Agenda

1

• Agenda
• Schedule of Classes
• Claude Lévi-strauss and French Structuralism
• Language and Culture
• The Elementary Unit of Kinship
• Alliance Theory
• The Avunculate
• The Tsimshian Myth of Asdiwal
• Basic Principles
• Totemism
• Pierre Bourdeau The Berber House
• Critique

2
Schedule of Classes April 1 Structuralism April 3
Marxist Anthropology April 8 Symbolic
Anthropology April 10 Interpretative
Anthropology April 15th Post Modernism April
17th The Future of Anthropology (term paper
due) April 28th 8 am Final Exam
3
FRENCH STRUCTURALISM
Claude Lévi-Strauss
4

• CLAUDELÉVI-STRAUSS
• born Belgium 1908
• 1927-1932 studied law and philosophy at the
  University of Sorbonne in Paris.
• 1932-35 studied Sociology under Marcel Mauss

5
Brazil 1938

• 1935-9 taught at the University of Sao Paulo
• made several expeditions to Matto Grosso area in
  Western Brazil
• 1939 returned to Paris, but because he was Jewish
  unable to get work and escaped to New York City
  in 1942
• 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for
  Social Research. In New York

6

• 1947 returned to France presented Elementary
  Structures of Kinship as his doctoral theses at
  Sorbonne
• 1950 Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique
  des Hautes Etudes.
• 1959 82 assumed the Chair of Social Anthropology
  at the College de France.

7
LÉVI-STRAUSS MAJOR TEXTS 1949 The elementary
structures of kinship 1955 A world on the wane
(Tristes tropiques) 1958ff Structural
anthropology (collected essays) (I, II, III)
1962 The savage mind 1964 The raw and the
cooked 1966 From honey to ashes 1968 The origin
of table manners 1971 The naked man
1974 Totemism 1979 Myth and meaning 1982 The
way of the masks 1985 The view from afar
1987 Anthropology and myth (collected lectures,
1951-82) English titles shown, but arranged by
original dates of publication in French
Mythologiques, (logics of myth) IIV
8
Mythologiques
Steward Faron

• compare dozens of variant versions of the same
  basic narrative collected over a wide area e.g.
  the origin of the sexes the origin of initiation
• look for basic structures, typically expressed as
  oppositions upstream/downstream sky/earth
  dark/light
• relate particular oppositions to wider and
  universal ones (e.g. nature/culture)

SOUTH AMERICA PRE-COLONIAL SUBSISTENCESYSTEMS
9

• He proposed that the proper study for
  anthropologists is not how people categorize the
  world but the underlying patterns of human
  thought that produce those categories
• The segmentation and imposition of form on
  inherently formless phenomena (like space and
  time) reflect deeply held structure from our
  humanness.
• Conducted cross-cultural analysis of kinship,
  myths and religion in an attempt to understand
  the fundamental structure of human cognition
• L-S believes that the underlying logical
  processes that structure all human thought
  operate within different cultural contexts
• Consequently, cultural phenomena are not
  identical but they are the products of an
  underlying universal pattern of thought.
• His anthropology centres on the search to uncover
  this pattern.

10

• for Lévi-Strauss anthropology is not so much a
  means to investigate and understand the richness
  of content of cultures as it is a means of using
  the variability of cultures as a means of gaining
  insight into the unconscious workings of the
  human mind
• particular cultures are like so many projections
  of human thinking, from the study of which it
  should be possible to deduce the mechanisms which
  led to those projections
• for Lévi-Strauss, the subject matter of
  anthropology is Culture, not cultures
  (although the fact that there are cultures is
  useful as a method to investigate Culture)

11
Language and Culture

• All languages are composed of arbitrary groups of
  sounds called phonemes.
• Phonemes are the minimal units of sound which a
  group of speakers consider distinct and which can
  create a difference in meaning
• Phonemes themselves are meaningless
• It is only when they are combined into larger
  units (morphemes, words, phrases etc) according
  to certain patterns (rules of syntax and grammar)
  that phonemes form meaningful units or speech
• Most speakers of a language cannot articulate the
  underlying rules that structure their use of
  phonemes and create meaningful communication yet
  all are able to use language to communicate
• Therefore at a subconscious level we must know
  the rules that structure our use of language.

