Unit 1: Structuralism by Claude Levi Strauss
Unit 1: Structuralism by Claude Levi Strauss
Unit 1: Structuralism by Claude Levi Strauss
• Social structure basically observes and analyses the relationships between social persons,
structuralism analyses the relationships between concepts or the names that cultures give to
concepts
• Structuralism operates at a much higher level of abstraction than does the concept of social
structure
• Social structure as in the sociology of Durkheim and his follower A.R. Radcliffe-Brown refers to
behavior and processes of social relationships, structuralism refers to the logical structures of
the human mind. Since the mind is common to all humans, structural analysis is ideally context
free. Levi-Strauss thus said that the structural analysis of any myth is completely free of the
context of the culture in which it is found
• This is quite different from structural- functional analysis that is specifically contextualized to the
society and culture of which the data is being analyzed.
Claude Levi-Strauss
• Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) is often described as the ‘last French intellectual giant’, the
‘founder of structuralism in anthropology’, and the ‘father of modern anthropology’. Born on 28
November 1908 in Belgium, he was one of the greatest social anthropologists of the twentieth
century, ruling the intellectual circles from the 1950s to the 1980s, after which the popularity of
his method (known as structuralism) depressed with new approaches and paradigms taking its
place, but he never went to the backseat. Even when structuralism did not have many admirers,
it was taught in courses of sociology and anthropology and 30 the author whose work was
singularly attended to was none other than Lévi-Strauss.
• Each year he was read by scholars from anthropology and the other disciplines with new insights
and renewed interest, since he was one of the few anthropologists whose popularity spread
beyond the confines of social anthropology. He was (and is) read avidly in literature. Although he
did not do, at one time, it was thought that every social fact, and every product of human
activity and mind, of any society, simple or complex, could be analysed following the method
that Lévi-Strauss had proposed and defended.
• Totemism (1962)
• Claude Lévi-Strauss’s academic career began to take off as Europe spiraled into World War II and
he was fortunate to escape France for the U.S., thanks to a teaching post at the New School for
Research in 1941. While in New York, he joined a community of French intellectuals who
successfully found refuge in the U.S. amidst the fall of their home country and the rising tide of
anti-Semitism in Europe.
• Lévi-Strauss remained in the U.S. until 1948, joining a community of fellow Jewish scholars and
artists escaping persecution that included linguist Roman Jakobson and Surrealist painter André
Breton. Lévi-Strauss helped found the École Libre des Hautes Études (French School for Free
Studies) with fellow refugees, and then served as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in
Washington, DC.
• Lévi-Strauss formulated his famous concept of structural anthropology during his time in the U.S.
Indeed, this theory is unusual in anthropology in that it is inextricably linked to the writing and
thinking of one scholar. Structuralism offered a new and distinctive way to approach the study of
culture and built on the scholarly and methodological approaches of cultural anthropology and
structural linguistics.
• Lévi-Strauss held that the human brain was wired to organize the world in terms of key
structures of organization, which enabled people to order and interpret experience. Since these
structures were universal, all cultural systems were inherently logical. They simply used different
systems of understanding to explain the world around them, resulting in the stunning diversity
of myths, beliefs, and practices. The anthropologist’s task, according to Lévi-Strauss, was to
explore and explain the logic within a particular cultural system
• Structuralism used the analysis of cultural practices and beliefs, as well as the fundamental
structures of language and linguistic classification, to identify the universal building blocks of
human thought and culture. It offered a fundamentally unifying, egalitarian interpretation of
people across the world and from all cultural backgrounds. At our core, Lévi-Strauss argued, all
people use the same basic categories and systems of organization to make sense of the human
experience.
• Lévi-Strauss' concept of structural anthropology aimed to unify — at the level of thought and
interpretation – the experiences of cultural groups living in highly variable contexts and systems,
from the indigenous community he studied in Brazil to the French intellectuals of World War II-
era New York. The egalitarian principles of structuralism were an important intervention in that
they recognized all people as fundamentally equal, regardless of culture, ethnicity, or other
socially constructed categories.
His theory
• He was influenced by Hegel from whom he borrowed his dialectical process of Structuralism
understanding and explanation that we see so clearly in his analysis of myth and stories. Thus to
understand a cultural element like a myth it should be broken down into its constituent parts
and then these need to be arranged into opposed binaries.
Unit 2: Parsons
Pattern Variables
1. All social relations will fit into the following categories, which can be used as a framework for
comparing different societies:
2. Statuses, which can be achieved, as through work or education, or ascribed, that is,
assigned.
3. Roles, which may be specific, like that of a teacher, or diffuse, like that of a father.
2. Parsons tried to show that all social groups, from kinship groups to complex societies, have four
“functional requisites” if they are to remain stable. That is, they need systematic ways of
meeting four basic needs: to achieve goals, adjust to the environment, integrate the various
parts of society and deal with deviations from accepted standards. But Parsons was no
mechanist. He believed that societies sought to realize values, and that their values (the
achievement motive in the American system, for example) justified all other activities. Values,
for Parsons, were part of the cultural system; roles, of the social system; motivations, of the
personality system, and biological functions, of the organismic system. All four systems, he
believed, were under the direction of “cybernetic controls” lodged in the value system.
Parson’s functionalism is known for the functional imperatives which are the essential conditions
required for the enduring existence of a system. Parsons says that all action systems places 4 major
problems or they have 4 major needs.
1. Adaptation- problem of securing resources form the society’s external environment and
distributing them throughout the system. Each society needs certain institutions that performs
the function of adaption through the environment which is an… Adaptation provides the means
or the instrument aspect to achieve goals. In the context of society economic institutions
performs this function.
2. Goal Attainment- This function is concerned with the needs of the system to mobilize its
resources to attain the goals and to establish priorities among them. It mobilizes motivations of
the actors and organizes their efforts. In general system of action personality performs this
function while in case of society political institutions do it because power is essential for
implementation and decision making. Goal Attainment is concerned with ends and since goals
and delineated in reln with the external environment it is like adaptation and external function.
3. Integration- It is the heart of the core functional imperatives. It means the need to coordinate,
adjust and regulate reln among various actors so the system continues as an ongoing entity.
According to the general theory of action, social systems perform these functions wherein the
societies legal institutions and court does it. Integration is concerned with ends and is therefore
an internal aspect of the system.
4. Latency (Tension management, Pattern Maintenance) - Its function pertains to issue of providing
knowledge and info to the system. In general theory of action culture does not act, it lays
hidden. It supplies the actors with knowledge and information to keep the value system intact
because culture exists behind the action it is called latent. One’s family, religion and education
carry it out. Latency gives means to achieve ends and it is internal to the system.