"LANGUAGE AND THE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL LAWS"

Among all social phenomena, Lévi-Strauss writes, "language alone has thus far been studied in a manner which permits it to serve as the object of truly scientific analysis" (58). Indeed, he argues, the study of modern phonemics in the wake of Saussure has proved that phonemes (what Saussure calls the signifier or the sound-image) consist of "fundamental and objective realities consisting of systems of relations which are the products of unconscious thought processes" (58). Linguistic behaviour largely occurs at the level of unconscious thought in that when we speak, we are not conscious of the syntactic and morphological laws of the language that we use but which we apply anyway. Lévi-Strauss suggests that "all forms of social phenomena are substantially of the same nature" (58-9) and "consist of systems of behavior that represent the projection, on the level of conscious and socialised thought, of universal laws which regulate the unconscious activities of the mind" (59).

These social laws are not determinable by purely empirical observation nor by intuitive consideration of phenomena. The nature of the social sciences is such that the observer necessarily has an effect on the observed phenomena, a problem that is circumvented by the methodology provided by linguistics which has the ability to apprehend the so-called ‘deep structures,’ rather than surface appearance, of the phenomena in question. Lévi-Strauss concludes that "insofar as language is concerned we need not fear the influence of the observer on the observed phenomenon, because the observer cannot modify the phenomenon merely by becoming conscious of it" (57).

Lévi-Strauss proposes to apply the insights of Structuralist (or post-Saussurean) linguistics to the study of certain features of social organisation, particularly of marriage rules and kinship networks. Indeed, for Lévi-Strauss, it is the kinship system which is the fundamental feature of all social organisations, something more basic than the mode of economic production which, according to Marxists, is the ‘base’ of all societies. Marxists, you might recall, deploy the architectural trope of the Base/superstructure which serves as a template, as it were, that they can impose upon any society in an effort to comprehend its structure. That is, even before humans organise themselves economically in order to ensure the means of their physical survival, humans are born into a set of familial relations which determines their identity in relation to other humans, in particular those closest to them.

Lévi-Straus argues that the kinship system (the relationship between mother, father, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.) is itself the product of a set of marriage rules which are themselves based on rules of sexual conduct. In all societies, it would seem, there is operative what Freud would term an ‘incest prohibition’ as a result of which not all women are available to all men. Sons, for example, are forbidden to have sex with their mothers in all human societies that anthropologists know about. The question which arises is, consequently, how does one explain this fact? Freud’s explanation centred around the castration complex whereby the threatened horror of castration forces young males to abandon any sexual attraction to their mother. Lévi-Strauss offers another explanation, however, drawing upon the famous view expressed by earlier anthropologists like Marcel Mauss that the cohesion of primitive societies was established upon the basis of reciprocity, that is, the exchange of gifts. Lévi-Strauss argues that the most precious gift ensuring social cohesion (the gathering of a particular group of persons to form a community and, thus, the necessary exclusion of others) is the exchange of women between males. All known cultures have been patriarchal (matriarchies have existed only, as far as anyone can tell, in mythical form). Men have thus always had the power to give their female biological relatives to others, not because of some innate or culturally acquired aversion to one’s mother or one’s sister, but in the interest of establishing alliances with other males. They do this, however, without conscious knowledge of this fact. Lévi-Strauss puts it this way: the

complete set of marriage regulations operating in human societies, and usually classified under different headings, such as incest prohibitions, preferential forms of marriage, and the like, can be interpreted as being so many different ways of insuring the circulation of women within the social group or of substituting the mechanism of sociologically determined affinity for that of a biologically determined consanguinity. (60)

In other words, for social cohesion to extend beyond solely blood relatives and to include those with whom one has no biological relationship, male humans, the historically dominant gender, would give away their daughters and sisters to other males to ensure that social rivalry would be replaced with amity. Exogamy, rather than endogamy, is the ‘name of the game,’ as it were and the fundamental principle uniting humans in communities.

In view of this, Lévi-Strauss argues that it is possible to "make a mathematical study of every type of exchange between n partners to enable one almost automatically to arrive at every type of marriage rule actually operating in living societies and, eventually, to discover other rules that are merely possible" (60). To this end, Lévi-Strauss asserts that marriage rules and kinship systems are best treated "as a kind of language, a set of processes permitting the establishment, between individuals and groups, of a certain type of communication" (61). In this case, instead of signs being passed from individual to individual (as is the case with verbal communication), it is the "women of the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families" (61). In short the different aspects of social life can be studied by the methods employed by Saussurean linguistics because they "constitute phenomena whose inmost nature is the same as that of language" (62).

