ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns Claude Lé vi-Strauss, the anthropologist, and Louis Althusser, the marxist political economist, and epistemologist, and their structuralism. Structuralism arrived in Britain in the late 1960s by a number of routes: through social anthropology, particularly the work of Leach and Needham, through trendy culture critics, and through the generation of students, mainly in sociology, who had taken part in the student movement. The easiest way to gauge the distinctiveness of structuralist anthropology is to look at the way the term 'social structure' has been differently used by Lévi-Strauss and by Radcliffe-Brown, who can be taken as the most eloquent and theoretically advanced spokesman of the British school of social anthropology. One of the main features of the structuralist or Althusserian analysis of Marxism is its anti-humanism: it has no notion of human essence or human nature, and the unit of analysis is the social formation as a whole rather than the individual.
