ABSTRACT
One notable criticism within the discipline came from ethnologists such as the Africanist Georges Balandier, who argued that while Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis might be appropriate to the small-scale communities he had studied in the rainforests of Brazilsocieties with relatively little contact with the outside world-it was entirely inappropriate to the analysis of, for example, the substantially larger and rapidly changing societies of the African continent. The implication of this criticism was that anthropology should resist the temptation to idealize the exotic culture as an isolate untouched by history and instead attempt to understand the difficult process of the adaptation of traditional cultures to the modern world.
