Assignment – Sociological Thinkers II

Q. Explain Levi Strauss’s structural method for the study of society

One of the concept of social structure that Levi Strauss focused on is structuralism
which studies the underlying, unconscious regularities of human expression—that is,
the unobservable structures that have observable effects on behaviour, society,
and culture. French anthropologist Levi Strauss derived this theory from structural
linguistics, developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who examined
language as a structure, as langue, and his ideas about the basic structures of language
apply to any kind of system of making meaning, whether it's an official "language,"
like English or Spanish or Arabic, or just a set of signals or codes, like football referee
signals. Such a system is called a signifying system, and can include any structure or
system of organization that creates meaning out of cultural signs. In fact, just about
any part of a culture constitutes a signifying system, as long as that system contains
signs that can be "read" and interpreted, along the lines Saussure laid out: by
determining signification and by determining value.
This idea is at the heart of any kind of structuralist analysis. Saussure applies it to
language; Levi-Strauss applies it as an anthropologist, to kinship systems, cultural
organizations, and to myth; Roland Barthes (who is discussed in SPSB) applies this
system to a wide variety of contemporary Western (mostly French) cultural "signs,"
including food, advertising, and clothing.

According to Saussure, any language is structured in the sense that its elements are
interrelated in nonarbitrary, regular, rule-bound ways; a competent speaker of the
language largely follows these rules without being aware of doing so. The task of the
theorist is to detect this underlying structure, including the rules of transformation that
connect the structure to the various observed expressions.
All the structuralists of the time—Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Merton, and Althusser—
were, in different ways, seeking to accomplish much the same goal. They sought a
new, deeper method for defining the science of social and cultural life. They had
learned well the lessons of the inter- war years. The individual, left alone, could not
account for social action. They each pressed social theory beyond the merely visible.

Levi-Strauss' insistence that the relations among units within the structure occur
in binary pairs, which are either similar to each other or different from each other;
this corresponds to Saussure's idea of paradigms, where one thing can be exchanged
for something similar, and syntagms, where one thing is exchanged for something
different. This also corresponds to the idea of metaphor and metonomy: metaphor is
establishing a relationship of similarity between two things (A is like B, or A is B),
while metonomy is substituting one thing for something close to it, related to it, but
not it (for example, saying "crown" instead of "king,"). The point here is that relations
between units of a system can only be analyzed in pairs: you know A is A because it's
not B, and A is not Q, and A is not %, but you can only examine what A is in a binary
pair: A:B, A:Q, A:%. In other words, what's important to Levi-Strauss is not the
identity of any individual unit, he doesn't care what "A" is--but the relation between
any two units compared in a binary pair.

Levi-Strauss insists that myth is language, because myth has to be told in order to
exist. It is also a language, with the same structures that Saussure described belonging
to any language. Myth, as language, consists of both "langue" and "parole," both the
synchronic, ahistorical structure and the specific diachronic details within the
structure. Levi-Strauss adds a new element to Saussure's langue and parole, pointing
out that langue belongs to what he calls "reversible time," and parole to "non-
reversible time." He means that parole, as a specific instance or example or event, can
only exist in linear time, which is unidirectional--you can't turn the clock back;
langue, on the other hand, since it is simply the structure itself, can exist in the past,
present, or future. Think of this sentence again: "The adjectival noun verbed the direct
object adverbially." If you read the sentence, you read from left to right, one word at a
time, and it takes time to read the whole sentence--that's non-reversible time. If you
don't' read the sentence, but rather think of it as being the structure of English, it exists
in a single moment, every moment--yesterday as well as today as well as tomorrow.
That's reversible time.

Myths are unpredictable and contingent due to the uncertain circumstances

surrounding their origin but yet they seem to share some commonalities. The
interpretation of myths is still widely contested for some feel myths merely base
themselves on common human traits or shared experience while others feel myths are
a way of explaining phenomena that the ancients had no explanation for.
What Strauss feels is that anthropologist and psychoanalysts have missed the point by
focusing so much on the sociological and psychological field of study for you can’t
simplify the existence of an evil grandmother by merely stating that the society had
many such evil grandmothers and that mythology thus, reflects the social structure and
social relations.

