UNIT 1 FUNCTIONALISTS AND

STRUCTURALISTS
APPROACH
Contents
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Functionalism
1.2.1 Malinowski’s Brief Life History
1.2.2 Malinowski’s Criticism of Evolutionists and Diffusionists
1.2.3 Malinowski’s Fieldwork Method
1.2.4 Malinowski’s Functionalism
1.2.5 Criticism of Functionalism
1.3 Structural-Functional Approach
1.3.1 Radcliffe-Brown’s Brief Life History
1.3.2 Radcliffe-Brown’s Theory of Social Structure
1.3.3 Types of Social Structure
1.3.4 Radcliffe-Brown’s Structural-Functional Approach
1.3.5 Criticism of Structural-Functionalism Approach
1.4 Structuralism
1.4.1 Lévi-Strauss’ Brief Life History
1.4.2 Lévi-Strauss’ Structuralism
1.4.3 Lévi-Strauss’ Models
1.4.4 Main Areas of Study
1.4.5 Criticism of Lévi-Strauss Structuralism
1.5 Summary
References
Sample Questions

Learning Objectives
Once you have studied this unit, you should be able to:
 dene the concepts of “function” and “structure” in the study of societies/
cultures;
 describe different approaches to study ‘function and structure’; and
 indicate the differences between French ‘structuralism’ and British ‘function
and structure’.

1.1 INTRODUCTION
Anthropological approaches to study societies and cultures during the late nineteenth
century have been named after ‘evolution’ which was a major concept in explaining
how societies and cultures ‘evolved’ during the course of history. Evolutionary
schools of thought gave way to ‘diffusion’ or ‘culture-historic’ schools of thought
during the early 20 th century that uphold the view that culture is a product of
historical process.
The notion of function was not new as social philosophers right from ancient Greek
scholars like (Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and later Augustine, Hobbes and Locke), 5
Approaches to Ethnography recognized the relations between social institutions but they never developed a
sound theory of ‘function’. Even Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, while
using function as a major methodological tool in their writings, were more intent
in developing their theory of ‘positivism’ and left function largely unexplained.
The concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘function’ rst appeared in the writings of Herbert
Spencer in his book, Principles of Sociology (1885, vol.1), where he has dealt with
fundamental similarities between ‘organism’ and ‘society’. He has treated society as
an integrated order of parts like an organism. As an organism is a composition of
different parts, society also is a composition of different parts that are interrelated and
integrated to provide the ‘structure’ of that society. As different parts of the organism
perform different functions to make the existence of a body of the organism possible,
in the same way, different parts of a society contribute indispensable functions for
the existence of the society as an integrated whole.
Emile Durkheim, a well-known French sociologist, also used the concepts of
structure and function in his books, Division of Labour (1893) and The Rules
of Sociological Method (1895); however, he preferred the terms ‘monopoly’ and
‘physiology’ respectively. It was only in his writings the concept of function got
a greater methodological signicance. He too likened the society to an organism.
He held the view that just as an organism, in order to make the body alive, fullls
certain essential needs, society also has to fulll certain needs for its existence and
survival. The ‘activities’ by which the essential needs are fullled, he calls them as
‘function’. Durkheim dened function as the combination that a part makes to the
whole, which is for its maintenance and well being.
During the earlier part of twentieth century two British scholars pioneered what has
came to be known as ‘Functional and Structural’ approach to the analysis of culture.
Malinowski is associated with the functional approach, and Radcliffe-Brown is the
pioneer of structural-functional approach. Both of them were critical of evolutionary
and diffusionists views on culture. In their view, the evolutionists and diffusionists
analyses of cultures, about which written records were lacking, was not historical
but pseudo-historical. Similar cultural traits are generally accepted as indicating
historical connections. They held the view that the purpose of comparison in Social
Anthropology is to explore socio-cultural institutions of present day societies in
terms of their structural functional aspects. Comparative studies could thus be carried
out both synchronically (ahistorically) and diachronically (historically). Synchronic
studies deal with the descriptions of social life in a point of time without reference
to change in its general features, and diachronic studies deal with descriptions taking
into consideration two points of time to study changes. Accordingly, discrediting
the earlier evolutionists and diffusionists, they developed the concept of synchronic
functional analysis of culture which deals with the ‘present’, or in the words of
Radcliffe-Brown ‘here-and-now’. The ‘comparative method’ of the evolutionists
which involved reconstruction of the past by extrapolating from contemporary
primitive societies also came into sharp criticism by them.

