Soon everybody was standing up and talking over the hedge.

Tom and Alaric were like

suspicious animals, eyeing each other doubtfully. Tom said that his thesis was nearly
finished anyway, and that he didn’t think he would be able to use any more material.
Alaric hurried to point out that his notes dealt almost entirely with religion and material
culture and would therefore be of very little use to anyone writing a thesis on social and
political structure.
(Barbara Pym, Less than Angels 1955)

Introduction

1
It was not by chance that the expression “social anthropology,” which had been around
for some fifty years, came into use in France. At the end of the 1940s, it was the
expression “cultural anthropology” that seemed likely to enter general use, as the words
“ethnology” and “ethnography,” which had been used since the nineteenth century for the
study of peoples who did not use writing, faded into the background. Therefore, when
presenting the work Sociologie et anthropologie [Sociology and Anthropology], which
brings together the principal studies by Marcel Mauss, Georges Gurvitch wanted to
republish texts “which converged on a subject increasingly known by the term cultural
anthropology.” And Gurvitch added: “… the title Sociologie et anthropologie came about
quite naturally, the term anthropology having been taken in the broad sense
of cultural anthropology commonly used in America” (1950, VIII). Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1950, XXIX), writing an “Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss” in the same
volume, refers to:
2
The eminent place of ethnography in the sciences of Man, which explains the role that it
already plays in certain countries, under the name of social and
cultural anthropology,[[1] My emphasis.[1]] as the inspiration for a new humanism,
originating in the fact that it presents in experimental and concrete form that unlimited
process of the objectification of the subject, which, for the individual, is difficult to
achieve.
3
In 1950, anthropology was therefore still both social and cultural for Lévi-Strauss. Ten
years later, however, it was a chair of social anthropology that was created at the Collège
de France, and it was there that Lévi-Strauss set up a laboratory of social, not cultural,
anthropology. What had happened during that decade? One may first suppose that the
choice of social as opposed to cultural is neither insignificant nor arbitrary: the
terminology indeed reflects a stance on the nature of the discipline of anthropology.
However, we must make a detour to grasp the significance of this: it is not in the ordinary
sense of the adjectives “cultural” or “social” in French that we will find the key to this
shift. If we keep to the normal usage of “cultural” and “social,” it is difficult to
understand why Lévi-Strauss, a social anthropologist, essentially devoted himself after
1960 to the structural analysis of myths and then works of art, cultural subjects par
excellence. The choice of the expression social anthropology is in fact explained by the
relation of Lévi-Strauss to the British and North American academic world. To be more
specific, Lévi-Strauss intervened in the polemic which set North American partisans
of cultural anthropology against British devotees of social anthropology for some years
from 1951 onwards. At the end of the 1950s, he was therefore following the British, or
rather the Franco-British, school of thought, which resulted in North American cultural
anthropology being marginalized for a long time in France. After describing the details of
the anthropological conflict between “culture” and “society,” we will see how Lévi-
Strauss came to grips with this in the 1950s.[2] I would like to thank Marshall Sahlins for his kind...[2]

Before the Confrontation

4
Until the beginning of the 1930s, the concept of culture was shared by both British and
North American anthropology.[3] The quotations from Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown...[3] On
either side of the Atlantic, Edward Tylor’s (1871) definition of culture as “that complex
whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities or habits acquired by man as a member of society” is at the origin of the
majority of essays attempting to define the discipline (Tylor 1871, 1). In 1930, Franz
Boas thus produced the article “Anthropology” in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, in
which he wrote:
5
Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the reactions of
the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the products of
human activities as determined by these habits.
(Boas 1930, 79)
6
For Malinowski, who shortly afterwards wrote the article “Culture” in the same
encyclopedia, culture is defined as:
7
This social heritage is the key concept of cultural anthropology. It is usually called
culture. … Culture comprises inherited artifacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits
and values.
(Malinowski 1931, 621)
8
These two definitions are extremely close as both Boas and Malinowski consider culture
to be everything that is acquired in material form or in the form of customs. The
functionalism of Malinowski and the historical particularism of Boas converge therefore
on at least one point: they both think that culture is the central concept of anthropology. It
is true that the scientific theory of culture proposed by Malinowski some ten years later
(1944) emphasizes the satisfaction of needs, as culture was then viewed as a means of
satisfying the biological needs of the human being. Culture then seems limited to a set of
techniques given purpose by organic human life. The idea nevertheless remains in this
theory (a theory which now seems considerably unsophisticated)—in keeping with the
preceding definition—that culture is not strictly speaking a biological fact, even if it aims
to fulfill food or sexual needs. The fact that culture is at the service of the body and its
demands does not imply that approaches and customs are themselves products of nature.
Malinowski’s theory is not therefore biological determinism: the cultural serves the
biological without being reduced to it.
9
In other words, if Malinowski is opposed to North American anthropology, the difference
of opinion lies not in the conception of culture, but rather in the way it is studied. This is
quite different from Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, for whom anthropology is seen as a natural
science of society. Culture is no longer the central aim of this study of Man; it is society
which will henceforth occupy this place in anthropological theory:
10
We do not observe a “culture” since that word denotes not any concrete reality but an
abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction. But direct observation does
reveal to us that these human beings are connected by a complex network of social
relations. I used the term “social structure” to denote this network of actually existing
relations. It is this that I regard as my business to study if I am working not as an
ethnologist or psychologist, but as a social anthropologist. I do not mean that the study of
social structure is the whole of social anthropology, but I do regard it as being in a very
important sense the most fundamental part of the science.
(Radcliffe-Brown 1940, 2)
11
From a viewpoint which owes much to Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown sees social structure
as a set of institutions whose function is to contribute to the maintenance of society
through time. This functionality differs from that of Malinowski, which was developed at
the same time: whereas the latter sees function as a response to individual and psycho-
biological needs, Radcliffe-Brown considers that institutions play a conservation role in
collective totality. As for the word “culture,” it is almost absent from the structural-
functional lexicon; or else when Radcliffe-Brown mentions “culture,” it is only to claim
its dependent nature in relation to the social structure: “Cultural tradition is a social
process of interaction of persons within a social structure.” Culture, he adds, as applied to
the:
12
… process of cultural tradition, is the process by which in a given social group or social
class, language, beliefs, ideas, aesthetic tastes, knowledge, skills and usages of many
kinds are handed on (“tradition” means “handing on”) from one person and from one
generation to another.
(Radcliffe-Brown 1949, 511)
13
Culture is therefore merely an effect of the social structure process, that is, of the groups
or subgroups which comprise it. From this point of view, it is, for example, the kinship
group which is the foundation of children’s education; it is the professional group which
organizes the teaching of work techniques; it is the moral community which produces
belief, and not the reverse.[4] We should note that E. Evans-Pritchard (even if in...[4]
14
In the 1930s, the development of social rather than cultural anthropology in the United
Kingdom did not seem to cause any notable reaction in the United States. While
followers of Malinowski favored detailed position papers, often based on Oceania,
advocates of structural functionalism aimed to find constants from case studies, with a
predilection for Africa. The emergence of a “new” functionalism did not go unnoticed in
the United States, but it was the conciliation route which prevailed. So, Kroeber, when he
wrote a passionate defense of Boas, who had been attacked from a functionalist point of
view by Agnès Hoernlé (1933) for his historicism, stated: “He was a functionalist, as his
main interest lay in structural interrelations, change, processes, before Radcliffe-Brown
or Malinowski had even written a line” (Kroeber 1935, 541). In other words, the English
school of anthropology would not have proposed anything original in relation to Boas:
for Kroeber, Hoernlé is attacking an imaginary Boas from lack of awareness or
understanding of his work, but there are few real differences between British social
anthropology and North American cultural anthropology.
15
Until the end of the 1940s, the school of thought known as “culturalist” and the
structural-functional group therefore develop in a parallel fashion, with few exchanges or
debates. Of course, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski taught in the United States during
the 1930s, but North American anthropology remained dominated by the followers of
Boas. This status quo was not to last beyond 1950.

