ABSTRACT
In the article entitled ‘Social Structure’ in Anthropology Today, Lévi-Strauss (1953, pp. 526-27) draws attention to the distinction between culturally produced models and observers’ models. The former, constructs of the people under study themselves, he calls conscious models; the latter, unconscious models. Conscious models, he points out, may or may not exist for any particular phenomenon, may or may not provide useful insight, but, being part of the facts (and probably among the most significant facts), are in any case worthy of study. At best, they can ‘furnish an important contribution to the understanding of the structures either as factual documents or as theoretical contributions similar to those of the anthropologist himself’.
