Structuralism and Anthropology

Shore’s own judgments and connections

Structuralism responds to problems that preoccupied earlier thinkers, teleology and subjectivity, by diminishing both: in some ways it brackets history and the subject.

Put simply Shore: earlier thinkers worried about where history is heading and about the individual self. Structuralism handles both by making them matter less; in a way it sets history and the self aside.

Studying how a language changes over time and studying how it works as a system at one moment are separate disciplines; neither is inferior, but a linguist picks one.

Put simply Saussure: studying how a language changes over time and studying how it works as a whole at one moment are two separate fields. Neither is worse, but a linguist does one or the other.

Kinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: family relationships work like a language. As with Saussure's words, each relation means something only through how it differs from the other relations in the system.

What makes kinship a system is not blood or descent but a representation held in people's minds: arbitrary, not grown spontaneously from any real situation.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: a kinship system is not made of blood ties or descent. It exists in people's minds, as a set of ideas fixed by convention, not something that grows naturally out of real life.

Bracketing subject and object alike and studying only how signifiers interact is structuralism's own route past the bridge problem of how subject reaches world.

Put simply Shore: philosophy long asked how the mind can reach the world outside it. Structuralism sidesteps the question by setting aside both mind and world and studying only how signs relate to one another.

Structural anthropology hangs on a chance encounter: had Koyré not introduced Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss among wartime émigrés in New York, Shore judges, that intellectual history would never have happened.

Shore places structuralism with the other answers to God's death: one more attempt to fill religion's empty place and quiet the alienation and groundlessness it left behind.

Put simply Shore: structuralism is another answer to the loss of God, one more attempt to fill religion's empty place and ease the feeling of homelessness and having no firm ground that it left.

In her postwar lecture on existential philosophy, Arendt blames Kant: by severing being from thought and putting the thing-in-itself beyond reach, he opened the subject-world gap that alienates us.

Put simply Arendt blames Kant for our alienation. He split thinking from being and said we can never reach things as they really are, which opened a gap between us and the world.

Structuralism responds to problems that preoccupied earlier thinkers, teleology and subjectivity, by diminishing both: in some ways it brackets history and the subject.

Put simply Shore: earlier thinkers worried about where history is heading and about the individual self. Structuralism handles both by making them matter less; in a way it sets history and the self aside.

Calling structuralism anti-humanist is description, not condemnation: it advocates no cruelty, it simply denies that the individual subject centers the system or generates its meaning.

Put simply Shore: calling structuralism "anti-humanist" describes it; it is not an accusation. It favors no cruelty. It only denies that the individual person is the center of the system or the source of its meaning.

Structuralists meet Hegelians on totality: a sign means something only within a whole that holds everything in place, so faint echoes of Hegel persist even on the synchronic plane.

Put simply Shore hears a faint echo of Hegel in structuralism: a sign means something only inside a whole system that holds everything in place, even when the system is studied at a single moment.

Studying how a language changes over time and studying how it works as a system at one moment are separate disciplines; neither is inferior, but a linguist picks one.

Put simply Saussure: studying how a language changes over time and studying how it works as a whole at one moment are two separate fields. Neither is worse, but a linguist does one or the other.

Proper study of language brackets the signified, the real cat the word points to, and examines how signs work as a system at one moment.

Put simply Saussure: to study language properly, set aside the real things words point to, such as the actual cat. Look instead at how words work together as a system at a given moment.

In the text In the Course in General Linguistics (1916; Baskin translation, p. 66), Saussure writes: "The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image."

A language's present state can be fully described without knowing its past, much as a chess position is legible to a passerby who never saw the earlier moves.

Put simply Saussure's comparison: a passerby can read a chess position without having seen the earlier moves. Likewise, a language as it stands now can be fully described without knowing its history.

Nobody is present at a language's birth: every speaker arrives into one already in place, so its origins are never witnessed.

Put simply Saussure: no one is around when a language is born. We are all born into a language that already exists, so nobody sees how it began.

Rising national and ethnic strife calls for a purely international second language that nobody owns more than anyone else: ideally consistent, exception-free and easy to learn.

Put simply Zamenhof, who invented Esperanto, argued that with national and ethnic conflict rising, the world needs a second language no nation owns, ideally regular and easy to learn.

As Shore reports the structuralists, language need not voice or mirror a meaning already present: it produces that meaning, and signs structure the way we think.

Put simply Shore's account of the structuralists: language does not just express or mirror meanings that already exist. It creates meaning, and words shape how we think.

Culture, taken broadly to include language, art, customs, tools and belief, operates largely unconsciously, a Freudian premise; anthropology's task is to expose the deep laws beneath it.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: culture, meaning language, art, customs, tools and beliefs, works mostly without our being aware of it, an idea taken from Freud. The anthropologist's job is to uncover the hidden rules beneath it.