12
Ferdinand de Saussure

• The job of the linguist is to go beyond the
  outward use of language and discover these
  unconscious principles
• This was the great achievement of Ferdinand de
  Saussure, a Swiss linguist
• Saussure's conception of language was based on
  the premise that the meanings that words are
  associated with are arbitrary and are maintained
  only through cultural conventions
• Also, that as such, these meanings are
  relational in that no word can be defined in
  isolation from other words within the same
  system.
• A key insight was that words were built upon
  contrasts (binary oppositions) between phonemes
  rather than simply being groups of sounds.

13

• EXAMPLE
• English distinguishes between the bilabial
  plosives /b/ and /p/
• cf. the minimal pair bat, pat

• Arabic makes no such distinction and an Arabic
  speaker untrained in another language does not
  hear the difference
• What in one language is a significant difference
  is ignored in another language
• Eg. The aspirated t in top and the unaspirated t
  in stop are considered to be the same sound t. in
  English
• But they are different sounds in Thai

14

• Arabic on the other hand has pairs of
  non-palatalized and palatalized consonants
  (palatalization being represented in
  transcription by a dot under the consonant)
• unless specifically trained in Arabic, an English
  speaker would not hear these distinctions,
  although one could not speak proper Arabic
  without them

d t s z d t
s z
.
.
.
.
15

• The important aspects of linguistics for
  Levi-Strauss were
• The shift of linguistic focus from conscious
  behaviour to unconscious structure
• The new focus on the relations between terms
  rather than on terms.
• The idea of binary contrasts which was
  fundamental to structuralism
• The importance of discovering the concrete
  existence of systems relationships of meaning
• The goal of discovering general laws.

16

• Major lifes work
• reorienting anthropology away from the extreme
  cultural particularism of the Boasians and back
  to the French Enlightenment focus on human
  universals
• working out the possibilities of a rationalist
  form of structuralism distinct from the
  empiricist structuralism of Radcliffe-Brown
• rescuing armchair anthropology from the
  disrespect into which it had fallen (thanks to
  Malinowski and Boas) through a series of works
  which mined gold out of half-forgotten
  collections of Amerind myths, by applying
  structuralist theories and methods

17
In any society, communication operates on three
different levels communication of women,
communication of goods and services,
communication of messages. Therefore kinship
studies, economics, and linguistics approach the
same kinds of problems on different strategic
i.e. methodological levels and really pertain
to the same field. 1963 296).
18

• For L-S, culture like language is essentially a
  collection of arbitrary symbols.
• He is not interested in the meanings of the
  symbols, any more than a linguist is interested
  in the phonemes
• He is concerned with the patterning of the
  elements
• The way the cultural elements relate to one
  another to form the overall system.
• L-S tried to design a technique for studying the
  unconscious principles that structure human
  culture.
• following the linguistic model of binary
  oppositions LS proposed that the fundamental
  pattern of human thought also uses binary
  contrasts such as black and white, night and day,
  and hot and cold.

19
The Elementary Unit of Kinship

• A kinship system like a language exists only in
  human consciousness it is an arbitrary system of
  representations, but representations whose
  organizations reflect unconscious structures.
• the unconscious activity of the mind consists in
  imposing forms upon content, and if these forms
  are fundamentally the same for all minds
  ancient and modern -, primitive and civilized
  it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the
  unconscious structure underlying each
  institutions and custom 1963 21).
• LS argued that phonemes and kinship terms are
  both elements of meaning although meaningful only
  in reference to systems which are building on the
  mind on the level of unconscious thought

20

• the linguistic model of binary oppositions
  dovetailed nicely with Durkheims distinction
  such as sacred and profane, and Hertzs
  proposition that right and left were fundamental
  part of the collective conscious.
• Analyzed kinship based on his notion of the
  binary structure of human thought.
• Based on the work of Marcel Mauss
• Mauss tried to demonstrate that exchange in
  primitive societies was not motivated by economic
  motives but instead by rules of reciprocity upon
  which the solidarity of the society depended.
• LS took Mausss concept of reciprocity and
  applied it to marriage in primitive societies.

21

• LS argued that women are a commodity that could
  be exchanged, and kinship systems are about the
  exchange of women
• LS argued that one of the most important
  distinctions a human makes is between self and
  others.
• Defining the categories of potential spouses and
  prohibited mates.
• This natural binary distinction then leads to the
  formation of the incest taboo, which necessitates
  choosing spouses from outside your family
• In this way the binary distinction between kin
  and non-kin is resolved by the reciprocal
  exchange of women and formation of kin networks
  in primitive societies.

