article. Those who wish to pursue the fundamentals further
could hardly do better than to consult the richly annotated
twenty-six page bibliography and reading guide appended to
Hawkes’s Structuralism and Semiology (cited below), though
since its publication there has been a further huge expansion
of the relevant literature.Barthes, Roland. Éléments de sémiologie. Paris, 1964. Translated by
Annette Lavers and Colin Smith as Elements of Semiology
(New York, 1964). A good guide to the fundamentals of
Saussure’s structuralism, though the terminology in the En-
glish version is very confusing.
Bartsch, Hans Werner, ed. Kerygma and Myth: A Theological De-
bate. 2 vols. Translated from German by Reginald H. Fuller.
New York, 1953–1962. A discussion of Rudolf Bultmann’s
views concerning mythology in the New Testament.
Bastide, Roger, ed. Sens et usages du terme structure dans les sciences
humaines et sociales. 2d ed. The Hague, 1972. A set of papers
offered at a colloquium held in Paris under the patronage of
UNESCO in January 1959. Émile Benveniste notes that the
term structuralism, which he puts between inverted commas
or in italics, is so recent that it is not included in a French
dictionary of linguistic terminology published in 1951.
Chabrol, Claude, and Louis Marin, with the collaboration of
Alain J. Cohen, Christian Mellon, and François Rastier. Le
récit évangélique. Paris, 1974. A collection of structuralist es-
says in the manner of A. J. Greimas that are concerned with
biblical materials, especially New Testament parables.
De George, Richard T., and Fernande M. De George, eds. The
Structuralists: From Marx to Lévi-Strauss. New York, 1972.
An anthology showing that a common structuralist theme
can be found in work by Marx, Freud, Saussure, Jakobson,
Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan. The
introduction offers a helpful overview.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pol-
lution and Taboo. London, 1966. Contains, as chapter 3, the
author’s well-known but badly flawed essay “The Abomina-
tions of Leviticus,” which has had considerable influence on
later discussions of biblical food taboos.
Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage (1909). Translated from
French by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Lon-
don, 1960. Van Gennep’s theory has been greatly extended
by later authors; the original is now of historical interest only.
Gordon, R. L., ed. Myth, Religion and Society. Cambridge, 1981.
Representative essays by an important group of French classi-
cal scholars (Marcel Detienne, Louis Gernet, Jean-Pierre
Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet) who employ structuralist
techniques of analysis. With an introduction by R. G. A.
Buxton and an extensive and valuable bibliography.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Sémantique structurale: Recherche de mét-
hode. Paris, 1966. An early work by an influential structural-
ist theorist. Not recommended for novices.
Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiology. New York, 1977.
The best short guide to the subject in the English language.
Excellent bibliography.
Hugh-Jones, Christine. From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal
Processes in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge, 1979. An eth-
nographic account of the Barasana Indians of the Vaupes re-
gion of Colombia that successfully combines the empirical
approach of traditional British social anthropology and an
idealist model-in-the-mind style derived from the structural-
ism of Lévi-Strauss. See also the companion volume by Ste-
phen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and
Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge, 1979).
Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language.
The Hague, 1956. Most of Jakobson’s huge oeuvre is some-
what inaccessible for the ordinary reader. This well-known
work contains a useful but incomplete account of phonologi-
cal distinctive-feature theory.
Leach, Edmund. Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. London, 1969.
All the essays in this collection apply a structuralist style of
analysis to biblical materials. The title essay, which dates
from 1961, was one of the earliest of this genre.
Leach, Edmund. Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which
Symbols Are Connected; An Introduction to the Use of Structur-
alist Analysis in Social Anthropology. Cambridge, 1976. The
long-winded full title of this widely read work is self-
explanatory. The range is narrower and rather different from
Hawkes’s comparable Structuralism and Semiology. Chapter
18 is entitled “The Logic of Sacrifice.”
Leach, Edmund, and D. Alan Aycock. Structuralist Interpretations
of Biblical Myth. Cambridge, 1983. Five essays by Leach and
two by Aycock on themes comparable to those in Leach’s
Genesis as Myth and Other Essays.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “L’analyse structurale en linguistique et en
anthropologie.” Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New
York (1945): 33–53. An English version, somewhat revised,
appears as chapter 2 of Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology,
translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf
(New York, 1963). The 1945 version was Lévi-Strauss’s first
thoroughgoing application of structuralist method. His debt
to Roman Jakobson is explicit. This essay introduced the cel-
ebrated, though much criticized, concept of “the atom of
kinship.”
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris,- The first magnum opus of anthropological structural-
ist literature. Its merits and limitations are still hotly debated
by professionals in the field.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Social Structure.” In Anthropology Today:
An Encyclopedic Inventory, edited by A. L. Kroeber,
pp. 524–553. Chicago, 1953. Now only of historical inter-
est. Connects with Tax’s An Appraisal of Anthropology Today.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, in collaboration with Georges Charbonnier.
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961). Translated
from French by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman.
London, 1969. A series of radio interviews given when Lévi-
Strauss was at the peak of his celebrity.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques. 4 vols. Paris, 1964–1971.
Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman as
Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 4 vols. (London,
1970–1981). An obsessional masterpiece reminiscent of the
unabridged edition of James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
Nonspecialists can find the important parts of the argument
published elsewhere in shorter form.
O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Asceticism and Eroticism in the My-
thology of Siva. London, 1973. A successful adaptation of
Lévi-Strauss’s method of myth analysis to a large body of
classical Indian textual material.
8756 STRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION]