C. LEVI-STRAUSS (1908-2009)
Early Structuralism
Saint Simon
Comte
Durkheim
Karl Marx
Ferdinand de Saussure (structural linguistics)
Main Features of Structuralism
1. World is a product of ideas
2. World as a logical pattern
3. Death of the subject/ decentring of the subject. There is nothing in social life that is
innovative creation of the conscious or imaginative mind.
4. Anti –humanist. Human beings are not the authors of their life stories, for these are
written for them in language and culture. Individual/ actor/agent/ subject is irrelevant
5. Anti - Historicist
6. Anti-empiricist
7. The underlying structures remain comparatively constant
8. Social phenomena are structured in the same way that Saussure perceived language to be
structured
9. The defining features of human existence are:
10. Language- which humans encounter upon entering life
11. The fact that the underlying structures of all language is the same
12. Each sign could be analysed into two parts: signifier (the sound/mark/etc) and
Signified(concept). The relationship between the two is arbitrary.
13. Difference between language(social) and speech(individual)
14. Preference for synchronic approaches
15. Systemic and relational nature of social phenomena
, Social Structure by Claude Levi Strauss
1. Structure is an abstract concept
2. Structure is not a field of study of enquiry but is an explanatory method
3. The term ‘Social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models
which are built after it. It is a method of study.
4. Social relations, which are empirical and observable, form the raw data from which
models comprising social structures are built.
5. Social structure is a concept constructed by an anthropologist for analytical
purposes.
Social Structure as models
The model deserving the name ‘structure’ meets the following requirements:
1. The structure exhibits the characteristics of a system
2. For any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of
transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type.
3. The above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or
more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications.
4. The model should be constituted so as to make immediately intelligible all the
observed facts
Early Structuralism
Saint Simon
Comte
Durkheim
Karl Marx
Ferdinand de Saussure (structural linguistics)
Main Features of Structuralism
1. World is a product of ideas
2. World as a logical pattern
3. Death of the subject/ decentring of the subject. There is nothing in social life that is
innovative creation of the conscious or imaginative mind.
4. Anti –humanist. Human beings are not the authors of their life stories, for these are
written for them in language and culture. Individual/ actor/agent/ subject is irrelevant
5. Anti - Historicist
6. Anti-empiricist
7. The underlying structures remain comparatively constant
8. Social phenomena are structured in the same way that Saussure perceived language to be
structured
9. The defining features of human existence are:
10. Language- which humans encounter upon entering life
11. The fact that the underlying structures of all language is the same
12. Each sign could be analysed into two parts: signifier (the sound/mark/etc) and
Signified(concept). The relationship between the two is arbitrary.
13. Difference between language(social) and speech(individual)
14. Preference for synchronic approaches
15. Systemic and relational nature of social phenomena
, Social Structure by Claude Levi Strauss
1. Structure is an abstract concept
2. Structure is not a field of study of enquiry but is an explanatory method
3. The term ‘Social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models
which are built after it. It is a method of study.
4. Social relations, which are empirical and observable, form the raw data from which
models comprising social structures are built.
5. Social structure is a concept constructed by an anthropologist for analytical
purposes.
Social Structure as models
The model deserving the name ‘structure’ meets the following requirements:
1. The structure exhibits the characteristics of a system
2. For any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of
transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type.
3. The above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or
more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications.
4. The model should be constituted so as to make immediately intelligible all the
observed facts