22
Alliance Theory

• based on an initial direct exchange between two
  men who marry each others sisters.

Bilateral Cross Cousin MarriageDirect or
Restricted Exchange
23

• A rule which specifies that bilateral cross
  cousin must marry, will establish a permanent
  marriage exchange between descent groups that
  take their ancestry from the original couples, in
  this case patrilineages A and B.
• The lineages are paired into moieties which in
  principle form a narrowly closed intermarrying
  social system, which Levi-Strauss terms
  "restricted".

24
Matrilateral Cross Cousin MarriageIndirect or
Generalized Exchange In this case men and women
marry without any regard to mutual obligations to
provide wives for each other. Integration of the
system is provided by the application of a
matrilateral cross cousin rule, in which a man
marries his mother's brother's daughter.
25

• This arrangement generates a system in which the
  groupings (patrilineages in this case) that form
  according to descent from the original couples
  always exchange women in the same manner as their
  founders.
• The resulting system assume the form of circle of
  intermarrying groups that unlike the bilateral
  system can involve any number of units.
• Because of the openness of this pattern it is
  considered to constitute "generalized" rather
  than "restricted" exchange.

26
The Avunculate The Elementary Unit of Kinship

• The relationship between Ego and his maternal
  uncle fits into a set of relationships in which
  the relationships between Ego and father
  (eg.formal or hostile relationship) and Ego and
  Maternal uncle (eg.familiar relationship) are
  inversely correlated
• The relationships between Father and Mother
  (husband and wife) and Mother and Mothers
  Brother (or brother and sister) are always
  inverse.
• The avunculate only makes sense as one
  relationship within a system
• A structure in which there are attitudinal
  oppositions between generations and between
  husband and wife and brother and sister,
  constitute the most elementary for of kinship
  that can exist

27
In both groups, the relation between maternal
uncle and nephew is to the relation between
brother and sister as the relation between father
and son is to that between husband and wife. Thus
if we know one pair of relations then it is
always possible to infer the other. (SA 42)
28
The Structural Analysis of Myth

• Expanded the notion that human cognition was
  structured into binary oppositions.
• myths are arbitrary, imaginative, not linked with
  reality, not a representation of facts.
• Therefore there are laws operating a deeper level
  and since our brains are pre-programmed to work
  in the same ways the structure of all cultural
  elements is the same, even if the content varies.
  
• It is in a sense reduced too imitating the mind
  itself as object.
• L-S Believed that studying the mythologies of
  primitive people allows him to examine the
  unconscious universal patterning of human thought
  in its uncontaminated form
• LS thought the mythology of primitive people is
  closer to these universal principles than Western
  beliefs because the training we receive in
  Western society buries the logical structure he
  seeks under layers of cultural interferences
  created by our social environment.

29

• LS believes that the elements of myth, like the
  phonemes of language, acquire meaning only when
  arranged according to certain structural
  relations
• Consequently the structuralist examines the rules
  that govern the relationships between myth
  elements
• The task of the structural analysis is to break
  the myth into its constituent elements mythemes
  - and uncover the unconscious meaning found in
  the binary relationships between them
• Uncovering this hidden structural core will
  reveal the essential elements of human thought.

30
the Tsimshian myth of Asdiwal
Edwin Curtis Kwakiutl Hamatsa Ceremony
31
Edwin Curtis Kwakiutl Hamatsa Ceremony
32

• LS identifies four levels of representation
  within this myth geographic, techno-economic,
  sociological and cosmological.
• The myth describes rivers, place names, famines
  post marital residence patterns, and relations
  between affinal kin these descriptions are not
  distorted reflections of reality but a
  multilayered model of structural relationships.
• LS proposes that there are two aspects in the
  construction of the myth the sequence of events
  which form the apparent content of what happened.
• And the Schemata of the myth which represent the
  different planes of abstraction on which the
  sequence is organized.
• On the geographic level, there is the basic
  opposition between east and west, while on the
  cosmological level, there are oppositions of
  highest heaven and the subterranean world

33
French Structuralism

• Basic principles
• all humans think identically, through mechanisms
  of binary oppositions (the most elementary
  structures)
• that being so, structural analysis essentially,
  decoding the oppositions in an exotic cultural
  artifact is capable of understanding the
  meanings encoded in them
• in a perfectly scientific way transparently
  reasoned from the evidence
• with no claims to special subjective insight

