ABSTRACT

Structuralism is a theory that sees every aspect of culture as the creation of unconsciously applied rules, like those of language, based in the unchanging structure of the human mind. Anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss used structural analysis to understand totemism the way some societies divide themselves into groups that claim a particular supernatural animal, their totem, as their ancestor. As the same grammar underlays everything produced by a culture, the beauty of the structuralist method is that it identifies a harmony between functionally dissimilar objects and forms. They are all items of material culture, "that section of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined behavior", according to Deetz. But after the mid-seventeenth century there was a drift away from this parent culture', and for perhaps a century a folk tradition developed. To use a structural metaphor, hermeneutic understandings are soft' and ambiguous, while science is hard' and produce results that can be tested with recognized metrics.