Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The term ‘structuralism’ has been used in anthropology to designate a number of quite distinct theoretical positions but recently it has normally only been used to label the theories which were originally developed from the 1940s onward by the French anthropologist *Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In the 1940s Lévi-Strauss found himself in New York as a refugee. He came with some experience of fieldwork among South American Indians and with a fascination for the great wealth of accumulated ethnographic data on the North American Indians which had been published in a largely unanalysed form by the American Smithsonian Institution. This material was mainly transcription and translation of what elderly Native Americans could remember of their youth and the myths and stories that had been told to them. The sheer volume of this data seemed to require an analytical approach and, at first, Lévi-Strauss was swayed by the *Boasian tradition which, in its later developments, had become influenced by the psychological theory called †Gestalt theory (Benedict 1934).
This stressed how human beings coped with information and emotions by creating encompassing configurations of knowledge. Gestalt theory stressed how cultures formed ‘patterns’.
Lévi-Strauss was, however, searching for something more precise and he found it in a sister subject to cultural anthropology: linguistics. By the end of the war he had obtained a post at the New School for Social Research in New York and there he became closely linked with another refugee, the linguist †Roman Jakobson. Jakobson had become an advocate of a particular theory in linguistics called ‘structural linguistics’. This proved to be what Lévi-Strauss was looking for.
This is the complete article, containing 263 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Structuralism