The War of the Anthropologists

16
How can one be a social anthropologist, if one considers that anthropology is by
definition cultural? In other words, is a social anthropologist still an anthropologist? This
is the radical question which Murdock asked at the time of the publication of collective
works on kinship directed by Radcliffe-Brown and Darryl Forde (1950).
17
George Murdock is famous in the history of anthropology for having undertaken,
beginning in 1937, a vast compilation of cultural data entitled Human Relations Area
Files (HRAF), first available in 1949. This is a database, organized in files, that deals
with kinship, social organization, art, and techniques. But Murdock is also the author of
an article (1932) defining the science of culture, in which, taking up the conclusions of
Kroeber (1917, 177–78) and Stern (1929, 270), he rejects the idea that the human being is
distinguished from other animals exclusively by virtue of his social nature. Many higher
animals live in groups, as do certain insects: collective life is not therefore a specifically
human trait. For Murdock (1932, 213), Man is an intelligent animal who may
acquire customs, living in groups and possessing language. Many species have several of
these features, but only the human species has all four. Using a technical metaphor,
Murdock compares culture to the stability of a stool: if it only stands on two or three legs,
the object is unstable. For example, certain monkeys are capable of inventing things, but
they are incapable of passing on this knowledge; they immediately forget, because
monkeys cannot form customs. Only Man is therefore capable of raising himself to the
cultural level, to the “super-organic” (Kroeber), without falling. Only Man can innovate
and communicate his findings to his peers, who can adopt it in perpetuity.
18
One can therefore understand that reducing anthropology to the study of social
organization (as was done by Radcliffe-Brown and his students) was not acceptable to
Murdock. After several formal compliments (along the lines of: this collective volume
will be very useful to specialists in Africa; the professional skills of the authors are of a
very high order; and so on), the argument develops around seven polemical points which
can be summarized as follows:
19
Despite these merits, one nevertheless finds a certain number of limitations that
numerous professionals outside the United Kingdom find difficult to understand and
impossible to defend.
(Murdock 1951, 467)
20
Firstly, British social anthropologists are not interested in the whole range of cultural
phenomena, but concentrate exclusively on kinship and associated subjects, in particular,
marriage, property, and government. Technology, folklore, art, the education of children,
and even language are almost completely ignored.
21
Secondly, this research is geographically limited; it is all carried out in British colonial
areas. It is therefore research undertaken in Anglophone Africa.
22
Thirdly, only a small number of societies have been studied by “social” anthropologists.
Whereas, according to Murdock, two or three thousand “primitive societies” (sic) have
been identified throughout the history of anthropology, the British Radcliffe-Brown
school of thought limited themselves to some thirty cases. Ethnography produced outside
the United Kingdom is neglected, in particular, works published in French and German,
which shows a lack of interest in making comparisons.
23
Fourthly, as well as ignoring ethnography produced outside their country, British social
anthropologists are indifferent to external developments in theory; only British authors
are cited and discussed.
24
Fifthly, there is hardly any interest at all in history. Social structure is only studied at a
point in time, in order to see the functional relations. The question of the genesis of
institutions is not tackled, or is tackled very rarely.
25
Sixthly, processes of cultural change are neglected. Invention, cultural integration,
reinterpretation, selective elimination, integrated modifications, and drift are not included
in the field of investigation.
26
Finally, English social anthropology ignores psychology. Murdock remarks that this is all
the more surprising given that the approach of Malinowski, whose interest in the
psychology of the individual was notable, lies at the origin of numerous studies of the
relations between culture and personality in the United States.
27
Murdock pursues what resembles a prosecution case against Radcliffe-Brown. He
expresses gratitude to him for having created order in kinship studies, which Morgan and
Rivers had left in a sort of tangle. But with the accent on the synchronic structure of a
single society, the paths opened up by Tylor (comparison), Malinowski (anthropology
open to psychology), and Boas (historical method) are closed. The English scholar is
responsible for having locked anthropology, initially into research on universal laws
formulated from the study of a small number of societies which are not representative of
the whole of humanity, and then into an expression of these laws which does not specify
the concomitant behavior of variables. Moreover, Radcliffe-Brown’s theory does not
change; it has been repeated in identical form over many years. According to Murdock
(1951, 470), the reader will find the same old errors in the introduction to the volume on
kinship, “and a few new errors as well.” Radcliffe-Brown’s theory is therefore like an
immutable dogma (or one which only deteriorates) around which has formed a “school.”
28
How can we explain the peculiarities of this structural-functionalist school? Murdock
arrives at the astonishing conclusion that its supporters are not anthropologists. Indeed, if
one considers anthropologists to be scientists who take culture and its ramifications as the
subject of their study, then it appears that British social anthropologists do not use this
concept and only study a small part of what is collectively acquired. They do not study
change, education, or diffusion, phenomena which lead other anthropologists to take an
interest in history, geography, and psychology. To sum up, British social anthropologists
have nothing in common with cultural anthropologists other than the study of kinship and
of societies without writing. And Murdock deals the final blow with:
29
In their fundamental aims and theoretical orientation, they are more in line with
sociologists. Like other sociologists, they are primarily interested in social groups and the
structuring of interpersonal relations rather than in culture, in synchronic rather than
diachronic correlations. … Our interpretation is, of course, based on the fact that this
British school derives from the sociologist Durkheim, via Malinowski and Radcliffe-
Brown.
(Murdock 1951, 471–72)
30
With a certain irony, Murdock links the work of Radcliffe-Brown, not to that of the
eminent American sociologists of the 1950s, such as Merton and Parsons, but to the “best
sociologists of the 1920s, for example Sumner, Pareto and Thomas.” In other words, the
British anthropologists of 1951 are sociologists twenty years behind the times…
31
It is therefore a clear and definite rupture in the discipline of anthropology on either side
of the Atlantic which is proposed in this article. One may be surprised that the
discriminating criterion used by Murdock is not the participant observation method,
which now seems to us to be at the heart of the discipline of anthropology. In truth,
Murdock hardly ever practices it, and he is even one of the rare devotees of the
quantitative method in anthropology (applied to the HRAF), hence his frequent use of
statistical notions (“variable,” “correlation”). Researchers in the field are not
anthropologists if they are only interested in social solidarity; anthropologists may be
statisticians if they go on to make intercultural comparisons. The definition of the
discipline therefore centers on notions of culture and society.
32
Faced with the serious risk of a rift between social and cultural anthropologists, the
editors of the journal asked Raymond Firth to respond to Murdock in the same volume of
the magazine American Anthropologist. Firth succeeded Malinowski at the London
School of Economics in 1944. He was therefore in no sense a student of Radcliffe-
Brown, who was a professor at Oxford from 1937 to 1946. Besides, Firth is a specialist
not in Africa, but in the society of Tikopia, in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.
33
He therefore notes that Murdock makes exaggerated claims for the unity of British social
anthropology, which according to him does not constitute a “school:” there are great
differences between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.[5] Firth (1951, 480) remarks that the work of