Anthropological research, like linguistic research, is "dealing strictly with symbolism": its material is signifiers.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: anthropology, like the study of language, deals strictly with symbolism. Its material is signifiers, the words and symbols themselves rather than the things they name.

Kinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: family relationships work like a language. As with Saussure's words, each relation means something only through how it differs from the other relations in the system.

What makes kinship a system is not blood or descent but a representation held in people's minds: arbitrary, not grown spontaneously from any real situation.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: a kinship system is not made of blood ties or descent. It exists in people's minds, as a set of ideas fixed by convention, not something that grows naturally out of real life.

To grasp the avunculate, the bond between maternal uncle and nephew, one must treat it as a single relation inside a kinship system taken as a whole.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: to understand the special bond between a boy and his mother's brother, you must see it as one relation within the society's whole family system.

The prohibition on incest belongs to the earliest, most primordial taboos, laid down as culture first separated itself from nature.

Put simply Freud: the ban on incest is one of the very first taboos, laid down as human culture first broke away from nature.

Classical structuralism, as it comes through Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, charts many cultural relations as binary oppositions: cooked against raw, low against high, cold against hot.

Put simply Classical structuralism, in Lévi-Strauss's hands, maps much of culture as pairs of opposites: raw and cooked, high and low, hot and cold.

Across human cultures, including oral and indigenous ones without large written literatures, myths rework a limited stock of themes and share constant structures that operate like a language.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: across human cultures, including those that pass stories on by word of mouth, myths rework a limited set of themes. They share constant patterns that work like a language.

Myth has a grammar: its smallest units combine by rules analogous to those of language, and that grammar is built into the human mind itself.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: myths have a grammar. Their smallest parts combine by rules, as sounds combine into words, and that grammar is built into the human mind.

Myths are instruments by which a culture sorts and orders its reality.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: myths are tools a culture uses to sort and organize its world.

A myth works as an imaginary resolution of a contradiction that is real in social life.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: a myth settles, in imagination, a conflict that is real in a society's life.

In the text The phrase "imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" is Fredric Jameson's (The Political Unconscious, 1981, ch. 1), developed from Lévi-Strauss's reading of Caduveo face painting in Tristes Tropiques.

In structuralism the subject is radically decentered: meaning is not something people produce; language produces people, more than the reverse.

Put simply Shore: in structuralism the individual is pushed from the center. People do not make meaning; language makes people, more than the other way round.

The crisis that opens many myths is one of too little difference, not too much: boundaries blur, distinctions collapse.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: many myths open with a crisis of too little difference, not too much. The lines that keep things distinct blur and break down.

In the text In "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), Lévi-Strauss writes that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution"; "a crisis of distinctions" is Girard's phrase in Violence and the Sacred.

Bracketing subject and object alike and studying only how signifiers interact is structuralism's own route past the bridge problem of how subject reaches world.

Put simply Shore: philosophy long asked how the mind can reach the world outside it. Structuralism sidesteps the question by setting aside both mind and world and studying only how signs relate to one another.

Structuralism is ahistorical, and amoralizing too, in that it tends to steer clear of value judgments.

Put simply Shore: structuralism sets history aside, and it tends to avoid judging things as good or bad.

Structuralists meet modernists on the point of arbitrariness: because the linguistic sign is arbitrary, meaning turns out contingent, neither natural, universal nor intrinsic.

Put simply Shore: structuralists agree with modernist artists on one point. Since the link between a word and its meaning is a matter of convention, meaning is never natural, universal or built into things.

Because it rethinks every part of human life with language as its model, structuralism leads into what is later called the linguistic turn in history, literature and anthropology.

Put simply Shore: by taking language as the model for all of human life, structuralism opens the way to the "linguistic turn", which studies history, literature and anthropology as made of language.

Lévi-Strauss is captivated by man in the abstract while caring little for actual, particular men.

Put simply Geertz's criticism: Lévi-Strauss is fascinated by humanity in general but cares little for actual, individual people.

Zamenhof, aged 15, starts working on an international language (Esperanto).

Course in General Linguistics Cours de linguistique générale

Saussure's Course in General Linguistics appears, compiled from students' lecture notes three years after his death.

Jakobson leaves Russia with a Red Cross mission and settles in Prague, where he founds the Prague Linguistic Circle.

German army invades the rest of Czechoslovakia; Bohemia and Moravia occupied, Slovakia becomes a client state.

Jakobson, who was Jewish, flees Czechoslovakia after the German occupation and reaches the United States (1941) via Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden).

In New York, Koyré introduces fellow émigrés Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss; structuralism grows from their collaboration.

Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology

What Is Existential Philosophy?

Responsibility and History

The Dialectic of Morality and the Morality of the Dialectic

The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Humanism and Revolution