What is "structural anthropology"

n. an anthropological theory that there are unobservable social structures that generate observable social phenomena [syn: structuralism]

Structural anthropology is a school of anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have 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 a concept) dates back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Hegel explains that every situation presents two opposing things and their resolution; Fichte had termed these " thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Lévi-Strauss argued that cultures also have this structure. He showed, for example, how opposing ideas would fight and were resolved to establish the rules of marriage, mythology and ritual. This approach, he felt, made for fresh new ideas. He stated:

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, quality 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. For instance, Gê tribes of the Amazon were found to divide their villages into two rival halves; however, the members of opposite halves married each other. This illustrated two opposites in conflict and then resolved.

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 essays as "Time and False Noses" [in Rethinking Anthropology].