Viewing the kinship system as if were something akin to a sign system sheds much light on the nature of both the relationships and the participants in those relationships in human societies. All signs consist of a signifier and a signified, that is, they involve both a ‘sound-image’ as well as a concept or value. In much the same way, the participants in a kinship system are equivalent to signs in that they also consist of both a signifier (e.g. ‘woman’) and signified, the latter representing the signification or value attached to that participant by virtue of its role in the system. A woman’s value, for example, corresponds to her worth as an object of exchange to the social group of which she is part. By contrast, men’s value consist in the role of exchanger, rather than exchangee, which they are assigned. Like signs which do not possess meaning in and of themselves, both men and women do not choose but are assigned their respective roles in their kinship system by virtue of the accident of their birth: the former are born with a penis, the latter with a vagina.

A major consequence of this new method of studying social life is that the question arises "whether or not different types of communications systems in the same societies--that is, kinship and language--are or are not caused by identical unconscious structures" (62). Lévi-Strauss posits that a "substantial identity" (62) exists between language structure and kinship systems. From this point of view, great similarities are seen to exist between seemingly diverse forms of social life (the kinship system, art, law and religion, etc.) which can all, in the same way that the functioning of language can, be reduced to the ‘deep structures’ of which they are comprised. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss asserts, such a view would seem to overcome the

opposition between the collective nature of culture and its manifestation in the individual, since the so-called ‘collective consciousness’ would, in the final analysis, be no more than the expression, on the level of individual thought and behavior, of certain time and space modalities of the universal laws which make up the unconscious activity of the mind. (65)

In other words, humans act and relate to each other in ways that have been pre-scripted for them.

"STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS IN LINGUISTICS AND ANTHROPOLOGY"

Here, Lévi-Strauss is of the view that recent advances in linguistics in the wake of Saussure affords us the means to achieve empirically accurate knowledge of cultural phenomena. (Where sociologists study ‘society,’ anthropologists study ‘culture,’ arguably the same referent for the most part as ‘society,’ but one conceptualised differently.) Linguistics can assist the anthropologist in particular in his study of the kinship system which is at the very heart of human culture. In order to understand the latter, one must comprehend the former.

Hitherto, Lévi-Strauss points out, a diachronic or historical approach to linguistics (which applies a diachronic approach to understanding the meaning of words) provided him with the etymologies which allowed him to come to grips with the historical development of the meanings of each of the terms designating the main participants in the kinship system, meanings that were not always immediately apparent. For example, fatherhood is a role that has changed over time. A synchronic or structural approach to linguistics permits kinship in any given culture to be studied also as a synchronic system, in the process shifting the study from the changing role of the phenomena themselves over time (e.g the role of the father) to the way in which these roles are determined at any given moment in time by their unconscious participation in an infrastructure (the rules by which certain roles are unknowingly assigned to particular participants). Such an approach does not treat the terms which comprise that system as independent entities but rather analyses the relations between terms. The goal in so doing is to uncover the general ‘laws’ or rules that govern human culture universally.

Confronted with a given culture, the anthropologist finds himself in a situation which formally resembles that of the Structural linguist confronted with the phenomenon of language. "Although they belong to another order of reality, kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena" (34) as a result of which anthropologists should make use of a "method analogous in form (if not in content) to the method used in structural linguistics" (34). Like phonemes (signifiers), kinship terms are elements of meaning and acquire meaning only when integrated into systems: the

recurrence of kinship patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit. . . . Although they belong to another order of reality, kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena. (34)

Lévi-Strauss is not saying that a signifying system is merely one model or paradigm or metaphor or trope which an observer imposes on social phenomena in an effort to apprehend social reality. (Marxists, similarly, do not consider the Base/superstructure of a society a mere model which one imposes on social phenomena for interpretive purposes. For them, it is a structure inherent in every society.) Lévi-Strauss’s argument is, rather, that a similar structure to that identified by Saussureans in language also inheres in the social phenomena under investigation which the Structuralist, in a tautological act of cognition, merely traces or reproduces.

Whereas the linguist analyses phonemes by distinguishing their distinctive features which s/he can then group into pairs of oppositions (e.g. harsh consonants versus soft vowels), Lévi-Strauss contends that the anthropologist should not yield to the temptation to break down analytically the kinship terms of any given system merely into their component oppositions. The crucial thing is to ask what is the nature of the relationships which link each term in the system to the others. The error of traditional anthropology was to consider the terms and not the relations between the terms. From this point of view, any kinship system consists of a terminology and a set of corresponding attitudes or values that are psychological and social in nature. That is, it is comprised of a nomenclature (this would be the signifiers) by which the various participants (e.g. father) are designated and the prescribed behaviour or roles (this would be the signifieds) enjoined upon the terms as a result of their relation with each other (e.g. fatherhood). Structuralist linguistics when applied to Anthropology allows us to understand how the system is composed and to what end the component elements function as well as the function of the system as a whole.

