Structuralism

Saussurean sources of structuralist (as opposed to symbolic) anthropology are discussed; oversimplifications & misstatements of Saussure's position are corrected. The various senses (none absolute) in which the notion of the arbitrariness of semiological phenomena appear in Saussure's work are explicated. Misconceptions about his opposition of langue to parole, of synchrony to diachrony, & of syntagmatic to paradigmatic relations are discussed & clarified, & the ways in which the oppositions contrast with one another are detailed. C. Levi-Strauss's Jakobsonian introduction to structural linguistics & the special biases resulting therefrom are considered, along with his independence from the work of Propp & the importance of Durkheim, cybernetics, information theory, & geology in his work. Levi-Straussian analyses of myth, considered to be very Saussurean in its concern with cultural codes & the intellectual processes by which these are elaborated & understood, are addressed. It is suggested that the reason for Levi-Strauss's importance lies not in any rigor of method, nor in any specific insights produced by his actual analyses, but instead in (1) his metatheoretical assertions about the kinds of cultural meanings that can inhere in mythic material & (2) in the complex chains of interconnectedness that he was able to show in the body of mythic material he examined. His metatheoretical assertions become areas of serious anthropological interest topics that had been foreclosed since the time of Frazer & Boas, while his detailed chains of connections show convincingly that such mythic material poses puzzles worthy of close attention. Modified AA