Malinowski...[5] Firth nonetheless agrees that British Africanism is not sufficiently

comparative in the sense that it uses almost no data originating from other cultural areas,
in particular the Americas.
34
As far as the final reproach to British anthropologists is concerned, where they are
accused of being sociologists, there is nothing new in this: Malinowski, Firth himself,
Radcliffe-Brown, Gluckman, Evans-Pritchard, and Nadel demanded that there should be
a necessary rapprochement between anthropologists and sociologists at the theoretical
level. What distinguishes sociology from anthropology is not therefore conceptual
construction, but the ethnographic method:
35
The more general theory of the anthropologists, then, is hardly distinguishable in its
scope from that of the professed theoretical sociologist, though its different ethnographic
base gives it a different illustrative content and a different—sometimes sharper—focus.
In field techniques, their work is distinguished by a high degree of intensive first-hand
observation of social behavior.
(Firth 1951, 477)
36
Firth’s response is therefore that anthropology is a social science, closely related to
sociology, psychology, economics, politics, law, and history when it is problem-oriented.
On the other hand, it is only distantly related to biological anthropology, technology, or
archaeology. The ethnographic viewpoint gives the anthropologist in the field a more
precise picture of social relations, and, if one reads Firth correctly, this is perhaps the
only real particularity of social anthropology, if one compares it to the “wide
perspectives” characteristic of the sociological point of view.
37
How does Firth respond to the reproach made to the British anthropologists that they
neglected culture in favor of society? The two concepts indeed represent for Firth two
facets of human existence:
38
“Society” denotes the human component, people and the relations between them;
“culture” refers to the accumulated resources, material and immaterial, which people
have acquired, transmitted and modified by social learning. But the study of both must
include the study of social relations and values, by examining human behavior.
(Firth 1951, 483)
39
Firth claims that British anthropologists do not therefore feel divided from their
American colleagues even if the latter define their discipline in cultural terms. If some
British anthropologists refuse to use the notion of culture, this is to distance themselves
from the definition given by Malinowski, not from that which is current on the other side
of the Atlantic. But, reading the definition above, one can easily understand that
anthropology is social before it is cultural, since life in society is a condition of learning,
and of the transmission of material and immaterial resources. Even if Firth considers
culture to be a facet of human existence associated with learning, anthropology remains
fundamentally social. For Murdock, however, human sociality only constitutes one of the
carriers which convey culture, along with intelligence, custom, and language. In other
words, whereas for Firth culture is an aspect of social life, for Murdock it is an order of
facts which are superior (super-organic) to biological and social life.
40
From this perspective, Murdock’s line of argument is close to that of Ruth Benedict
(1931; 1934) and Ralph Linton[6] In 1936, Ralph Linton devoted a chapter of his work... [6] (1936; 1959
[1945]), for whom culture fashions social life. There are patterns of culture which give a
certain shape to relations between individuals in a community. Culture cannot therefore
simply be reduced to society; culture is a factor in the organization of social relations,
their permanence, and their transformation. From this point of view, anthropology is
therefore cultural before being social. It is the science of custom, that is, of all that is
learned, as opposed to biological heredity.
41
Less than a year after the publication of the articles by Murdock and Firth, Radcliffe-
Brown (1952) responded to Murdock in the same magazine. This text, “Historical Note
on British Social Anthropology,” a title which is itself a response to the reproach that the
English anthropologist neglected history, begins with a reference to Boas (1940, 633–34),
who said that anthropology had two aims: to reconstruct the history of peoples, societies,
or particular regions, and to discern the general laws of cultural development through
comparison. Radcliffe-Brown considers that social anthropology in the United Kingdom
has concentrated on this second objective, the first being reserved for “ethnology” as a
historical or museological science. As for ethnography, it is the study of peoples who do
not have writing. In 1906, Frazer was the first professor of social anthropology, which
was defined as the “sociology of primitive peoples.” Conversely, Westermarck is a
professor of sociology, but according to Radcliffe-Brown, his work falls within the field
of social anthropology.
42
With the passage of time, ethnography saw itself shift from a dependence on ethnology to
a dependence on social anthropology. Although the latter favored the comparative
method on a large scale, with no direct link to fieldwork, Malinowski and Radcliffe-
Brown established an organic link between theory and empirical enquiry. Ethnography
was therefore subject from then on, not to the collection of data aimed at the historical
reconstruction of the society studied, but to the principles of comparative study.
Ethnography was to concentrate, for example, on kinship or political organization in
order to establish a body of data to juxtapose with a set of elements of the same type from
the ethnography of another society. Purely descriptive at the outset, ethnography is
influenced by concepts of social anthropology.
43
So are British social anthropologists really sociologists with whom other anthropologists
no longer have anything in common because the former have no interest in technology,
folklore, art, the education of children, or language? The response of Radcliffe-Brown
is almost affirmative:
44
There is a danger of misunderstanding here. I do not suppose that Murdock intends to say
that British anthropologists in general do not deal with such subjects as technology, art
and folklore, and language. It is only that these studies are not included in that branch of
anthropology that is called social anthropology. The study of languages is carried out at
the School of Oriental and African Languages, as well as elsewhere. Folklore is dealt
with by the Folklore Society, which includes anthropologists in its membership.
Technology and art are studied in connection with ethnological museums. In other words,
the view that has been taken in England for fifty years is that social anthropology is only
one branch of anthropological studies.
(Radcliffe-Brown 1952, 277)
45
In other words, Radcliffe-Brown admits that social anthropologists are not interested in
the cultural practices mentioned above, but that they concentrate on the study of social
structure. And when one reads the arguments of Radcliffe-Brown, one has great difficulty
seeing what justifies their attachment to “anthropological studies,” which appear very
disparate. Should social anthropologists therefore abandon the term “anthropology?”
Radcliffe-Brown ultimately gives a purely historical and institutional justification for
keeping it. There are a great number of social anthropology departments in the United
Kingdom, and it has become impossible to change this name, even if Radcliffe-Brown
admits that it is awkward. Linking structural functionalism to anthropology is in the end
based on historical chance, not on the reasoned unity of a discipline.
46
The first stage of this polemic between North American and British anthropologists
therefore ends with the recognition, in theory, of a divergence between social and cultural
anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown does not contest Murdock’s statement, he simply points
out that people other than him are doing cultural anthropology in England. It therefore
seems that the only unity of the discipline rests on the use of a word imposed by the
history of academic institutions. While Murdock and Radcliffe-Brown are in complete
agreement on their divergence, Firth on the other hand proposes a compromise which
would include culture and society in the field of anthropology. However, this solution is
asymmetrical: culture is one aspect of social life; it is not the principal subject of
anthropological science.
47
After the publication of these three articles, the polemic spread on both sides of the
Atlantic. If one follows Murdock and Radcliffe-Brown, there is indeed a great risk that
anthropology will split into two disciplines: a sociology of peoples without writing on the
one hand, and a science of culture favoring the study of art, folklore, religion, and
language, on the other.[7] The short text from Barbara Pym placed as an epigraph... [7] This split did not,
however, take place in the 1950s for the reasons described below.

