The new-found interest in cosmology is to a large extent attributable to the influence of the work of *Lévi-Strauss and his notion of the ‘order of orders’. Lévi-Strauss makes an analytic contrast between ‘lived-in’ orders and ‘thought-of’ orders. The former may be studied as part of the objective reality, he says, but ‘no systematic studies of these orders can be undertaken without acknowledging the fact that social groups…need to call upon orders of different kinds, corresponding to a field external to objective reality…The “thought-of‘orders are those of myth and religion’ (Lévi-Strauss 1968:313). In a later essay he seeks to clarify his terms: ‘By order of orders then, I mean the formal properties of the whole made up of sub-wholes, each of which corresponds to a given structural level’ (Lévi-Strauss 1968:333). Lévi-Strauss made this statement as a response to those who he claimed had misunderstood him and assumed him to be saying that for a given society all orders are homologous. Although in the early days Lévi-Strauss does not use the word cosmology, and hardly does so subsequently, his work inspired a new and different interest in indigenous cosmologies. Data derived from many different cosmologies, together with mythologies, were being used to put forward general theories about the workings of the human mind. But Lévi-Strauss did not appear to be greatly interested in the study of cosmology for its own sake.
Certain parts of the world lent themselves particularly well to *structuralist analysis of *myth and cosmology whereas others did not. *Highland and *lowland South America and parts of *Southeast Asia became regions especially favoured with anthropological studies of this kind. The aim of most of these early structuralist ethnographies was to elicit a form of structural concordance between the cosmological and the social domains (e.g. Hugh-Jones 1979).
In the influential collection of essays entitled Purity and Danger (1966), †Mary Douglas alerts us to another aspect of classification as part of cosmology. She suggests that anomalies and ambiguities are necessary as bearers of symbolic meaning in any religious system, and formulates her famous statement that ‘dirt is matter out of place.’ Anomalies become so, however, precisely because they fail to find a proper place in the overall cosmological order. Thus Jewish food *taboos can be explained in terms of the forbidden animals not being part of the schema of creation; a schema, moreover, which, she argues, necessarily has a moral thrust that informs human social and symbolic orders.
A different tradition developed in Holland where the Leiden structuralist school grew out of the empirical focus on Indonesian societies. Many of these are organized in ways that encouraged the early observers to adopt an untheorized structural model. The Dutch missionary Van Hien wrote an article as early as 1896 in which he discussed the Javanese calendar in direct relationship with the complex Javanese system of organizing the cardinal directions, and showed how these were also embedded within a cosmological order that affected humans and spirits in relation to a whole. The thread of argument was taken up by others who had read Durkheim and Mauss’s essay, and were able to bring this theoretical perspective to bear on their own empirical findings (de Josselin de Jong 1983:10–16). Van Wouden, in his comparative study of Eastern Indonesian societies, concludes that not only are these societies distinguished by a clear-cut symbolic dualism, but that *marriage is the pivot to a comprehensive organization of cosmos and society. Although today the pure structuralist approach has been abandoned by most anthropologists, ethnographic accounts from Indonesia cannot ignore this Dutch tradition. Whether the focus of their studies is on *kinship, *ritual, *house construction, or even on social change, most find it impossible to discuss cultural and social practices without relating them in some way to indigenous cosmologies (eg McKinnon 1992, Traube 1986).
With the recent theoretical focus in some academic circles on the individual agent (as opposed to a transcendental cultural order), cosmology has lost some of its interpretative force. In his comparative investigations into the cosmologies of an area in Highland New Guinea, †Barth is critical of the structuralist endeavour and seeks to demonstrate that a better understanding of cosmology comes ‘not by construing more order in it, but by better accounting for its production’ (Barth 1987:84). However, others would argue that because *ancestors or spirits are integral participants in human social life in many parts of the world, signifying the constituting role of the past in the present and the future, the indigenous values of the individual may often be subsumed by the cosmic. With increased anthropological interest in a globalization of culture, it is becoming clear that this process is far from automatic or easily predictable in particular instances. One reason for the variety of cultural responses to outside influences may be found embedded within cosmological perceptions.
