Page 18 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 17

Culture as ‘like a language’

Structuralism extends its reach from ‘words’ to the language of cultural signs in general.
Thus human relations, material objects and images are all analysed through the structures
of signs. In Lévi-Strauss (see Leach, 1974), we find structuralist principles at work when
he describes kinship systems as ‘like a language’ – that is, family relations are held to be
structured by the internal organization of binaries. For example, kinship patterns are
structured around the incest taboo that divides people into the marriageable and the
prohibited.
Typical of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is his approach to food, which, he declares, is
not so much good to eat, as good to think with. That is, food is a signifier of symbolic
meanings. Cultural conventions tell us what constitutes food and what does not, the cir-
cumstances of their eating and the meanings attached to them. Lévi-Strauss tends
towards the structuralist trope of binaries: the raw and the cooked, the edible and the
inedible, nature and culture, each of which has meaning only in relation to its opposite.
Cooking transforms nature into culture and the raw into the cooked.
The edible and the inedible are marked not by questions of nutrition but by cultural
meanings. An example of this would be the Jewish prohibition against pork and the
necessity to prepare food in culturally specific ways (kosher food). Here, binary opposi-
tions of the edible–inedible mark another binary, insiders and outsiders, and hence the
boundaries of the culture or social order. Later, Barthes (see Chapter 3) was to extend the
structuralist account of culture to the practices of popular culture and their naturalized
meanings or myths. He was to argue that the meanings of texts are to be grasped not in
terms of the intentions of specific human beings but as a set of signifying practices.
In sum:
v Culturalism focuses on meaning production by human actors in a historical context.
v Structuralism points to culture as an expression of deep structures of language
that lie outside of the intentions of actors and constrain them.
v Culturalism stresses history.
v Structuralism is synchronic in approach, analysing the structures of relations in a
snapshot of a particular moment. As such, it asserts the specificity of culture and
its irreducibility to any other phenomena.
v Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of understanding meaning.
v Structuralism has asserted the possibility of a science of signs and thus of objective
knowledge.
Structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis rather than an all-embracing phi-
losophy. However, the notion of stability of meaning, upon which the binaries of structuralism

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