1.2 FUNCTIONALISM
1.2.1 Malinowski’s Brief Life History
Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (1884-1942) was born in Cracow, Poland. He got his
Ph.D. degree in Physics and Mathematics from the University at Cracow in 1908.
Soon after, when he was recuperating from an illness, he read Frazer’s magnum opus
Golden Bough and immediately after reading it, he thought of taking up the career
of an anthropologist. He moved to England in 1910, where he met C.G. Seligman
and expressed his desire to become an anthropologist. On the advice of Seligman
6 he enrolled himself as a post-graduate student at the London School of Economics.
In 1914, he was awarded Robert Mond Travelling Studentship and during his six Functionalists and
years period at the Australian National University he made three extensive eld Structuralists Approach
trips to New Guinea, one to Mailu (1914-15) and two to Trobriand Islands (1915-16
and 1917-18). He obtained his [Link]. degree in 1916 on the basis of his works on
Australian aborigines and on Mailu. Later, at the London School of Economics in
the Department of Sociology, he taught on Primitive Religion, Social Differentiation
and Social Psychology. In 1924 he was appointed Reader in Anthropology at the
University of London, and in 1927 he occupied the rst Chair in Anthropology in
the University of London. He received an honorary [Link]. from Harvard University
in 1936. From September 1940 he was Bishop Museum Visiting Professor of Yale
till his death in 1942.

1.2.2 Malinowski’s Criticism of Evolutionists and Diffusionists

He was critical of the earlier evolutionists and the diffusionists whose emphasis
was on the study of forms of culture or cultural institutions without explaining their
functions. He was critical of the evolutionists’ concept of ‘survival’ maintaining that
no custom or institution is functionless. He was also critical of the diffusionists who
had treated cultures and cultural institutions in isolation. His main contention was
to examine cultures, explain and analyse as to why and how culture functions, how
different aspects of culture are integrated in the entire culture by their functions but
not to seek answers for their evolution or distribution.

1.2.3 Malinowski’s Fieldwork Method

His approach for doing eldwork is known as ‘participant observation’ which has
ever since became the hallmark of anthropological method. In his eldwork, he
practically lived with his subjects, speaking their language, participating in all their
customary practices and rituals, thus making his subjects feel that he was just like
them and one of them. Thus he acquired a new identity establishing full-edged
rapport with the natives. His approach was to learn the language of the natives and
collecting data in their language, and also writing ethnographic diary everyday during
eldwork. His approach relied on “statistical documentation by concrete evidence”
as the method for acquiring information about people, but not through the procedure
of the xed interviews with the help of the native interpreter. The Argonauts of
Western Pacic (1922) is a typical example of his method. In the Kula district, the
landscape is recreated and at each island the physical characteristics of the native and
main features of their social and economic organisation are described. His approach
is to make the readers slowly enter into different aspects of Trobriand life that are
interwoven with their social organisation. On Kula system (which is a system of
ceremonial exchange among the Trobriand Islanders), he dealt with different types of
valuables involved and the norms governing their exchange, the basis of partnership,
the importance of secondary economic transactions, and the background of ritual
and ideology. The rest of the volume dealt with the documentation of generalisations
by an account of the links in the chain of Kula performance – from the building of
a canoe, the departure of an expedition to Dobu, the ceremonial procedure which
occurs at each stage of journey. While the sequence of events provides the main
thread of the argument, the themes of the sociological mechanism underlying
the activities and the system of ideas at work in regulating labour and magic are
developed. In demonstrating the interlocking of structural, technological and ritual
aspects, he does not stop short at integrative description. He used it as a basis for
the analysis of the rules governing the organisation of labour, the distribution of
wealth, for the formulation of the principle of reciprocity and its importance in
kinship, political relations and law. While passing from one dimension to another,
from technological to structural or ideological, Malinowski has his own criteria
of relevance and these are determined by the scientic rigour which he considers
necessary for the documentation of his more abstract generalisations. In his accounts
7
Approaches to Ethnography of ceremonies, economic activities, domestic and village relations, he records the
imponderabilia of actual life. Thus, his study of Trobriand Islanders involved the
collection of statements of norms and concrete cases, genealogies, village census,
maps and especially the preparation of garden land, hunting and shing privileges,
the dovetailing of rituals and technical activities, the distribution of harvest, the
pattern of gift exchange in association with its sociological, ceremonial and economic
aspects. From the writings of Malinowski, informants emerge as living personalities
rather than the data providers. All details related to everyday life of the natives,
the routine of their working day, the care they took of their body, their personal
ambitions, their emotional behaviour including laughing and weeping, and every
aspect of their social and cultural life, were recorded by him conveying a sense of
actual reality to his readers. His approach to eldwork is with a goal to grasp the
native point of view, his relation to life, to realise the native’s vision of this world,
and these objectives Malinowski could realise getting inside the skin of the native.
He presented his data in the form of narratives, developing in that process the
implications of his generalisations for the theory in the elds of economics, law,
kinship, magic and religion.