Anthropologists at Peace?

48
In June 1952, a symposium proposing an overview of anthropology (Anthropology
Today) was held in New York, under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and
presided over by A. L. Kroeber. This conference had been decided upon at the end of
1951, and was organized in sessions based on the discussion texts distributed to the
participants several weeks before the meeting. These documents touched on every aspect
of the discipline of anthropology (theories, classic methods, new technologies,
applications of anthropology, and so on) and its relations with the other sciences, both
natural and social (linguistics, biology, archaeology, and physical anthropology).
49
It is not these articles which concern us here,[8] These texts were brought together by Kroeber and

published...[8] but rather the debates organized at the time of this symposium, which were
transcribed and published by certain participants (Tax et al. [eds.] 1953). The only
session organized during the symposium itself had the theme of “Cultural
Anthropology/Social Anthropology.” It was therefore not based on any text distributed in
advance, but was obviously consequent to the articles by Murdock, Firth, and Radcliffe-
Brown published between 1951 and 1952. With forty-four participants, this is the session
which involved the greatest number of speakers in this conference. The Americans were
in the majority (there were thirty), but among the Europeans were: S. F. Nadel, Austrian
by origin, who was a student of Malinowski and a professor in Australia; Darryl Forde,
who was a student of Kroeber and Lowie, then a close collaborator of Radcliffe-Brown,
with whom he coordinated the collective volume on kinship which originally gave rise to
this Anglo-American polemic; and Lévi-Strauss, director of studies at the École pratique
des hautes études.[9] One may also note the presence in other sessions of...[9]
50
After discussing how to organize the subdivisions of the discipline, the discussion, led by
Sol Tax, arrived at the central issue: the pertinence of the distinction between social
anthropology and cultural anthropology, in the sense given to these expressions in the
United States and the United Kingdom.
51
Robert Lowie, a specialist on the Indians of the North American Plains (in particular the
Crow) and one of the oldest participants in the debate,[10] Lowie was born in Vienna in 1883,