34

• Basic principles (cont.)
• Culture is first reasoned and then enacted
• Culture is in Nature but not of it i.e. it has
  its own economy, which is often in tension with
  nature
• Culture appropriates matter from nature and
  reorganizes it
• Culture Nature Raw Cooked
• but it does this according to a pre-established
  mental template or structure
• therefore all human constructions (material,
  narrative, ideological) contain the marks of the
  tools which made then the human mind
• I.e.binary oppositions are reflected in various
  cultural institutions

35

• A hidden reality exists beneath all cultural
  expressions and the Structuralist anthropologist
  aims thus to understand the underlying meaning
  involved in human thought as expressed in
  cultural acts

• The Culture is the thought that guides the hand
  which fashions raw materials and cooks them
  into cultural artifacts
• The thought is in effect a code composed of
  oppositions, analogies, categories (columns)
  and layers (rows)

Dan mask (Côte dIvoire)
36

• Humans do not simply fashion non-human materials,
  they also fashion themselves
• by arranging themselves into various categories
• by altering their physical appearance
• All of culture is manifest in human exchanges of
  three categories of commodities
• goods (dried fish and figurines)
• messages (news and status-confirmation)
• persons (kinship and marriage systems)

37
In La pensée sauvage and Le totémisme
aujourdhui, elaboration of the notion of
bricolage
BRICOLEUR (Fr.) Repair man, to whose shop broken
objects can be taken for to be repaired, and
which is stacked floor-to-ceiling with broken and
discarded objects and parts, which the repair-man
cannibalizes and puts to new uses in fixing
objects brought in.
For L-S, all human thought is bricolage
appropriating objects from one context and
putting them to use in another, e.g. totemism, in
which likenesses and differences in human groups
is conceived by analogy with likenesses and
differences in the environment
38

• TOTEMISM
• Definition various descent groups in a society
  claim a special or mystical relationship with
  natural species in the environment
• e.g. name themselves after animal species
  (crocodile clan, eagle people)
• in ceremonial rituals, dress up in costumes to
  appear like their totems act out the role of
  the totemic species
• often abstain from eating the totemic animal and
  carry out increase rites to enhance its fertility

39
EARLY TOTEMIC THEORIES Evolutionists (a.)
early childlike stage of human understanding
(b.) primitive form of more abstract religious
concepts diagnostic marker of primitive
mentality Functionalists (a.) a means of
protecting species in the natural environment
(i.e. by tabooing the eating of them) (b.) a way
of symbolically recognizing the priority of the
group over the individual (i.e. the group is
sacred)
40
Lévi-Strauss
Totemism is everywhere a
use of thinking in one familiar realm (the part
of the natural world accessible to members of a
culture) to think about things in realms which
do not present themselves as organized, e.g. the
division of society into groups
e.g. organization of a society into four totemic
phratries essentially the layering of one moiety
upon another
41
Moiety 1
Moiety 2
eaglehawk
crow
sky
wolf
weasel
land
opposition EAGLEHAWK/WOLF opposition
simultaneously expresses difference (land vs.
sky) and similarity (both are predators)
opposition EAGLEHAWK/CROW likewise expresses
equality-and-difference, but cross-cuts the first
opposition
42

• in totemism (totemic thought), we see
  distinctions taken from one realm of experience
  and applied to another
• contra earlier theorists who saw totemism as a
  fuzzy or imprecise form of thought, L-S stresses
  in highly analogical and intellectual character
• totems are not good to eat
• they are good to think
• and we are all bricoleurs and we are all
  totemists

43
TOTEMS ARE NOT GOOD TO EAT THEY ARE GOOD TO
THINK
44

• Human Culture is inherently in tension with
  nature
• Culture is quintessentially an intellectual
  achievement a form of reasoning (albeit
  bricolage)
• humans appropriate aspects of nature and turn
  them to human-defined ends
• they cook the raw materials of nature,
  organizing them into structures of
  ever-increasing complexity ...
• using simple binary oppositions
• layered, one upon another
• all human Culture is an intellectual/symbolic
  reflection on the Nature-Culture boundary

45

• In Lévi-Strauss conceptualization, the
  Nature/Culture boundary never disappears
• because Culture is essentially a human creation
  a sort of rebellion against Nature it never
  becomes totally autonomous
• but must continually confront the fact of its own
  arbitrariness and self-authorship (continually
  looks for Laws outside of itself but they keep
  crumbling in the face of further struggles with
  Nature)
• hence, all of Culture is a set of reflections on
  its own nature
• the Nature/Culture boundary, then, is the
  meta-narrative encoded in all Cultural discourse
  (e.g. myths)