1.2.4 Malinowski’s Functionalism

It was only in Malinowski’s writings, A Scientic Theory of Culture and Other Essays
(1944) and Dynamics of Culture Change (1945), a full-blown ‘functional approach’ in
the analysis of culture appeared. According to him, functionalism attempts to explain
the part institutions play within the interrelated whole of culture. Malinowski denes
functional method as: “The functional view of culture lays down the principle that
in every type of civilization, every custom, material object, idea and belief, fullls
some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part
within a working whole”. His emphasis is mainly on the role the institutions of a
culture play in satisfying the needs of the individuals and that of society as a whole
as every aspect of culture has a function. All aspects of culture are interdependent
and interrelated as there is a functional unity among them.
Malinowski notes that human beings have different kinds of needs such as social,
economic, biological, religious, etc., and in order to get these needs satised they
have developed material and non-material aspects of culture. Accordingly social,
economic, political, and religious institutions have originated. The purpose of
inventing language, literature, art, technology, etc., is to satisfy the human needs.
Again all human needs are interrelated to one another because they are related to
man as a whole. In the same way, culture traits appear externally as different but
they are integrated and united internally and the basis of this integration and unity
is the satisfaction of human needs. Malinowski maintains that change in one aspect
of culture results in change in culture as a whole. According to him ‘function’ is
a specic way of understanding institutions and customs of primitive life. In his
book, Magic, Science and Religion (1929), he saw function as largely fullling the
psychological need. Magic was the standardisation of optimism serving to provide
human beings with necessary condence to carry out his tasks, to maintain his
poise and his mental integrity in times of anger and anxiety. Religion also provides
outlets for emotional stress and also in maintaining moral law and order and works
towards the identication of the whole tribe as a unit. Eventually, Malinowski
related psychological and social functions to biological ones. Optimism and
condence enabled Trobrianders to become better food providers and magic, thus,
also contributed to physical survival. This notion of function as serving biological
needs became the core of Malinowski’s functional theory. In his book, A Scientic
Theory of Culture (1944), he reiterated his conviction that the functional method
of investigation is best suited to give an accurate picture of the realities of culture.
Malinowski’s main contention in ‘functionalism’ is that every aspect of culture
8 has a function, i.e. the satisfaction of a need. In this context, he distinguishes three
levels of needs: (i) basic, (ii) derived, and (iii) integrative. By basic needs, he Functionalists and
means biological needs such as nutrition, reproduction, growth, health, etc. The Structuralists Approach
primary function of culture is to fulll these requirements for survival and well-
being. The basic needs themselves are essentially constant across all populations,
but the cultural mechanisms people develop to fulll them vary from place to place
and time to time. Humans do not meet their needs in isolation from other humans.
They organize cooperative groups to meet their basic needs (or imperatives) more
effectively. They develop institutions to give their need-serving activities regularity
and predictability. People, therefore, must maintain the groups and institutions that
serve their bio-psychological needs. The behaviour of group members must be
regulated, roles must be doled out to individuals, access to natural resources must
be assigned, and so forth. Malinowski called these “derived needs” – in essence,
the needs of groups and institutions to be maintained and perpetuated over time. By
derived needs, he means production and distribution of consumer goods, regulatory
mechanisms of human behaviour, well dened authority to carry out forceful
executions, etc., and their corresponding cultural responses are those institutions
such as economic, educational, legal, which help to satisfy primary needs. Finally,
Malinowski argues that people will adhere to the requirements of their groups and
institutions only if they become committed to the norms and standards that guide
behaviour. This commitment is achieved through creating emotional attachment to
the whole way of life. These are the integrative needs that help the society to cohere
such as religion, magic and play.
In functional approach, it is the researchers task to discover the specic functions
of the element of culture within the integrated whole. Functional analysis of culture
reveals that culture is the handiwork of man and it is the medium through which
he achieves his end, a medium which allows him to live, to establish a standard of
safety, comfort and prosperity; medium which gives him power and allows him to
create goods and values beyond his animal, organic endowment, that culture, in all
this and through all this, must be understood as a means to an end, i.e., instrumentally
or functionally.