Kroeber was born...[10] declared at the outset that “as culture is the whole of social heritage,
culture and society are associated (correlated) concepts,” and that ideally, social and
cultural anthropology should be united (should be one) (Tax et al. [eds.] 1953, 223).
Without in any way excluding the possibility of generalizing or the discovery of “laws”
(it is Lowie who puts this word in quotation marks, showing his doubt all the same), he
refuses to limit his research to this aim, and defines himself as an ethnographer
and cultural historian above all. When and where was the reindeer first domesticated?
That question is of much greater interest to Lowie, and of no interest to British
anthropology.[11] Lowie develops his point of view after the Wenner Gren...[11]
52
Benjamin Paul, a reader at Harvard, proposed clarifying the terms of the debate. The
adjective “cultural” has a metonymical meaning, like the word day in English which
denotes both a cycle of twenty-four hours and the part of the day during which the sun
shines. Anthropology is therefore cultural when it is set in opposition to physical
anthropology; and within cultural anthropology, part of the discipline is “social,” the
other part “cultural.” This latter orientation favors history, space, and time. In the United
States, declaring oneself a cultural anthropologist in reality consists in integrating the two
areas of the discipline, culture and society. The distinction between the two sections does
not therefore seem very relevant to the Americans. When the British say that they are
social anthropologists, they seem, on the contrary, to exclude culture from their study and
limit their research to a narrower field.
53
Murdock agreed with this statement and claimed the designation cultural anthropology
for the whole of the discipline. Social anthropology is limited to the study of
interpersonal relations. In the United Kingdom, distinguishing the social from the cultural
has had the detrimental effect of leaving the study of the latter lying fallow . If culture
and society continue to be studied equally, it will be possible to consider social structure
as a progressive system through time, and to compare these systems in terms of the way
they change and adapt. Hence, Murdock implicitly reproaches Radcliffe-Brown for
defining the discipline in a manner which does not lead to any understanding of social
transformation.
54
Lévi-Strauss interceded by proposing a fundamental distinction: Man may be considered
as an animal that makes tools or as a social animal. Cultural anthropology starts from the
study of material techniques and then moves to the study of social relations. Social
anthropology works in the opposite direction: it moves from social relations, to tools and
culture in the wider sense. It is only a difference of viewpoint, and there is no great
difference between social anthropology and cultural anthropology.
55
For the English side, Nadel and Forde attempted to minimize the difference of opinion.
The former pointed out that in England, Malinowski held a chair of social anthropology,
and that he continuously talked about culture, whereas a cultural anthropologist in the
United States may quite well talk about social structure all the time. Nadel concluded that
there is no difference between these two designations. As for Forde, he stressed the
arbitrary history of these words: Malinowski’s chair took the name of “Social
Anthropology” simply to distinguish it from that held by Seligman, who was professor of
“ethnography” and “ethnology” at the London School of Economics. For both Forde and
Nadel, social anthropology and cultural anthropology must make up a single discipline,
even if they agree with Lévi-Strauss when he makes a distinction between the two points
of view. Tax ended the debate by agreeing with Nadel:
56
I think the consensus here, with some exceptions, is that we ought to use the words
“cultural” and “social” anthropology interchangeably and forget about the question of
terminology and deal with the problems involved.
(Tax et al. [eds.] 1953, 225)
57
It seems, therefore, that we have reached a position of compromise based on minimizing
the significance of designations, which are considered more or less arbitrary. However,
we must immediately point out that Sol Tax, who moderated this debate, is a North
American anthropologist, but that he is in no way representative of “Boasian”
anthropology in the United States. Indeed, Sol Tax experienced the influence of
Radcliffe-Brown in Chicago where the latter taught in the 1930s (Eriksen and Nielsen
2001, 58); he is therefore no doubt inclined to find common ground between culturalists
and functionalists.
58
However, one should not be surprised that Kroeber (1953, 365–66), one of the fathers of
culturalism, was less accommodating when he announced the conclusions of the
symposium. Unlike Paul, he does not think that the difference between cultural and social
anthropology is based on the opposition between research into laws and the description of
particular facts situated in time and space. It is a problem of primacy or inclusion.
Radcliffe-Brown and the sociologist Talcott Parsons both think that culture is secondary
to society, that the first in some way derives from the second: culture seems to be an
extension of the social base. Kroeber, on the other hand, in line with Murdock and the
majority of American anthropologists, thinks that culture embraces society. One cannot
define society narrowly as a “social structure,” and at the same time broadly in a way that
includes language and symbolism. How could the vast cultural proliferation be the
product of a social structure? For Kroeber, society has no pre-eminence over culture, and
it is culture which includes society and not the reverse.
59
The debate continued in similar terms in the columns of the magazine American
Anthropologist in 1953. Meyer Fortes, whose text was written before its author was
acquainted with the articles by Murdock and Firth, defended the results of British social
anthropology in the field of kinship. But in a more general way, Fortes (1953, 21–22), in
that article, also developed the idea that if one views culture as a concept subsuming that
of social structure, as did Malinowski and Firth, one is led to give equal weight to
everything that is produced in a given society. The anthropologist cannot therefore locate
the most important institutions—kinship, political institutions, and the legal system—
from a functional point of view. Of course, ethnographic observations may be seen as
facts of custom, “standardized ways of acting, knowing, thinking, feeling, which are
compulsory and universally exploited within a group of people at a given moment.” Here
Fortes skillfully combines the definition of the social fact by Durkheim and that of
culture by Tylor, but he proposes above all analyzing ethnographic data other than as
cultural elements. According to Fortes, we must now concentrate on the social structure,
and see customs as the symbolization and expression of social relations. The social
structure is not, from this point of view, “part of culture, but the entire culture of a
people, handled within the framework of a specific theory.”
60
To read Fortes, one might think that he is defending a perspectivist position similar to
that of Lévi-Strauss. However, Fortes moves on to draw up a theory of the relations
between culture and society which leaves no doubt as to the nature of the primordial
authority:
61
I would suggest that a culture is a unity in so far as it is tied to a bounded social structure.
In this sense I would agree that the social structure is the foundation of the whole social
life of any continuing society. … The social structure of a group does not exist without
the customary norms and activities which work through it. We might safely conclude that
where structure persists there must be some persistence of corresponding custom and
where custom survives there must be some structural basis for this.
(Fortes 1953, 22–23)
62
Fortes nevertheless further qualifies this by considering that there are major factors of
autonomy in custom: “A house is not just its foundations and custom cannot simply be
reduced to a manifestation of social structure.” So the case of migrants like the Chinese
and Indians, or that of Black Americans (Fortes cites Herskovits), shows that it is
possible for religious and aesthetic customs to be retained in the face of radical changes
in social structure. Nevertheless, the metaphor of the “foundation” is significant: social
structure supports symbolism, language, and religion, which would not hold up without
it.
63
The response to Fortes came swiftly. In the same year (1953), Lowie published an article
in the same magazine, in which he gave his opinion on the relations between
ethnography, cultural anthropology, and social anthropology. Lowie recognized that the
British anthropologists were really ethnographers—the ethnographic method is what
anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic had in common (Lowie 1953, 527–28). They
were researchers who, in their best work, dealt with an “important subdivision of culture”
(social relations). Lowie even admits that it can be useful to take the social structure as
the starting point for the study of a people’s culture. But he rejects out of hand the
declaration by Fortes that the social structure should not be “part of culture, but the entire
culture of a people, handled within a specific framework.” On the contrary, writes Lowie,
“the social structure of a people is one aspect of their culture, in the sense of Tylor,” and
it is not because one can link certain craft activities with certain social groups, or certain
religious beliefs with certain social sectors that one can dispense with studying the
techniques themselves and the content of the beliefs (Lowie 1953, 531–32). The social
structure, conceived of as the determining force of culture, in fact leaves a very large
cultural residue unexplained. In other words, the social structure only explains a very
small part of the cultural whole.
64
Let us end this section with Fred Eggan, who gave the presidential address to the
American Anthropological Association in 1953. Like Sol Tax, Eggan was a Chicago-
based anthropologist[12] Eggan is a specialist in the Indians of North America....[12] who had followed
the teachings of Radcliffe-Brown. Eggan noted the existence of a “schism” between those
who claimed to follow ethnology, mainly Americans, and the new group of followers of
social anthropology, who were mainly British. The former are interested in culture, its
history, and its transformations (process), the latter are interested in social structure and
its functions. This is not just a difference in terminology, and cannot be brushed aside as
Nadel suggested: it has a foundation in reality. Eggan was trained in the Boasian school
of anthropology, particularly by Edward Sapir, before partly adopting functionalism
under the aegis of Radcliffe-Brown himself. Having therefore had a “foot in both camps
for twenty years” (1954, 743), Eggan offers to mark out common ground which will
satisfy both parties.
65
Of course, one may consider that the British have excellent field observation techniques
in certain limited areas, even if their theoretical approach is barren and lifeless compared
to the broad focus of studies in American anthropology. Eggan’s proposition, on the other
hand, consists of adopting the structural-functionalist approach by integrating it into the
American tradition of interest in cultural processes and history. The weaknesses of the
British are the strengths of American ethnology (that is, cultural anthropology): Eggan
therefore proposes a synthesis of the two approaches.
66
It is necessary to distinguish society from culture, as does Radcliffe-Brown. Social
structures (in particular, kinship, political organization, and the legal system) tend to
present a limited number of shapes, which enables classification and comparison. On the
other hand, cultural data correspond to patterns which one can discern in time and space,
even if they do not have the stability of social structures: here one encounters the problem
of cultural models formulated by Ruth Benedict (1934). Eggan therefore preserves the
theoretical framework of cultural areas, which is typical in American anthropology
(Kroeber 1939). Social forms and cultural models may vary independently, while having
as the locus the behavior of individuals in social groups.
67
It is in the comparative method that we must be able to find common ground according to
Eggan. This method, discredited by Boas for its speculative nature, was sidelined in the
United States in favor of the specific history of each culture. Conversely, functionalism
proposes finding universal laws which govern every human society. The first approach is
too specific, the second too general. Eggan (citing Merton 1949) therefore proposes
developing an intermediary comparative method between particularity and
generalization; the concept of cultural area which is current in the United States would be
an excellent tool, if it does not lapse into diffusionism, and this could be used outside the
continent of America with the aim of comparison, in both social structures and cultural
models.
68
Eggan’s text—which ends this cycle of polemical publications—in fact constitutes a
brilliant asymmetrical synthesis. American cultural anthropology is recognized in this as
superior in its ability to propose the total ethnography of a culture (without being limited
to the social structure), but it is inferior to social anthropology in the theoretical field. The
structural functionalist approach gives a new dimension to American ethnography, which
was too “flat” according to Eggan (1954, 746). The common ground therefore “leans”
toward the British side: the society/culture distinction, rejected by Murdock, Kroeber, and
Lowie, is well validated, even if Eggan integrates the concepts of cultural area, historical
process, and social change that the British have sidelined. One may therefore consider
that the British managed to enter the world of North American academia, even if
American hostility towards social anthropology only subsided definitively in the United
States at the beginning of the1980s (Watson 1984, 351–52).
69
We now need to examine the repercussions of this debate in France.

