Structural anthropology

Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 belief that immutable deep tables exist in all cultures, as well as consequently, that any cultural practices hold homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equitable.

Lévi-Strauss' approach arose in large part from dialectics expounded on by Marx and Hegel, though dialectics as the concept dates back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Hegel explains that every situation featured two opposing matters and their resolution; Fichte had termed these "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Lévi-Strauss argued that cultures also score this structure. He showed, for example, how opposing ideas would fight and were resolved to determine the rules of marriage, mythology and ritual. This approach, he felt, introduced for fresh new ideas. He stated:

people think about the world in terms of binary opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, person and animal, life and death—and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites. "From the very start," he wrote, "the process of visual perception makes ownership of binary oppositions.

Only those who practice structural analysis are aware of what they are actually trying to do: that is, to reunite perspectives that the "narrow" scientific outlook of recent centuries believed to be mutually exclusive: sensibility and intellect, kind and quantity, the concrete and the geometrical, or as we say today, the "etic" and the "emic."

In South America he showed that there are "dual organizations" throughout Amazon rainforest cultures, and that these "dual organizations" represent opposites and their synthesis. As an illustration, Gê tribes of the Amazon were found to divide their villages into two rival halves; however, members from used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters half married each other, resolving the opposition.

Culture, he claimed, has to take into account both life and death and needs to have a way of mediating between the two. Mythology see his several-volume Mythologies unites opposites in diverse ways.

Three of the most prominent structural anthropologists are Lévi-Strauss himself and the British neo-structuralists Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach. The latter was the author of such(a) essays as "Time and False Noses" in Rethinking Anthropology.

The Leiden school

Much earlier, and some 450 miles north of Paris, a specific type of applied anthropology emerged at Leiden University, Netherlands that focused frequently on the relationship between apparent cultural phenomena found in the Indonesian archipelago: Batak, Minangkabau, Moluccas, etc., though it was primarily aimed at training governors for colonial Indonesia. This type of anthropology, developed by behind nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scholars, was eventually called "de Leidse Richting," or "de Leidse School,".

Multiple researchers were educated in this school. This theory attracted students and researchers interested in a holistic approach, that was broad and deep, that related economic circumstances with mythological and spatial classifications and that explored the relationship between the natural world and religious, symbolic systems. This was long before structuralism. The "Leiden" perspective drove research for many decades, influencing successive generations of anthropologists.

The almost recent chairs were held by J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong chair: 1922–1956, 1964, who coined the concept of the Field of Ethnological study in 1935, and later his nephew P. E. de Josselin de Jong chair: 1956–1987, 1999.