Re lection
One important thing about Malinowski’s approach is that it considers
individuals as the starting point for explanation. Directly or indirectly, all
cultural elements function to meet the bio-psychological needs of individuals.

According to Malinowski the following are the general axioms of functionalism:

a) Culture is essentially an instrumental apparatus by which man is put in a
position to cope better with the concrete specic problems that face him in his
environment in the course of satisfying his needs.
b) It is a system of objects, activities, and attitudes in which every part exists as
a means to an end.
c) It is an integrated system in which the various elements are interdependent.
d) Such activities, attitudes, objects are organised around important and vital tasks
into institutions such as the family, the clan, the local community, the tribe, and
the organised teams of economic cooperation, political, legal and educational
activities.
e) From the dynamic point of view, that is, as regards the type of activity, culture
can be analysed into a number of aspects such as education, social control,
economics, systems of knowledge, belief and morality, and also modes of
creative and artistic expression.
9
Approaches to Ethnography 1.2.5 Criticism of Functionalism
The main problem with such an approach is that, by themselves individual needs
provide no explanation for why cultures in the way they meet basic needs. Why do
different people fulll their needs in different ways? For example, unless we know
why some people satisfy their nutritional needs by eating beef, whereas, others
refuse to consume cattle esh even though they are hungry, we have not explained
a population’s food getting behaviour. It may be noted here that human biological
and psychological needs are relatively constant across societies and, therefore, cannot
by themselves explain cultural variation.

1.3 STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONAL APPROACH

The second variety of functionalism that arose in Great Britain takes the needs of
society and not the needs of individuals as its starting point. Its adherents became
known as Structural Functionalists, because they believed that the function of some
particular cultural element is the contribution it makes to the persistence of social
structure. Social structure refers to the enduring pattern of relationships between
individuals and groups. The leading proponent of this approach was A.R. Radcliffe-
Brown who imagined that human societies are in some ways like living organisms.

1.3.1 Radcliffe-Brown’s Brief Life History

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born in 1881. He started his career as a
student of W.H.R. Rivers, a British diffusionist, who was strongly interested in
history. Rivers sent Radcliffe-Brown to Andaman Islands (of India) in 1906 with the
task of reconstructing the cultural history of these non-literate Andaman Islanders.
Averse to making conjectural and hypothetical reconstructions, he dutifully recorded
Andamanese myths, ceremonies, and customs. Much delayed his book on the
Andaman Islanders appeared in 1922. In the mean time he got acquainted with the
writings of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and realised that it was much more
important to study meanings and function.

1.3.2 Radcliffe-Browns Theory of Social Structure

Although Radcliffe-Brown used the concept of ‘social structure’ while delivering a
lecture in Birmingham as early as 1914, he described it in detail only in 1940 while
delivering his Presidential address at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain. On that occasion he divided anthropologists into students of ‘Society’ and
‘Culture’. He was of the opinion that Social anthropologists main concern was with
the study of ‘society’ and its ‘structural features’.
In his book, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952), he has elaborately
dealt with his concept of ‘social structure’ and the features of ‘function’. He has
dened ‘social structure as the complex network of actually existing relations’. He
maintained that the “components of social structure are human beings, the structure
itself being an arrangement of persons in a relationship institutionally dened and
regulated” (1950:82). ‘Function’ is dened by him as “the contribution a partial
activity makes to the total activity of which it is a part”. The function of a particular
social usage is the contribution it makes to the total social life as the functioning of
the total social system. Such a view implies that a social system has certain kind of
functional unity. He denes it as a condition in which all parts of the social system
work together with a sufcient degree of harmony or internal consistency.

