /p/ is unvoiced
and /b/ is voiced, as shown in table 1.Altogether there are about thirty such distinctive fea-
tures, though any particular language makes use of only
about half that number. The details need not concern us,
though it is important to note that the speakers and auditors
who encode and decode sound patterns in this way are quite
unconscious of what they are doing or how they are doing
it.Lévi-Strauss initially adapted this theory to his anthro-
pological purposes by claiming that many of the nonverbal
elements of human culture—such as cosmologies, art styles,
architectural design, the layout of villages, and rules concern-
ing descent, residence, and the regulation of marriage, all of
which were prominently featured in most ethnographic
monographs published during the first half of the twentieth
century—can similarly be broken down into sets of cultural
distinctive features which are recognizable as binary opposi-
tions. As in the case of phonology, it is the matrix combina-
tion of sets of such distinctive features which determines the
characteristics of a cultural feature in any particular ethno-
graphic
setting.In effect, Lévi-Strauss was maintaining that when an-
thropologists engage in cross-cultural comparison, it is not
the contrast in manifestly observable social relationships that
is of interest (as was maintained by Radcliffe-Brown), but
rather the contrast of patterns of “relations between rela-
tions” which can be discovered by analysis yet are uncon-
scious phenomena so far as the human actors are concerned.
The theory seems to presuppose that at a very rudimentary
level the variant possibilities of human culture are innate, or
at any rate that human beings are innately predisposed to
build up cultural constructs out of paired oppositions of a
very simplistic kind, such as animate/inanimate, human/
nonhuman, male/female, above/below, we/they, and sym-
metrical/asymmetrical.There are other versions of modern structuralism, such
as those of A. J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov, which simi-
larly seem to require that the “sociologic” of the human mind
contain a wide variety of innate (i.e., species-wide) binary op-
positions of this sort, though there is a notable lack of con-
sensus as to what they might be (see Hawkes, 1977, pp. 88,
95–96). Many critics would regard any such proposition as
entirely implausible, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Shorn of its highly sophisticated elaborations, Greimas’s ver-
sion of distinctive-feature (sémique) theory requires only that
the brain should have an innate propensity to make two asso-
ciated types of discrimination, such that any entity held
within the field of perception will always be associated withSTRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION] 8749