How French Anthropology Became “Social”

70
Lévi-Strauss took an active part in the 1952 symposium in New York, as we saw earlier.
He was at that time a devotee of a perspectivist solution in the debate between cultural
and social anthropology: the human being is Homo faber (likely to be studied by cultural
anthropology) and a social animal (which makes social anthropology possible). In 1954,
he returns to this question in a text published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization) (reproduced with slight modifications in Lévi-
Strauss 1958, 414–18).
71
After presenting the terms of the debate as proposed by Murdock, Firth, and the
participants in the symposium, Lévi-Strauss claimed that there is “no contradiction, not
even any conflict between the two perspectives” (1958, 415). Durkheim, who demands
that social facts should be considered as things, supported the cultural anthropology point
of view (as this stems from material culture), whereas Mauss, who holds things to be
social facts, adopted the typical social anthropology point of view.
72
One may be surprised that Lévi-Strauss considered Durkheim close to cultural
anthropology. Firstly, the latter never undertook any research into technology, and the
expression “as things” indicates that social facts are imposed on individuals as external
facts independent of their will, yet without being of a material nature. Secondly, Lévi-
Strauss reduces cultural anthropology to technological studies; the Boasian school of
thought, however, in no way limits the concept of culture to the manufacture and use of
tools. As for the convergence of Mauss and social anthropology, in its British version this
is equally doubtful. The variety of themes tackled by Mauss (sacrifice, magic, gift
exchange, the person, the techniques of the body, and so on) gives his work a range
which recalls the American conception of culture. We may add that the eclectic nature of
his work differs fundamentally from the striving for systematic scientificity displayed by
Radcliffe-Brown.
73
It therefore seems to us that the reverse is true: Durkheim is really at the origin of British
social anthropology (this origin is supported by Radcliffe-Brown), and Mauss, on the
contrary, has a certain affinity with the American school of anthropology. One just needs
to read The Gift to understand what Mauss owes to Boas, copiously cited in this text for
his work on the potlatch (1950 [1924], 152 sq.; 194 sq.). By wrong-footing the theoretical
genealogy claimed by Radcliffe-Brown, the reversal operated by Lévi-Strauss has the
effect of blurring the difference between social anthropology and cultural anthropology
even more. According to Lévi-Strauss, the first approaches the “whole man” from
his representations (which puts him in a close relationship with psychology and
sociology), the second from his productions, in particular his tools (which makes cultural
anthropology a close relation of geography, technology, and prehistory). But the main
thing is to recognize that for the author of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949),
both culture and society are governed by structures, whose paradigm is linguistic
structure. As language is both a cultural fact (as animals do not talk, this is one of the
markers of the nature/culture opposition) and a social fact (as speech establishes the link
between individuals), we may legitimately, in order to understand culture and society,
take inspiration from linguistics conceived as a disciplinary bridge between social
anthropology and cultural anthropology.
74
How can we understand, then, the final choice of Lévi-Strauss for the expression of social
anthropology? We should perhaps go back to the text of “Social Structure” (translated
and adapted in French under the title “La Notion de structure en ethnologie” 1958 [1952],
229–378), which was presented and discussed at the Wenner-Gren symposium, in order
to understand its ramifications. This famous text is a sort of manifesto of structuralism
where Lévi-Strauss calls “culture,” “any ethnographic whole which, from the
investigative point of view, presents significant differences, in comparison to others”
(1958 [1952], 352). This formulation no doubt comes from Saussurean linguistics, and
Lévi-Strauss had already noted this theoretical influence in 1945 (revisited in 1958
[1945], 43–69). This is far from the classic definitions of culture in the United States,
which raises a vehement protest from Margaret Mead: “I do not believe that we will get
anywhere if we try to find analogies for morphemes and phonemes in the rest of culture”
(Tax et al. [eds.] 1953, 296). Mead thinks that language is inseparable from culture, and
that these are therefore categories of cultural anthropology which enable one to think
language: linguistics cannot be the epistemological model of anthropology. Let us add
that in all these debates, Mead and Lévi-Strauss had several lively exchanges: for
example, regarding the existence of national cultures, Mead regrets the lack of
cooperation from the French in her project on this subject (Tax et al. [eds.] 1953, 138–
39); or on the subject of the use by Lévi-Strauss of the word “garbage” to designate non-
Western cultures, which the American anthropologist finds completely unacceptable (Tax
et al. [eds.] 1953, 351). In the United States, the propositions of Lévi-Strauss therefore
ran up against the resolute opposition of one of the principal figures of
culturalism.[13] Mead is cited with positive comments in Les Structures...[13]
75
On the other hand, Lévi-Strauss conceived of his theoretical propositions as a
continuance/extension of the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown, and his success
was therefore more notable in the United Kingdom than in the United States.[14] In 1953,