1.3.3 Types of Social Structure

Radcliffe-Brown distinguished ‘social structure’ (the actual social structure) from
10 ‘structural type’ (general social structure). According to him in actual structure the
relations of persons and groups of persons change from time to time. New members Functionalists and
come in by birth and immigrations while others go out by death and migration. Structuralists Approach
Besides this, there are marriages and divorces, whereby members change several
times. Thus while the actual social structure changes many times, the general social
structure may remain relatively constant for a long time. He held the view that the
structural form changes gradually but abrupt changes could be witnessed during the
times of revolution or military conquests. But, even in sudden changes the continuity
of structure is maintained to a considerable extent.

1.3.4 Radcliffe-Brown’s Structural-Functional Approach

To illustrate the relationship between structure and function, Radcliffe-Brown turned
to biology. The structure of an organism consists of an ordered arrangement of parts.
The function of the parts is to interrelate in the structure of an organism. Similarly,
social structure is an ordered arrangement of persons and groups whose function is
to inter-relate the structure of society. Social function is the interconnection between
social structure and social life. Like an organism, the social life of a community may
be dened as the functioning of its social structure. The function of any recurrent
activity (such as punishment of a crime or a funeral ceremony) is the part it plays
in social life as a whole and therefore, the contribution it makes to the maintenance
of the structural continuity. The importance of the differentiation between structure
and function is that it can be applied to the study of both continuity in the forms
of social life and the processes of change.
An institution is an established norm of conduct recognized as such by a
distinguishable social group. Social institutions, in the sense of standardised modes
of behaviour, constitute the machinery by which a social structure maintains its
existence and continuity. Radcliffe-Brown denes the social function of a socially
standardised mode of activity (or mode of thought) as its relation to the social
structure, to the existence and continuity of which it makes some contribution. Thus,
the social structure consists of the ordered arrangement of parts and the function
of the parts is to inter-relate the components of the structure, and to maintain its
integrity. Social function is the interconnection between social structure and social
life.
He applied his structural-functional principles mainly to the analysis of kinship
systems in his work Structure and Function in Primitive Societies. His discussion
of the role of mother’s brother in the kinship system of some South African tribes
(such as the Bathonga, Nama-hottentots and Tongans) is very distinctive. Avunculate
refers to the privileged relationship that exists between mother’s brother and sister’s
son. He explains this relationship from the structural-functional point of view by
focusing on the relatives in the kinship structure and their roles (or functions)
performed by them. In order to explain avunculate, Radcliffe-Brown considers
the relationships on the father’s side and then sees how these are balanced by the
relationships on the mother’s side. He demonstrated that as in a patrilineal system,
authority over a man is vested in his father’s lineage, he seeks indulgence from his
mother’s lineage, and by extension from the men of his mother’s lineage. Thus,
while deference characterises the relationship on the father’s side, it is structurally
balanced by the indulgence in the relationship with the mother’s side. The reverse
occurs in matrilineal systems. To explain avunculate, he made use of the functional
extension of sentiments and the structural equivalence of siblings.
Structural functionalism emphasizes that various customs and beliefs of a people
form an integrated system. Parts cannot be understood in isolation from each other
or from the whole system because each has denite relations to the others and each
has its function to perform on behalf of the social body. Incidentally, structural-
functionalists disliked the diffusionist term ‘trait’ because it implies that cultural
elements are sufciently independent from one another and can be transmitted 11
Approaches to Ethnography freely from people to people. By emphasizing the integration of culture, structural
functionalism strengthened the holistic perspective of anthropological thought.

