ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the work of British, Dutch and French anthropologists in the immediate post-war period and emphasizes the differences between the interests and perspectives of American cultural anthropologists and European structural anthropology. It takes up the discussion of Dutch structuralism again and its later developments under P.E. de Josselin de Jong. In the European structuralist tradition it was Needham who was to play an especially significant and pivotal role by bringing together and disseminating to an English-speaking audience the ideas and findings of the various streams of Dutch, French and British structuralism. Levi-Strauss elaborates the dimension of his theory by drawing on the concepts and methods of structural linguistics, a field of study developed by Roman Jakobson and the Prague School. In this linguistic paradigm phonemes comprise the primary contrasting pairs of sounds that create linguistic meaning.
