insights which are thoroughly convincing. The analogy with
psychoanalytic procedures is very close.
But this immediately raises doubts about validity. In
psychoanalysis the fact that a particular interpretation of
dream material is acceptable to the dreamer does not mean
that the interpretation has any truth outside the context of
the immediate psychoanalytic session. Even the most cele-
brated examples of structuralist interpretation of myth are
open to similar objections; they may be convincing, but they
cannot be shown to be true in any objective sense. A hard-
nosed empiricist can always find good grounds for rejecting
the argument lock, stock, and barrel.
Part of this skepticism arises because of the form in
which Lévi-Strauss has cast his argument. His enduring an-
thropological purpose was to engage in cross-cultural com-
parison on a very large scale. His book Les structures élé-
mentaires de la parenté (1949) is concerned with most of the
recorded kin-term systems of East Asia and Oceania, while
his Mythologiques (1962–1971) ranges all over the Americas
and even beyond. He therefore needed to assume that the
“mind” in which his transformational structuralist “model”
is located is a human universal, and it is precisely this which
the skeptics find unacceptable. It is one thing to suppose that
we are genetically endowed with the capacity to encode
speech sounds, but it is quite another to claim that, at some
abstract level, the elementary structures of total cultural sys-
tems are innate.
If, however, we take a more modest view of what struc-
turalist analysis might reveal, many of these difficulties disap-
pear. It is part of Lévi-Strauss’s thesis that different manifest
features of the same cultural system may be metaphorical
transformations of the same internalized unconscious
“model in the mind.” For a proposition of this sort to make
sense, it is not necessary for the mind in question to be an
innate human universal. If the territorial scope of the gener-
alization is restricted, it will suffice if the postulated uncon-
scious model is located in the multiple individual minds of
the members of a single society. It seems perfectly plausible
that a set of individuals who have all been reared in the same
cultural milieu might have the capacity to generate identical
or very similar unconscious models in the mind in the way
that the theory requires. But the innate components of such
models could be very limited indeed.
My personal view is that structuralist method is ill
adapted to cross-cultural comparison on a grand scale. It be-
comes illuminating for an anthropologist only when it is able
to show that contrasted patterns in very different aspects of
the same cultural system are logically consistent transforma-
tions/transpositions of the same abstract structure of ideas.
Christine Hugh-Jones’s From the Milk River (1979) provides
an excellent example of an anthropological monograph
which adapts Lévi-Straussian theory in this way. It provides
a deep structuralist analysis of a single cultural system as op-
posed to a grand-scale rampage right across the map.
Lévi-Strauss’s conservatism. The reader of this article
should appreciate that, although most of the key doctrines
of modern structuralism are to be found in prototypical form
in the writings of Lévi-Strauss, many of his followers and im-
itators, especially those who have adapted the theory for pur-
poses of literary criticism and the analysis of religious texts,
have deviated from Lévi-Straussian orthodoxy on important
issues.
Lévi-Strauss is a very conservative anthropologist. Un-
like most of his contemporaries, he draws a sharp distinction
between “primitive” and “modern” societies. He does not say
that “primitive” societies are better or worse than “modern”
societies, but he does assert that they are fundamentally dif-
ferent in kind, primarily in three binary dimensions. Primi-
tive societies are nonliterate, nonindustrial, and “cold.” They
are like machines (e.g., clocks) “which use the energy with
which they are supplied at the outset and which, in theory,
could go on operating indefinitely... if they were not sub-
ject to friction and heating;... they appear to us as static
societies with no history.” On the other hand, modern socie-
ties are literate, industrial, and “hot.” They are like thermo-
dynamic machines, “they interiorize history, as it were, and
turn it into the motive power of their development” (Lévi-
Strauss, 1961, chap. 3).
Now Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is, as we have seen,
heavily indebted to the linguistic theories of Saussure, who
drew a sharp distinction between diachronic linguistics,
which studies the changes of speech forms over time, and
synchronic linguistics, which is concerned with structuralist
issues such as the relation between thought and organized
sound, and the contrast between syntagmatic and associative
relations discussed above. In imitation of this dichotomy,
Lévi-Strauss has insisted that his own kind of structuralist
analysis is appropriate only for the synchronic study of cul-
tural phenomena. He assumes that the cultural systems of
“primitive” societies are sufficiently static to be studied as
total synchronic systems in this way. By contrast, he assumes
that the value attached to diachronic historical change in
modern society implies that the cultural data of modern soci-
ety fall outside the scope of structuralist analysis.
Lévi-Strauss’s successors. Here, as elsewhere, Lévi-
Strauss’s doctrinal pronouncements, as well as his practical
structuralist experiments, are elusive and inconsistent. With
rare exceptions, he himself has confined his use of structural-
ist analysis to ethnographic data of the classic anthropologi-
cal sort, but his imitators have not accepted this self-imposed
restriction.
The first general handbook of structuralist method was
Roland Barthes’s Elements of Semiology (1964). In this book
and in all his subsequent contributions to structuralist/
semiotic analysis, Barthes concerned himself with materials
drawn from contemporary Western culture and recent Euro-
pean literature.
In recent years structuralism, considered as a special
style of analysis, has had a greater influence on literary criti-STRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION] 8751