Levi-Strauss discusses the manner of dissecting the narratives of mythology so that

their structure can be identified and broken down, by doing so with multiple myths,
similar structure is noticed between myths from multiple locations that are not even
close to each other. In order to study myth, there are two paths that are being forced
on; it is either platitude or sophism.
Lévi-Strauss, adds dimensions to the current study of myth by alluding it to the study
of linguistics. The reason is the contradiction faced by the similarity between myths
and languages across the globe. He notes that ancient philosophers were questioning
linguistics in the same manner philosophers are studying myth now. The similarity in
sound and definite meaning on one hand, whilst there were similar sounds with
completely different meanings. This contradiction was more bellied by the fact that
the combination of sounds rather than the individual sounds themselves add value to
the data. Claude states that myth cannot be treated in the same manner as linguistics,
because myth is language.
What Lévi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined the relations
between mythemes was that a myth consists of juxtaposed binary
oppositions. Oedipus, for example, consists of the overrating of blood relations and
the underrating of blood relations, the autochthonous origin of humans and the denial
of their autochthonous origin. Influenced by Hegel, Lévi-Strauss believed that the
human mind thinks fundamentally in these binary oppositions and their unification
(the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these are what make meaning possible.
Furthermore, he considered the job of myth to be a sleight of hand, an association of
an irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition, creating the
illusion, or belief, that the former had been resolved.

A myth, according to Levi-Strauss, is both historically specific--it's almost always set

in some time long ago--and ahistorical, meaning that its story is timeless. As history,
myth is parole; as timeless, it's langue.

In his book structural anthropology he talks about the structures of a myth by giving
us few examples. An ignorant young boy becomes aware that he possesses magical
powers that enable him to cure the sick. Jealous of the boy’s increasing reputation, an
old medicine man of established position visits him on several different occasions,
accompanied by his wife. Enraged because he obtains no secret in exchange for his
own teachings, the medicine man offers the boy a pipe filled with magical herbs. Thus
bewitched, the boy discovers that he is pregnant. Full of shame, he leaves his village
and seeks death among wild animals. The animals, moved to pity by his misfortune,
decide to cure him. They extract the fetus from his body. They teach him their magical
powers, by means of which the boy, on returning to his home, kills the evil medicine
man and becomes himself a famous and respected healer.

A careful analysis of the text of this myth, discloses that it is built on a long series of
oppositions: (i) initiated shaman versus non-initiated shaman, that is, the opposition
between acquired power and innate power; (2) child versus old man, since the myth
insists on the youth of one protagonist and the old age of the other; (3) confusion of
sexes versus differentiation of sexes; all of Pawnee metaphysical thought is actually
based on the idea that at the time of the creation of the world antagonistic elements
were intermingled and that the first work of the gods consisted in sorting them out.
The young child is asexual or, more accurately, the male and female principles co-
exist in him. Conversely, in the old man the distinction is irrevocable, an idea clearly
expressed in the myth by the fact that his wife is always with him, in contrast with the
boy, who is alone but who harbors in himself both masculinity and femininity (4)
fertility of the child versus sterility of the old man (5) the irreversible relationship of
the fertilization of the “son” by the “father” versus an equally irreversible relationship,
namely the revenge of the “father” because the “son” does not reveal any secrets to
him in exchange for his own secrets; (6) the threefold opposition between, on the one
hand, plant magic, which is real, that is, a drug by means of which the old man
fertilizes the child (this magic, however, is curable) and, on the other hand, magic of
animal origin, which is symbolic (manipulation of a skull), by means of which the
child kills the old man without any possibility of resurrection; (7) magic which
proceeds by introduction versus magic which proceeds by extraction.

The construction of the myth by oppositions also characterizes details of the text. The
animals are moved to pity at the sight of the boy for two reasons, which are well
defined in the text: He compounds the characteristics of man and woman, a
combination expressed by the opposition between the leanness of his own body and
the swelling of his abdomen (due to his condition). To induce a miscarriage, the
herbivorous animals vomit the bones, while the carnivorous animals extract the flesh.
And finally, while the boy risks death from a swollen stomach the medicine man
actually dies of an abdominal constriction.

