Anthropological theories
Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary set members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.
In his own analysis of the appearance of the identities that occur through marriages between tribes, Lévi-Strauss forwarded that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the report between brother and sister, as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore, whether we know A, B, and C, we can predict D, just as whether we know A and D, we can predict B and C. The intention of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, then, was to simplify the masses of empirical data into generalized, comprehensible relations between units, which permit for predictive laws to be identified, such as A is to B as C is to D.
Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in Structural Anthropology 1958. Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others create used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning helps best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote approximately this relationship for decades.
A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the refine of the 20th century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state the goal of a social act or institution. The existence of a object was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strong pick to that kind of analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by stating how it came to be.
The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who had read and admired the work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, such(a) as what a religious creed or a set of rules approximately marriage did for the social an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. as a whole. unhurried this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere in the same manner. all of the activities in a assumption kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal system of logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together as do the parts of a body. In contrast, the more influential functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski planned the satisfaction of individual needs, what a grownup derived by participating in a custom.
In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas, the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely. Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis, the old notion of universal stages of developing or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no single history, only histories.
There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools; used to refer to every one of two or more people or things had to decide:
Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies, as it was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. Thus, some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach. The critical distinction, then, remained twofold:
For Lévi-Strauss, the alternative was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of dominance over events when the outcome was uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands, he found the proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to devloping clay pots even though this is the no morea business than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an offer hoc, superficial way–one postulates a trait of personality when needed. However the accepted way of examine organizational function didn't work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many apparent ways and yet, served different functions. many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups may interact. However, precisely what they may do—trade, intermarry—is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups. Nor will it do to say that dividing-in-two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.
For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies commonly are from phonology though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory, cybernetics, and so on. "A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he writes. Phonemic analysis reveals qualities that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize andto them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language–not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way this is the distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound-structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number of rules.
In the explore of the kinship systems that number one concerned him, this ideal of explanation gives a comprehensive company of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great command over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful.
A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son–if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually hadrelations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined together in inconsistent ways. One possible way of finding a master order was to rate all the postions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father introduced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall sample to emerge.