Structuralism and national traditions of anthropology
While it is easy to think of Levi-Strauss as the paradigmatic structuralist and his universalistic concerns the epitome of structuralist theory, his thought has both paralleled and influenced structuralist anthropologists working from different premises. Many do not accept his emphasis on psychic unity, favouring either regional or culture-specific foci.
Dutch structuralism emerged from studies of language, culture, and society, by Dutch academics and civil servants in the early twentieth-century Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This form of structuralism, described in chapter 4, emphasizes structures which are unique to culture areas or regions (e.g., J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong 1977 [1935]). J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong and other early Dutch structuralists developed their ideas partly independently of Levi-Strauss, and even anticipated him, especially in studies of kinship. Later Dutch anthropologists utilized Levi-Straus-sian methods and replicated Levi-Straussian studies of mythology and symbolism, generally within a regional framework. Such a regional approach was characteristic of anthropology, especially in Leiden, for several decades.
Although Levi-Strauss, rather like Levy-Bruhl, has often commented on distinctions between 'elementary' structures and 'complex' ones,
'cold' societies and 'hot' ones (with reference to the relative 'heat' of historical change), and societies with mainly 'concrete' and those with 'abstract' thought, his entire approach is predicated on reasoning from the general to the specific. British structuralists have tended to work the other way round, and that is why even those Britons who have been much influenced by Levi-Strauss' work have found themselves expressing fundamental disagreements with his methodology. This is somewhat true with Leach, but even more so with Rodney Needham (e.g., 1962) in his work on kinship. In the 1970s and 1980s as Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford, Needham went on to write prolifically on language, religion, symbolic classification, emotion, and what might best be called anthropological philosophy. Sadly, after his disagreements with Levi-Strauss Needham hardly ever, in this later, non-kinship work, referred to him. Some of Needham's works still carried structuralist theory with them (e.g. Needham 1979), while others obscured it or cast it aside in favour of an emotional variety of interpretivism almost unique to Need-ham's anthropology (e.g., 1981).
In other countries structuralism caught on in various ways between the 1950s and 1970s, but the Dutch and British traditions have remained the prime exemplars respectively of the regional and culture-specific versions. Belgian anthropology has some parallels with anthropology in Holland. Belgian structuralist Luc de Heusch has applied a regional-structural methodology to the study of political processes, kinship transformations, myth, sacrifice, and symbolism in Central Africa (e.g., de Heusch 1982 [1972]) and in Africa more widely (de Heusch 1985). Roy Willis, a British anthropologist and translator of both de Heusch and Levi-Strauss, has done similar work in Central Africa (see Willis 1981) and has postulated a common structural basis (but with crucial culture-specific differences) for animal symbolism in African societies outside that region (Willis 1974). As we saw in chapter 6, Sir Edmund Leach and Marshall Sahlins also applied a structuralist approach to the study of social transformations. These writers have all added a historical dimension to Levi-Strauss' structuralism, giving rise to theories of social transformation which both influenced and drew from processualist and Marxist anthropology from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Meanwhile back in France, Louis Dumont, a student of Mauss and one-time colleague of Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, developed a distinct but seminal, regional-structural understanding of social hierarchy in India (see especially Dumont 1980 [1967]). His work has had its followers, and its critics, in all countries in which the study of the Indian subcontinent is a particular focus. Meanwhile in the United States, studies in ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology developed through interests in human universals, linguistic models, and culture-specific semantic structures which parallel 'structuralism' proper in other countries. Levi-Strauss himself has frequently praised Americans outside the structuralist tradition as we usually think of it, for their contributions towards his own theories. In Australia and South America too, the intrinsic structuralist thought of the indigenous populations has lent itself well to the development of structuralist ideas among local anthropologists.
Other French anthropologists developed different strands of thought, most broadly structuralist but others less so. Furthermore, the structure of French academia itself, based on research 'teams' (équipes) rather than broad-based teaching departments, fostered the creation of diverse ethnographic and theoretical micro-traditions. Levi-Strauss and Dumont were key foci, but so too were, for example, Marxist theorists such as Maurice Godelier and Claude Meillassoux (chapter 6).
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