All the elements of the myth fall into place when we compare it, not with the
corresponding Pawnee ritual, but rather with the symmetrical and inverse ritual that
prevails among those tribes of the American Plains which conceive their shamanistic
societies and the rules for membership in the reverse manner from that of the Pawnee
themselves. The Pawnee have the distinction of having developed the most elaborate
system of societies outside the age-series. In this respect they contrast with the
Blackfoot and with such sedentary tribes as the Mandan and Hidatsa, which exemplify
most elaborately the other type and to which they are related, not only culturally, but
also geographically and historically through the Arikara, whose separation from the
Skidi Pawnee dates only from the first half of the eighteenth century.

Among these tribes, societies are based on age-grades. The transition from one to
another is achieved by purchase, and the relationship between seller and buyer is
conceived as a relationship between “father” and “son.” Finally, the candidate always
appears in the company of his wife, and the central motif of the transaction is the
handing over of the “son’s” wife to the “father,” who carries out with her an act of
real or symbolic coitus, which is, however, always represented as a fertility act.

We thus rediscover all the oppositions already analyzed on the level of myth, but there
is a reversal of the values attributed to each pair: initiated and non-initiated, youth and
old age, confusion and differentiation of sexes, and so on. In fact, in the Mandan, Hi-
datsa, and Blackfoot rites, the “son” is accompanied by his wife, just as in the Pawnee
myth the wife accompanied the “father.” But whereas in the latter case she was a mere
supernumerary, here it is she who plays the principal role: Fertilized by the “father”
and conceiving the “son,” she thus represents the bisexuality which the Pawnee myth
ascribed to the “son.” In other words, the semantic values are the same; they are
merely permuted in relation to the symbols which express them. It is interesting to
compare, in this respect, the objects which are considered to be fertilizing agents in
the two systems. In the Pawnee myth, a pipe is transferred by the father and his wife
to the son. In the Blackfoot rite, a wild turnip is first transferred by the father to the
son’s wife, then by the latter to the son. The pipe, a hollow tube, is the intermediary
between the sky and the middle world; hence its role is symmetrical to, and the
reverse of, the role ascribed to the wild turnip in Plains mythology as is evident in the
innumerable variants of the cycle called “Star- Husband,” where the turnip is a plug,
functioning as a circuit- breaker between the two worlds. The elements are expressed
by different symbols when their order is reversed. In an attempt to show that the
genetic model of the myth— that is, the model which generates it and simultaneously
gives it its structure consists of the application of four functions to three symbols.
Here, the four functions are defined by the twofold opposition elder/younger and
male/female, from which stem the father, mother, son, and daughter functions. In the
myth of the pregnant boy, the father and mother each use a different symbol, and the
functions of son and daughter are merged under the third available symbol, the child.

The reason for this is that the allocation of functions to symbols requires here an ideal
dichotomization of the latter. As we noted before, the father is both father and mother;
the son, both son and daughter; and the child borrows from each of the other two
symbols one of their half functions: fertilizing agent (father) and fertilized object
(daughter). It is remarkable that this more complex distribution of the functions
among the symbols characterizes the only one of the three systems which is based on
reciprocity. Although the purpose of each system is to establish an alliance, this
alliance is rejected in the first case, solicited in the second, and negotiated only in the
third.

To conclude in the structural study of myth, Levi-Strauss explains why myths from
different cultures from all over the world seem so similar. Given that myths could
contain anything, they aren't bound by rules of accuracy, or probability. why is there
an astounding similarity among so many myths from so many widely separated
cultures?
Levi-Strauss argues that their similarities are based on their structural sameness. To
make this argument about the structure of myth, Levi-Strauss insists that myth is
language, because myth has to be told in order to exist. It is also a language, with the
same structures that Saussure described belonging to any language. Hence by using
myth as an examples he illustrates how societies structures have so much in common.

ASMITA KASHIKAR
Sociology Hons 3rd Year
Roll Number – 373