Structuralism 1-1

Double synchronic study Raymond firth tikopia after 30 year interval. Diachronic study E leach in Myanmar examine the political formation in last 130 years using contemporary data.

Levi Strauss

three properties of human mind. People follow rules. Reciprocity is the simplest way to create social relationships. The gift binds the giver and the recipient in continuing social relationship.
Society and institutions are built upon structure of human mind therefore studying human mind is relevant. Structure of human mind is at the core.
Unity of opposites. None of the ideas can exist without the other.
Elementary structures of kinship 1949. marriage rules can be understand on basis of principles of reciprocity and exchange. Therefore can be reduced to variation of few marriage types. in structural Anthropology 1958 explain the structural method. Social structure is a concrete reality.
Totemism 1962. Totems as animals and natural objects are useful because they are useful as linguistic and classificatory devices to conceptualize and organise social relationships and groups. They are good to think about. Give the reference of Brazil tribes. Buganda totem clan also function as castes.
savage mind 1962. Demonstrated that primitive have logical concrete mode of thought. how cultures have their own system of concepts and categories derived from their experience and natural world. Naming of plants and animals concept of space and time, myth and ritual, how primitives organised abstract reasoning which is not inferior to the civilized people. There is no difference between civilized and primitive in that sense.
British social Anthropology believed social Anthropology as natural science of society. Positivist philosophy and discovery of universal law. He shifted away and called Anthropology as astronomer of social sciences. Don't study behaviour but study on mind to understand behaviour. The structures of human mind. Noam chomsky syntactic structures. Saussere structure of language. 1930 linguists focused on structure of language. Subconscious level there is a structure.
Not just institutions and trades but studying interrelationships between them for analysis.
parts of society like social relations institutions customs kinship marriage have to be studied with their interrelations and inter dependence. Change in one part leads to change in others.
Binary opposition model.
Conscious model like community having a festival. There is unconscious model that anthropologist discovers. Balinese cockfight underlying model identified by clifford geertz.
Mechanical model. Statistical model.
1945 book structural anthropology. Elementary structure of kinship 1949. Explain structuralism. things become understandable to the human mind when there is contrast good bad black white. Itself does not have meaning but meaning emerges from opposition. language symbols do not have meaning of words not do not have meaning but only any relation to one another meaning emerges.

Edmund leach

British anthropologist. Translated the works of Levi Strauss.
Political systems of highland Burma 1954. studied large and varied areas. Shifted attention towards structuralism.
conducted technical studies in kinship, marriage, ritual and myth. elaborated their notions of verbal categories. How humans categorise self and other uh culture and nature. Criticized radcliffe-brown who claimed that they can construct typology and in for social laws from ethnographic data.
In kachin. Mood alert and studied intercultural variation. Particularly Shan Valley people. Contrasting models of ideal political organisation - gumlao / gumsa- which alternated between egalitarian and hierarchical models like a pendulum.
Pul Eliya village in salon 1961. Meticulous catalogue of land tenure holding in relation to kinship systems. interpretation through exhaustive statistical information. Helped move social theory from decent to to alliance theory. insisted on empirical basis for structuralist generalization. rejecting Levi Strauss emphasis on universal properties of human mind.
Talked of social structure as social structure in practical situation and structure as a model. Practical is British and model is French thinking.
social structure refers to the set of ideas pertaining to distribution of power among individuals or group of individuals. {ideas : ideas E Power distribution among individuals and groups}
individuals and groups compete with each other for access to prestige steam rank status and power point this competition brings manipulation of social rules and manipulation by people. Anthropologist study communities at regard them as stable equilibrium but they are not.
Real societies exist in time and space and always changing. Never in equilibrium. Full of contradictions and id.me. So we need dynamic approach to social structure.
Kachin Myanmar field work. 1944 book the political system of highland Burma. criticize structural functionalism as inadequate to study social change. give the theory of dynamic theory of structure. studied land records police records government Court administration records over one thirty years and use field data. There is no clear principle of organisation and there was no rule for the formation of political group. Sometimes smaller groups created bigger groups and sometimes bigger groups dismantled into smaller groups.
Gumlao are egalitarian political units with smaller autonomous units but Shan is hierarchical non egalitarian largest political unit based on fetal aristocracy. The system never existed in equilibrium and always changing. In reality there was the system of Gumsa which has both features and complex model. Can only be understood if we construct the other two models previously shown
Social structure exists in the mind of a researcher and as equilibrium but in reality it is not.
Criticism. Does not allow for social change. Looks at society only in the present and ignoring the past. Does not account for social change. Lack of empirical evidence.