46

• Illustration the invention of exogamy the
  origin of human society
• State 1 complete RANDOM MATING
• no organization save domination by strongest
• constant disruption of life by quarrels induced
  by sex-drive
• State 2 institution of RECIPROCAL EXOGAMY
  between at least two groups (which, note, only
  become groups as a consequence of this
  institution)

A
B
47

• all human Culture develops out of the same basic
  elements, modeled in the human mind by mechanical
  models which can be reconstructed
• this reconstruction is the job, par excellence,
  of anthropology
• but these structural elements and their
  underlying reasoning processes tend to be
  obscured hidden by multiple layering in
  highly complex social formations
• while they are most easily discerned in
  structurally simple societies where the
  organization of society tends to be congruent
  with the mechanical models themselves

48
SIMPLE SOCIETY
COMPLEX SOCIETY
Many social roles, but these tend to be simplex
Few social roles, but these are multiplex
Best described by mechanical models
Best described by statistical models
a model the elements of which are on the same
scale as the phenomena
a model the elements of which are on a different
scale as the phenomena
49
MECHANICAL MODEL an entire social system can be
generated from a single conscious rule (e.g.
everyone must marry a cross-cousin) here, a
single conscious norm structures the entire
society and predicts the behavior STATISTICAL
MODEL marriage system requires to be described
as a set of probabilities, derived empirically
(i.e. no conscious rule(s) can generate the
system) e.g. 85 of persons marry a person who
resides within 25 km. 66 of persons marry a
spouse who resides within 8 km. 89 marry within
the same race 78 marry within the same
religion 88 marry within the same social class
here choice can only be described
probabilistically
50
Anthropology is, of course, about all human
Culture, but simple societies have an especial
place in it, in that their relative
organizational simplicity allows the
constructional principles to be deduced
particularly because their myths have been less
completely cooked (transmuted) than the
mythology of complex societies and more readily
explain how things have become as they are
51

• RADCLIFFE-BROWN
• STRUCTURES are observed regularities in actual
  behavior
• are empirical things, out there in the world
• to find them observe note regularities or
  tendencies and deduce the rules that must be
  producing them
• look for positive or negative sanctions that
  support them
• ANTHROPOLOGY empirical, inductive

• LÉVI-STRAUSS
• STRUCTURES exist in the human mind
• are mental things which exist first in human
  agreement before they are enacted in the outside
  world
• derive from the universal human capacity to
  reason in similarly structured ways
• hence they are intelligible cross-culturally
• ANTHROPOLOGY rationalist, deductive

52
Pierre Bourdeau The Berber House in Mary
Douglass Rules and Meanings The Anthropology of
Everyday Meaning, 1973.
53
Critique

• theories are often very abstract and untestable.
• structuralist methods are imprecise and dependent
  upon the observer
• As it is primarily concerned with the structure
  of the human psyche, it does not address
  historical aspects or change in culture
• a psychic unity of all human minds does not
  account for individual human action historically.
  
• lack of concern with human individuality.
• Cultural relativists are especially critical of
  this because they believe structural
  rationality depicts human thought as uniform
  and invariable
• Materialists object to structural explanations in
  favor of more observable or practical
  explanations