Talcott Parsons, visiting Paris, offered Lévi-Strauss...[14] The first major work by Lévi-Strauss is a
study of kinship, a subject favored by British social anthropology, as we have seen.[15] The

second edition of The Elementary Structures of...[15] Here his work is presented in the field of
“comparative sociology,” and he himself is presented as a “comparatist sociologist”
(1949, XI), just as Radcliffe-Brown before him. He also shares with Radcliffe-Brown the
idea that anthropology must become a science like the others, by distancing itself from
the humanist impressionism which certain American anthropologists hold to and
promote, such as Mead or Lowie, for example (Tax et al. [eds.] 1953, 152). The Lévi-
Strauss models are found in structural linguistics, but also in the theory of games and
cybernetics, and not at all in philology or the humanities in general. His conception of
anthropology as a science of the general properties of social life (1958 [1954], 404)
distances him from the historical particularism which left a lot of room for the study of
local circumstances and specifics.
76
At the end of the 1950s, the expression “social anthropology” therefore became
established, as can be seen in the report by Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the creation of a
chair of social anthropology (2008 a [1958]), and in his presentation of the candidature of
Lévi-Strauss for this same chair (2008 b [1959]). In the first text, the philosopher writes:
77
What we today call social anthropology—an expression in common use outside of
France, and now becoming more current in France—this is what sociology becomes
when it accepts that, like Man himself, the social has two poles or two faces: it is
significant, one can understand it from the inside, and at the same time personal invention
is generalized and diluted in it, it tends towards the process, it is, according to that
famous word, mediatized by things.
(Merleau-Ponty 2008 a [1958], 49)
78
Starting from Mauss, who had anticipated this “looser sociology,” Merleau-Ponty comes
to propose the creation of a chair entirely devoted to the study of social structures. In this
text can be found a résumé of the main theses of Lévi-Strauss, although he is never
named in it: there is no doubt that this chair, if it were to be created, would be destined
for the author of Structural Anthropology, a work which had just been published (1958).
Merleau-Ponty does nothing to disguise his intention, as he ends this text writing
explicitly “that this sketch of social anthropology” is also “someone’s abstract
description.” Once the chair was created, Merleau-Ponty presented the candidate,
beginning the introduction with:
79
Social anthropology, between sociology and ethnography, has recently gained its
autonomy. The works of M. Claude Lévi-Strauss are almost alone in France in following
this precise direction.
(Merleau-Ponty 2008 b [1959], 54)
80
At no time in either of these two texts does Merleau-Ponty mention the existence of
“cultural” rather than “social” anthropology. In the first document, the adjective “social”
is linked to the tradition of Durkheim, in which Merleau-Ponty explicitly locates the
creation of the chair. Mauss is presented as the “father” of this discipline, even though he
held a chair in “sociology.” As for the reference to general usage outside of France of the
expression “social anthropology,” it is incorrect, inasmuch as it is only in the United
Kingdom, as we saw earlier, that this wording dominates. In the second text, Merleau-
Ponty identifies Lévi-Strauss as the ideal candidate for this chair, and with reason, as it
was in fact created as a chair of structural anthropology.[16] Had it been defined more broadly, at

least four more...[16]

81
Once elected, Lévi-Strauss gave his inaugural speech; in it he briefly specified his
conception of the link between social anthropology and cultural anthropology (1973
[1960], 19). If we consider that anthropology is the study of the signs at the heart of
social life, how then should we consider “the tools, the techniques, the means of
production and consumption” (1973 [1960], 19)? Are these things signs? No, but they are
“impregnated with meaning.” To designate this part of social anthropology, close to
geography and technology, Lévi-Strauss proposes the expression “cultural anthropology.”
This therefore becomes a subdiscipline, as if culture was reduced to material culture.
82
Beginning from a perspectivist point of view in 1952, with no supremacy of the “social”
over the “cultural,” by 1960 Lévi-Strauss has come to favor an inclusivist approach, in
which culture is only one aspect of society. To the extent which social anthropology
studies every sign in society, its field of action includes the meaning attached to material
objects. This is not, however, a return to Durkheim or Radcliffe-Brown. These scholars
favored the study of forms of collective solidarity; Lévi-Strauss defines social
anthropology as a séméiologie.

Conclusion

83
To understand how social (and not cultural) anthropology became established in France,
we have had to take a long detour via the United States and the United Kingdom. The
determining player in this genealogy was Lévi-Strauss, of course, but it is only by taking
into account his relations with the British and North American scientific areas that one
can grasp the significance of the choice of “social” over “cultural.” Lévi-Strauss is seen
as a follower of Durkheim and Mauss in the 1950s, as he edited the volume Sociology
and Anthropology by Mauss (1950), which certainly went in his favor when he acceded
to the Collège de France in 1959. The reference to “social” allows him to manifest this
lineage from the French school of sociology, especially as he defined himself at the time
as a “comparatist sociologist.” But the choice of “social anthropology” is also explained
by the implication of Lévi-Strauss in the Anglo-American debate initiated by Murdock
and Firth. By choosing the social over the cultural, Lévi-Strauss distances himself from
North American anthropology, although he was trained in the American system. The very
broad definition of culture as custom, habit, or tradition, associated with a comprehensive
and aestheticized approach that is typical of the anthropology of Boas’ students (such as
Lowie, Benedict, or Mead), is the very antithesis of the “scientific” path he intended to
follow. Nothing is indeed more alien to structuralism than the psychological
anthropology of the school called “culture and personality,” and we have seen that Mead
had the greatest reservations, from 1952, with respect to the propositions of Lévi-Strauss:
the antipathy was mutual. On the other hand, Radcliffe-Brown’s propositions are
compatible in more than one way with the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss: it is a matter of
 discerning universal (or invariant) laws in the social organization (or the human spirit).
Anthropological science must disengage from any impressionism, from any subjectivity,
if it is to propose valid results. This is an aim common to both British structural
functionalism and French structuralism. This is how social anthropology came to triumph
in France, after it had become established in the United Kingdom.
84
Let us however avoid ethnocentricity. If the expression “social anthropology” is perhaps
dominant in the Francophone world, this is not the case in the Anglophone area. The
conception of anthropology as the study of culture, which thereby includes society
without being reduced to just that, remains widespread in the United States. By way of
example, neither Clifford Geertz (1973) nor Marshall Sahlins (1999) have ever
abandoned it. It enables today’s researchers to be attentive to human diversity rather than
to invariants, to favor the study of the (unforeseeable) event over that of structures, and to
avoid dogmatism by respecting the meaning that subjects give to their actions. That in no
way excludes the collective dimension from the field of cultural anthropology.
Significance, when understood at the level of words and actions, and not hypothetical
“structures” or “ontologies,”[17] In his research into a table of “ontologies” which...[17] always
develops in interpersonal relations, whether they are peaceful or contentious. If we
consider that anthropology aims above all else to understand cultural difference or
to interpret cultures (Geertz 1973), that is, the variety of meanings and symbols in
humanity, then the future of the discipline perhaps belongs to cultural anthropology.

