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62 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
succession of concepts and disciplines were integrated in sequences into the
paradigm. I shall rather be concerned exclusively with identifying the broad lines
through which the reconceptualization of ‘the ideological’ occurred, and the
integration of certain key theoretical elements into the general framework of the
paradigm as such.

Cultural inventories
I shall first examine how ideologies work. Here we can begin with the influence
of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistic anthropology: an idea which, though
never picked up in detail, suggests some important continuities between the new
paradigm and some previous work, especially in social anthropology. The Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis suggested that each culture had a different way of classifying
the world. These schemes would be reflected, it argued, in the linguistic and
semantic structures of different societies. Lévi-Strauss worked on a similar idea,
though he gradually became less interested in the cultural specificity of each
society’s classification system, and more involved with outlining the universal
‘laws’ of signification—a universal transformational cultural ‘grammar’,
common to all cultural systems—associated with the cognitive function, the laws
of the mind, and with thinking as such. Lévi-Strauss performed such an analysis
on the cultural systems and myths of so-called ‘primitive’ societies—‘societies
without history’, as he called them. These examples were well fitted to his
universalism, since their cultural systems were highly repetitive, consisting often
of the weaving together of different transformations on the same, very limited
classificatory ‘sets’. Though the approach did not, clearly, hold so well for
societies of more continuous and extensive historical transformation, the general
idea proved a fruitful one: it showed how an apparently ‘free’ construction of
particular ideological discourses could be viewed as transformations worked on
the same, basic, ideological grid. In this, Lévi-Strauss was following Saussure’s
(1960) call for the development of a general ‘science of signs’—semiology: the
study of ‘the life of signs at the heart of social life’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1967, p. 16).
Potentially, it was argued, the approach could be applied to all societies and a
great variety of cultural systems. The name most prominently associated with
this broadening of ‘the science of signs’ was that of Roland Barthes, whose work
on modern myths, Mythologies, is a locus classicus for the study of the
intersection of myth, language and ideology. The further extrapolation —that
whole societies and social practices apart from language could also be analysed
‘on the model of a language’—was subsequently much developed, especially in
Marxist structuralism: though the germ of the idea was to be found in Lévi-
Strauss, who analysed kinship relations in primitive societies in just this way (i.e.
on a communicative model—the exchange of goods, messages and women) (Lévi-
Strauss, 1969).
The structuralist strand is, clearly, the most significant one, theoretically, in
this development. But we should note that similar pointers could be found in