ABSTRACT
Structural anthropology was founded in a binary opposition, of the kind that would later become its trademark: a radical opposition to history. Working from Saussure's model of language as a scientific object, structuralism similarly privileged system over event and synchrony over diachrony. A dilemma is posed to a general semiology, a cultural structuralism, by the distinction between language and speech. Speech likewise presents the sign in the form of a 'heterogeneous' object, subject to other considerations than the pure relationships among signs. If structural/semiotic analysis is to be extended to general anthropology on the model of its pertinence to 'language,' then what is lost is not merely history and change, but practice-human action in the world.
