Page 74 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURALISM 67

The perils of formalism

Edith Kurzweil (1980) calls Levi-Strauss 'the father of structural­
ism', and there is no doubt that he, more than anyone, was
responsible for the early promotion of structural analysis as a new
and stimulating approach to the human sciences. His essay
'L'Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie' (trans­
lated as Chapter 2 of Levi-Strauss, 1972) first appeared in 1945,
and in it he made a case for applying to anthropology the principles
of structural linguistics - the social science, he suggested, 'in
which by far the greatest progress has been made' (ibid: 31). As his
thinking developed in the 1950s and 1960s, he produced a body of
work which was clearly marked by the influence of the Saussurian
tradition. The familiar distinctions between paradigmatic and syn­
tagmatic, synchronic and diachronic, langue and parole, all inform
his thought, everywhere united in an attempt to understand the
relational structure of complex representational systems.
However, his is not a straightforward application of Saussurian
concepts, and Levi-Strauss offers his own distinctive variation on
structuralist ideas. In particular, he foregrounds two features that
were to become especially significant in the first phase of struc­
turalist influence on cultural studies. Saussure, it will be recalled,
focused upon the underlying system of langue, noting that in so
doing he was concerned to distinguish the social and essential
from the individual and ancillary. As we have already seen, for
him the key task was to grasp the 'logical and psychological con­
nexions between co-existing items constituting a system, as
perceived by the same collective consciousness [conscience col­
lective j ' (Saussure, 1983: 98) . The use of the Durkheimian
conscience collective here underscores Saussure's interest in the
system of shared social conventions, but a system which was not
consciously perceived by individuals and which had to be

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