1.3.5 Criticism of Structural-Functional Approach

Despite the above cited contributions, the structural functionalists failed to answer
many questions adequately. First, because of their emphasis on steady states, they
did not produce an adequate theory of why cultures change. Such a theory is a
reasonable requirement of any approach, because change occurs everywhere at
varying rates. Second, most structural functionalists treated widespread conict as
an abnormal state: if individuals and groups regularly quarreled or fought with one
another, structural functionalists believed that something had gone wrong with the
mechanisms that restored equilibrium. Most anthropologists now recognize that
conict is a normal condition in almost all people.

Re lection
Radcliffe-Brown, although initially used the term ‘culture’, later he con ined
himself to ‘Social Structure’, whereas Malinowski has treated Social Structure
or Social Organization as one of the aspects of Culture. Thus, Malinowski deals
with Culture and Radcliffe-Brown with Society. Malinowski holds the view
that the functional whole of culture could be understood in its relationship to
man’s biology and his environment. He was not concerned with the universal
sociological principles or laws as Radcliffe-Brown was. Malinowski’s cultural
laws were the relations that exist between individual needs and social
institutions, which can be discovered through a comparative study of cultures.
To Radcliffe-Brown, each institution of society contributes functionally in the
existence of society.

1.4 STRUCTURALISM
The famous French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss is the founder of structuralism.
The term structure as used by him should not be confused with Radcliffe-Brown’s
‘social structure’. Whereas social structure refers to the pattern of network of actually
existing social relations between individuals and groups, Levi-Strauss is concerned
with the structure of the human mind. His goal is to show how the structure of the
mind unconsciously rearranges available ideas, themes, symbols, and objects into
patterns, and thus creates culture itself. The basic assumption of structuralism is
that the mind possesses certain given properties which are the source of all human
achievements. Structural analysis attempts to unravel the logic of the human mind.

1.4.1 Lévi-Strauss’ Brief Life History

He was born in 1908 in Belgium but lived near Varsailles with his parents from
1914 to 1918. He was a student in the University of Paris during 1927 and 1932,
where he took a degree in Law with aggregation in Philosophy. French school of
sociology, notably Saint Simon, Comte, Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, inuenced him
immensely. He worked as a teacher in Lyc’ee during 1932-34 and was Professor of
Sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil from 1934 to 1937. He researched
on Nambikwara and Tupi-kawahib Indians in central Brazil during 1938-39 and later
served French military for some time. After a brief stint at the New York School of
Social Research, he came back to France in 1950 to occupy the post of Director in
the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the University of Paris. In 1959, he was
appointed as Professor of Social Anthropology at the College de France.

1.4.2 Lévi-Strauss’ Structuralism

Lévi-Strauss believes that our thought is patterned in dual contrasts – the mind
12 works by “binary oppositions”. When we think about something we unconsciously
think about its opposite. The mind imposes a logical order on natural and social Functionalists and
phenomena by opposing certain qualities to other qualities. Such binary oppositions Structuralists Approach
are not real or objective characteristics of reality; actual objects and qualities in the
real world grade into one another. But because the mind thinks in dual contrasts, it
makes reality intelligible by breaking it up into pairs of opposites, then rearranging
the opposites into a pattern. This structure of thought, which is common to all
humanity, underlies culture, for culture results from unconscious activity of the mind.
The inspiration for structuralism came from linguistics: just as a grammar selectively
recognizes and makes patterns, structures, and meanings from distinctions between
sounds and morphemes, so does the mind impose patterns, structures, and meanings
on phenomena of all kinds. Further, like Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar,
which underlies a linguistic diversity that is only supercial, Lévi-Strauss believes
that cultural diversity is more apparent than real. In many of his complex empirical
studies of myth, he tries to show that some myths are merely transformations of
other myths, the same themes rearranged in new ways.

