ABSTRACT
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. Structuralism seemed to us to provide answers to some of the questions that academic sociology did not even raise. It promised rigorous and systematic theory, which we found lacking in modern sociology, and offered an interdisciplinary outlook, which did not carve up the social world into preconceived areas and corresponding academic disciplines or hypostatise the ‘social’ as an autonomous and reified level of reality. More important, it was anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, challenged bourgeois justifications of capitalism and imperialism, and seemed to provide a potential link between theory and practice-which contemporary structural functionalism certainly did not-by enabling a strategy for transforming society to be based on a scientific analysis of the ongoing social formation.