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Notes

[1]My emphasis.

[2]I would like to thank Marshall Sahlins for his kind remarks on this text; the theories presented
in it and any errors are entirely my responsibility.

[3]The quotations from Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown on the concept of culture and
successive definitions of it from the nineteenth century are taken from the work by Kroeber and
Kluckhohn (ca. 1960 [1952]).

[4]We should note that E. Evans-Pritchard (even if in 1950 he criticized research into “laws” in
anthropology and thus opposed Radcliffe-Brown) is in agreement with the latter in defining his
discipline as social anthropology, “a branch of sociology which mainly studies primitive
societies” (Evans-Pritchard 1951, 11).

[5]Firth (1951, 480) remarks that the work of Malinowski is tainted by romanticism, whereas
that of Radcliffe-Brown is imbued with the classical aesthetic. The former has a taste for
irregularities and individual variation, the latter for systems ordered by laws.
[6]In 1936, Ralph Linton devoted a chapter of his work The Study of Man to the notion of
function, which allowed him to place himself in relation to the emerging British structural
functionalism, a scientific movement which he explicitly places in the tradition of the French
school of thought, that is, the school of Durkheim. While Linton intended using the expression
“social structure” in the limited sense of “forms governing individual interrelations,” the
functionalists, according to him, incorrectly extended the meaning of this concept to a broad and
undefined sector of “culture” that included economic and religious life (Linton 1936, 401). For
Linton, culture is “social heredity,” not “social structure” (ibid., 80). Culture is the condition of
possibility of the “social structure,” and not the reverse. He therefore claims (in 1945) that “the
structure of a society, that is its system of organization, is itself a matter of culture … Without
culture, there could be neither social systems of a human type nor the possibility of adapting it to
new members.” (Linton 1959 [1945], 24–25).

[7]The short text from Barbara Pym placed as an epigraph to this article demonstrates this
opposition in a most striking way. Barbara Pym, a famous English novelist from the beginning of
the 1950s, describes in her fourth novel (Less than Angels 1955) the romantic relations within a
little group of anthropologists revisiting or setting off into their “field.” The hedge separating
Alaric, a cultural anthropologist who is passionate about African masks (he wears them in his
own time, to the stupefaction of his English neighbors), from young Tom, a devotee of structural
functionalism, fascinated by the role of the maternal uncle in matrilineages, symbolizes in
literary fashion the animosity between the two persuasions. Barbara Pym, who was also editorial
secretary of the magazine Africa, well knew the mores of the anthropologists of her time…

[8]These texts were brought together by Kroeber and published under the title Anthropology
Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory in 1953.

[9]One may also note the presence in other sessions of the linguist André Martinet, who was then
in post at Columbia University; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who lived in New York; and Henri
Vallois, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

[10]Lowie was born in Vienna in 1883, Kroeber was born in 1876 in New York into a German-
speaking family. We should remember that several founding figures of American anthropology
(including Boas, born in Westphalia in 1858) therefore had their origins in the Germanic world.
One might therefore interpret this polemic between British and American anthropologists as an
opposition between a German tradition, successor to the historic sciences and to diffusionism,
and a positivist Franco-English tradition, continuing from Spencer and Durkheim.

[11]Lowie develops his point of view after the Wenner Gren symposium in an article published
as a sequel to the Murdock/Firth/Radcliffe-Brown debate in American Anthropologist (Lowie
1953).

[12]Eggan is a specialist in the Indians of North America. One may note that his work of 1937 is
explicitly located in the domain of social anthropology.

[13]Mead is cited with positive comments in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1967
[1949], 556, 559) and in texts previous to 1952 of the volume Anthropologie structurale (1958);
but the volume of the Pléiade, which contains seven works by Lévi-Strauss (2008) and the four
volumes of the Mythologiques, make no reference to this author. Margaret Mead almost
completely disappears from the theoretical horizon of Lévi-Strauss after 1952: to my knowledge,
the only exception is the article entitled “Reflections on the Atom of Kinship” (1973, 103–35), in
which Lévi-Strauss makes abundant use of a comparative work by Mead on kinship (1935) to
illustrate his point of view.

[14]In 1953, Talcott Parsons, visiting Paris, offered Lévi-Strauss a professorial post at Harvard,
but he turned it down. If I may be permitted to relate this anecdote, Lévi-Strauss declared that it
was “because of an American lady who wrote unkindly in a book that [he had] returned to
France because [he could not find] a post in the United States.” Kurt Lewin and Kroeber had also
unsuccessfully offered a post to Lévi-Strauss a little earlier (Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon
1988, 82).The fact remains that the retreat of Lévi-Strauss from the American academic world
undoubtedly damaged his influence on the other side of the Atlantic.

[15]The second edition of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1967) therefore includes a new
preface almost entirely devoted to the interpretation of the theses on Lévi-Strauss by Rodney
Needham (1962), who was an Oxford professor, introducer, and proponent of structuralism in the
United Kingdom. This interpretation is mistaken according to the author, but he remains grateful
to Needham for having made the Anglophone readership aware of his work. In 1969, it was in
 London (at Tavistock publishers), and not in the United States, that the English version of the
first book by Lévi-Strauss was published, with Needham contributing to the translation.

[16]Had it been defined more broadly, at least four more candidates could have presented
themselves for this chair: Georges Balandier, Roger Bastide, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Métraux.
They were all sociologists and ethnographers in the same way as the candidate who was selected,
and had published several major works by the date of the election to the Collège de France.

[17]In his research into a table of “ontologies” which would be universally valid, Philippe
Descola (2005) takes up the model of social anthropology as it was defined by Lévi-Strauss in
the 1950s.

Abstract

English
How did the expression “social anthropology” become pre-eminent in French academia? Why
was “cultural anthropology” not successful in France? The answer seems to lie in the lineage
leading from Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss through Mauss. However, this explanation takes scant
account of an important debate –in which Lévi-Strauss was involved– between British and
Americans about the nature of the anthropological discipline in the 1950s: Should anthropology
be cultural or social? Is social anthropology really a part of “anthropology”? Or is it simply
sociology? In France and the UK, supporters of social anthropology were victorious, even if
Lévi-Strauss departs paradoxically from sociology when he takes structural linguistics as a
model. In the United States, anthropology remained mainly “cultural”, that is to say, open to
psychology, archeology, geography, technology, history, aesthetics and the humanities in
general.