In order to understand any specific kinship term, we must accordingly treat it in terms of its relationship to the rest of the system which must be considered as a whole if we are to grasp its structure. This structure of the kinship system is basically organised around four terms (brother, sister, father, mother). This structure is the most elementary form of kinship that can exist: it is the basic unit of kinship. In order for this unit to exist, three types of family relationship must always be present: one of consanguinity (between siblings), one of affinity (between spouses) and one of descent (between parent and child). Males and females tied by consanguinity or descent are not allowed to have sexual relations with each other. The reason for this is the goal of social cohesion discussed earlier: such relationships are forbidden because male patriarchs need to give their women (daughters, sisters) to other patriarchs in order to forge social alliances: the "primitive and irreducible character of the basic unit of kinship . . . is actually a direct result of the universal presence of an incest taboo" (46), which is to say that "in human society a man must obtain a woman from another man who gives him a daughter or a sister" (46).

In the final analysis, Levi-Strauss argues, what anthropologists are concerned with is not the biological family but the meanings imposed by humans upon it, not biology or nature per se but nurture or culture. Lévi-Strauss’s argument allows us to understand that the kinship system is a cultural, rather than natural, phenomenon:

what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation. The family is not the most elementary structure of kinship but rather it is the relationship between the terms within the family which constitute the basic unit of kinship. It is from this point of view that one can account for the universality of the incest taboo. (50)

For Lévi-Strauss, the kinship system is a signifying system structured analogously to language in that both are cultural attempts to make sense of the world (nature). However, it should be noted that, as is the case with language, there is a diachronic as well as a synchronic dimension to the kinship system. It is not a static phenomenon: it is, rather, one subject to change, as are all human and social phenomena. Lévi-Strauss points out, too, that the form taken by particular kinship systems is culturally-specific in that how fatherhood is conceptualised varies from one culture to another. However, although the specific terms and values may shift from culture to culture, the basic principles by which the kinship system operates remain identical everywhere. (Words, by the same token, vary in meaning from culture to culture but the structure by which signification occurs is universal.)

In short, Lévi-Strauss’s point is that the fundamental feature which unites all cultures is not, as Marxists claim, the necessity to provide the means for the survival of the individual and, by extension, the community but, rather, the fact that we are born first and foremost as biological creatures into a set of familial or kinship relations in which we are placed according to our anatomy. If we have a penis, we are assigned one role, if a vagina, another role. In order to understand how such roles come to be assigned, Lévi-Strauss asks us to think of the kinship system as more than a set of biological relations: it is a cultural phenomenon and, as such, one ordered along the same lines as any signifying system which attempts to interpret and impose order on the Real: according to the principle of difference. We are born into a system in which there are four principle kinship terms: father, mother, brother, sister. There are also other extended relations (uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.). Each of these are tantamount to a sign as a result of which we are dealing with both a signifier and a signified, a name (e.g. father) and a role (fathers do some things and not others). A given role came historically to be ascribed to the father because other roles are assigned to other kinship terms. Consequently, boys (who are future fathers) are quickly assigned one subject position (a gendered role or subject-position) while girls (who are future mothers) are assigned the opposite.

Understanding the kinship system in this way allows one to understand the nature of one of the most important problems which have plagued anthropologists for a long time. Incest (a sexual relationship between a parent and offspring or between sibling and sibling) is universally frowned upon by all specific human cultures everywhere. In other words, there are certain rules of sexual and, by extension, marital conduct enjoined upon humans everywhere. Many have attempted to understand this prohibition in various ways. Some sociobiologists argue that there is an inherent biological or genetic aversion in us which allows for healthy diversification of the gene pool; Freudians argue that it is a culturally acquired law, the principle mechanism of which is the threat of castration to which the male infant is subjected; etc. Lévi-Strauss’s view is that incest is forbidden in the interest, ultimately, of social cohesion. Parents are not allowed to have sex with their offspring nor are siblings with each other otherwise families would look only inwards and not outwards to the other families which comprise a community. Societies would fall apart. Relying upon Marcel Mauss’s influential theory of the gift, that is, the view that primitive societies coalesced around the provision of gifts of various kinds from one nuclear unit to another, Lévi-Strauss argues that the most precious gift conceivable is the woman and that the dominant male members of one family (human society is historically a patriarchal one) gave their females to males from other families. In this way, they ensured a cohesion that is the basis of subsequent, more sophisticated societies. The principal historical role of the female in the extended kinship system is to be exchanged while the role of the male is that of exchanger. These different roles came to be enjoined upon persons according to the significations that have historically come to be imposed upon their anatomy (as Freud points out, anatomy is destiny). Hence, the view that human culture is something of a signifying system (culture is nothing more less than an attempt to interpret the real), the structuring principle of which is difference:

F-a-t-h-e-r         M-o-t-h-e-r

------------ …       -------------     Etc.

Father              Mother