1.4.3 Lévi-Strauss’ Models

He regards Social Structure as a ‘model’ and the aim of studies on social structure
is to understand social relations with the help of the models. According to him, the
term ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality, but with models
which are built after it. Social relations are the raw material, out of which the
models making up social structure are built. Social Structure thus belongs to a
different epistemological category and it can “never be reduced to the ensemble of
social relations to be described in a given society”. A structure consists of a model
meeting with the following requirements:
First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several
elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all other
elements; second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a
series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type; third,
the properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or more
of its elements are subjected to certain modications; fourth, the model should be
constituted so as to make immediately intelligible all the observed facts.
In the structural analysis the following distinctions have to be made between different
kinds of models:
a) Conscious and Unconscious Models: The distinction between the two models
is one of degree but not one of categorical difference. Conscious models are the
“home made models” (or norms) that stand in the “collective consciousness”
hiding deeper and un-transcendental, according to which the society views itself.
It is generally more protable for anthropologists to work with unconscious
models that they constructed out of the deeper-lying phenomena than with
the conscious models. But conscious models are more accurate and they are
not intended to explain phenomena but to perpetuate them. For these reasons
anthropologists cannot dismiss conscious models when analysing the structure
of society.
b) Mechanical Models and Statistical Models: A model, the elements of which
are on the same scale as phenomena, is called a ‘mechanical model’; when the
elements of the model are on a different scale, it is called a ‘statistical model’.
The laws of marriage provide the best example to illustrate this difference. In
primitive societies these laws can be expressed in models calling for actual
grouping of the individuals according to kin or clan; these are mechanical
models. On the other hand, kinship in our own society would have to be
interpreted according to a statistical model because permitted and prescribed
marriages are not governed by a set of generative rules, but by factors as diverse 13
Approaches to Ethnography as chance, social mobility, social class, and even the pure emotional desires of
those involved. A satisfactory attempt to formulate the variants of our marriage
system would therefore have to determine average values—thresholds; it
would be a statistical model. He, thus, makes a distinction between jural rules
(mechanical model) and statistical norms (statistical model).
In studies on social structure, two important things have to be kept in mind: First,
there may be intermediate stages between mechanical and statistical models, such
as ‘the case in societies which have a mechanical model to determine prohibited
marriage and rely on a statistical model for those which are permissible. Second,
in order to explain a given set of social facts, it may be necessary to construct both
these models, depending on the inter-relationship of these facts and their relationships
to other facts. For example, in a study of a society which recommends cross-cousin
marriage, where this ideal type of marriage occurs with limited frequency, in order
that the system may be properly explained, both these models become necessary.
Levi-Strauss maintains that the value of social structure studies lies in the comparable
nature of the structures as models.

1.4.4 Main Areas of Study

Structural Anthropology has focused mainly on three areas of study: (1) kinship
analysis; (2) analysis of myth; and (3) semantic analysis.
In his monumental work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Lévi-
Strauss took incest taboos as the point of departure because only when these are
implemented human beings can cross the threshold from ‘nature’ to ‘culture’. Incest
taboos are universally present in all cultures though the specic rules differ from
society to society. It is a fact that incest taboos possess social functions, but these
cannot account for their origin because it is impossible to believe that early man who
instituted these rules could have known their possible advantages. Instead, incest
taboos ultimately depend upon the property of human mind to think in opposites and
the most fundamental dichotomy is the distinction between “self” and “others”. This
distinction makes ‘communication’ possible between ‘own group’ and ‘other group’.
Only when this distinction is made, a true symbolic communication is possible. The
communication is reciprocal exchange that takes place on three fundamental levels:
(i) exchanges of message, (ii) exchange of goods, and (iii) exchange of women.
For Lévi-Strauss, it is the ‘communication of women’ that is the focus of interest
in kinship studies. What determines the communication of women is the universal
structural ‘principle of reciprocity’ which necessitates the ‘exchange’ of women.
Generally, marital exchange may be accomplished through either of these two ways:
(1) restricted exchange in which two groups exchange women directly, and (2)
generalized exchange in which more than two groups exchange women indirectly in a
circular fashion. Lévi-Strauss has discussed elaborately on the structural implications
of the several forms of exchange in his book.
In his paper on “The Structural Study of Myth”, Lévi-Strauss dealt with various
versions of the Oedipus myth. He maintains that myth is not to be read as a story,
but must be broken down into its basic constituents which he called “mythemes”
analogues to the linguistic phonemes. These mythemes represent the nature-culture
dichotomy hinging on incest taboos. Lévi-Strauss elaborated his method in his four
volume Mythologiques published during 1964 and 1972. He explored 187 South
American myths in The Raw and the Cooked (1969) and in subsequent volumes
another six hundred myths were analysed. Although they are all different in content,
Lévi-Strauss tried to demonstrate that their underlying structures display remarkable
similarities. The differences in myths are brought into harmony by working out
relatively simple oppositions in which nature and culture gure prominently. For
example, honey is always consumed ‘raw’, and it represents nature, but honey is
14 also enticing and seductive. Hence all myths dealing with seduction stand in the
same structural position as honey. Lévi-Strauss could thus demonstrate that myth, Functionalists and
like the rest of language, is made up of constituent units. These constituent units Structuralists Approach
presuppose the constituent units of the language when analysed on other levels-
namely, phonemes, morphemes—but they, nevertheless, differ from the latter in
the same way as the latter differ among themselves; they belong to a higher and
more complex order.
Lévi-Strauss explained the Oedipus myth and a series of North American myths by
employing the structural method of analysis. He contends that the structural method
has the advantage of bringing some order into what was previously chaos. It also
enables to perceive some basic logical processes which are at the root of mythical
thought. In his The Savage Mind he elaborately showed that the intellectual process
involved in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of scientic thinking.
He resorted to Semantic Analysis in all these areas of study while working out the
‘binary opposites’.