54
poststructuralism. Although poststructuralists
are influenced by the structuralist ideas put
forth by Lévi-Strauss, their work has more of a
reflexive quality. Pierre Bourdieu is a
poststructuralist who sees structure as a
product of human creation, even though the
participants may not be conscious of the
structure (Rubel and Rosman 19961270). Instead
of the structuralist notion of the universality
of human thought processes found in the structure
of the human mind, Bourdieu proposes that
dominant thought processes are a product of
society and determine how people act (Rubel and
Rosman 1996). However, in poststructuralist
methods, the person describing the thought
processes of people of another culture may be
reduced to just thatdescriptionas
interpretation imposes the observers perceptions
onto the analysis at hand (Rubel and Rosman
1996). Poststructuralism is much like
postmodernism in this sense.
55
  Impact Impact on the way we think about
culture and consciousness. Structuralism has had
a profound effect on American anthropology in
particular it influenced symbolic anthropology
popular in the 1970s         And cognitive
anthropology And post-modernism
56
Major Premises 1. humans are compelled to
classify the world, through myth conflict is
resolved 2. fundamental oppositions encoded in
myths, the motifs appear around the world because
we all observe the world in the same way,
determined by the fundamental structures of the
brain 3. not an emphasis on how people
categorize the world (cognitive anthropology.),
but on the underlying patterns of human thought
that produce these categories 4. cross-cultural
studies of myth and religion used to understand
the fundamental structure of human cognition 5.
this fundamental structure operates within all
different cultural contexts, not, like Freud,
that psychological structure determines culture
6. binary contrasts a major notion (hot/cold
self/other, etc.) 7. looking for rules that
structure language, for example, one finds that
such rules are subconscious it is the task of
the structuralist to determine the structure of
language (thought) and thus uncover the
subconscious patterns(c) Problems and/or
Critiques 1. assumes universalism in terms of
human thought 2. does not account for cultural
or individual variation 3. is deterministic(d)
Examples/Major Figures Claude Levi-Strauss,
Mythologies one of the major intellectual
thinkers of the twentieth-century(e) Related to
cognitive anthropology
57
There are integration of schema such as
water/land, and sea hunting/land hunting which
cross geographic and cosmological schema There
are sociological schema, such as the changes in
postmarital residence patterns from patrilocal to
neolocal to matrilocal. Structural analysis
clarifies the multiple levels of meanings in the
story of Asdiwal. Asdiwals two journeys from
east to west and from west to east were
correlated with types of residence, matrilocal
and patrilocal respectively. But in fact the
Tsmshian have patrilocal residence and from this
we can draw the conclusion that one of the
orientations corresponds to the direction
implicit in a real-life reading to their
institutions, the other to the opposite
direction. The oppositions (east west, land sea,
heave-earth) do not exist in Tsimshian society,
but rather with its inherent possibilities and
its latent potentialities. Such speculations do
not seek to depict what is real but to justify
the shortcomings if reality, since the extreme
positions are only imagined in order to show that
they are untenable.
58
LEFT Costume used in ceremony of Frog totem of
Imanda RIGHT Costume used in ceremony of the
Water Totem
Spencer and Gillen The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia
59
Iruntarinia ceremony of the Eaglehawk totem
Spencer and Gillen The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia
60
William Baldwin Spencer and Francis J. Gillen
Spencer and Gillen The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia
Incident in dreamtime legend being recreated
61
Spencer and Gillen The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia
Elders lower the pole containing the totemic
emblem
62
Spencer and Gillen The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia
LEFT Costume representing horned dreamtime
figure (oruncha) RIGHT Pair of orunchas
performing
63
Venda Python Dance
64
STAGES OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT
UNIVERSAL CULT
STATE SOCIETY
D E V E L O P M E N T
STATE ORGANIZATION
RITUAL COHESION
AGRARIAN TRIBAL SOCIETY
TRIBAL RELIGION
SACRIFICE
BEGIN- NINGS OF PRIEST- HOOD
CLAN TOTEM BE-COMES TRIBAL GOD
ANIMISM
NATURE WORSHIP
NOMADIC SOCIETY
SHAMANISM
TOTEMISM
BODY/SOUL DISTINCTION
W. ROBERTSON SMITH MODEL OF THE EVOLUTION OF
RELIGION
65
The term social structure has nothing to do
with empirical reality but with models which are
built up after it. This should help one to
clarify the difference between two concepts which
are so close to each other that they have often
been confused, namely those of social structure
and social relations social relations consist
of the raw material out of which the models
making up the social structure are built, while
social structure can by no means be reduced to
the ensemble of the social relations to be
described in a given society.
Social structure in Anthropology today, p. 324
66
A structural model may be conscious or
unconscious conscious models, which are
usually known as norms, are by definition very
poor ones for purposes of analysis, since they
are not intended to explain the phenomena but to
perpetuate them. Therefore structural analysis is
confronted with a stran ge paradox that is, the
more obvious structural organization is, the more
difficult it becomes to reach it because of the
inaccurate conscious models lying across the path
which leads to it.
Social structure, p. 324
67

• Hence, the project of Mythologiques
• using corpus of (mainly) South American
  mythology, collected over a period of 60 years,
  mainly with a view to tracing diffusion of South
  American cultures
• Lévi-Strauss little interested in the details of
  the diffusion per se
• rather, numerous variants of myths and legends
  provide a way of ascertaining their structures
  (as opposed to incidental details)
• taken together, they seem, indeed, to be a
  prolonged discourse on Nature-and-Culture