1.4.5 Criticism of Lévi-Strauss’ Structuralism

Lévi-Strauss holds the view that the prerequisites of structural analysis are to collect
the facts and to order them, but he does not mention the criteria by which the
researcher should go about collecting facts. Unless there are independent criteria
for selecting the facts, how can the researchers decide which to include or which to
exclude. Lévi-Strauss tried to counter this criticism by distinguishing observation
and experimentation.
Observation and Experimentation: To observe facts and elaborate methodological
devices, permitting construction of models out of these things is not the same thing
as to experiment on the models. By ‘experimenting on models’ is meant the set of
procedures aiming at ascertaining how a given model will react when subjected to
change and comparing models of the same or different types. At the observational
level, the principal rule is that all the facts should be carefully observed and
described, without allowing any theoretical preconception to decide whether some
are more important and the others less. This rule implies, in turn, that facts should
be studied in relation to themselves and in relations to the whole. There should be a
direct relationship between the level of observation and experimentation, or between
“the concreteness of ethnographic detail” and the models constructed after it, for
in the nal analysis, the best model is that which is true, i.e., that which accounts
for all of the observed facts.

1.5 SUMMARY
Three famous Anthropologists have contributed immensely to our understanding
of the concepts of ‘function’ and ‘structure’. Malinowski is associated with
‘functionalism’ where as Radcliffe-Brown with ‘structural-functional approach’. The
French scholar, Lévi-Strauss is associated with ‘structuralism’. Malinowski explained
his functional theory of culture with his theory of needs and how these needs are
sub-served by cultural arrangements in the form of institutions. Radcliffe-Brown
views structure as a network of actually existing relations and explained function
as the contribution a partial activity makes to the total activity of which it is a part.
Both these British scholars tried to present a synchronic view of societies amenable
for comparison. For Radcliffe-Brown these comparisons should give rise to universal
sociological principles. Lévi-Strauss agrees with Radcliffe-Brown that structure
is an ordered arrangement of parts or components but Radcliffe-Brown examines
social structure to discover social functions taking inter-personal relationships as
his starting point. Lévi-Strauss is not concerned with social functions and considers
them self understood. Function is to produce the consequences, which it does not
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Approaches to Ethnography produce. He is concerned with ‘structure’ not from the inter-personal point of view
but to discover the structure of human thought process. Drawing heavily upon the
similarities between structural linguistics and structural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss
arguments of structure are not concerned with the structure of the mind and how
it conceives society. In that direction he contends that our task of understanding
societies is through models because ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical
reality but with models that are built after it.

References
Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1939. ‘The Group and individual in Functional Analysis’.
American Journal of Sociology, 44:938-64.
----------1960. A Scientic Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Agalaxy Book,
New York : Oxford University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1935. ‘Concept of Function in Social Science’. American
Anthropologist. 37:394-402
Upadhyay, V.S and Gaya Pandey. 1993. History of Anthropological Thought. New
Delhi: Concept Publishing Company.

Sample Questions
1) Discuss functionalism.
2) What is the structural-functional approach?
3) Discuss structuralism.

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