ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the use and meaning that 'structure' has had in British social anthropology, and French sociology, before looking at its contemporary use. The fundamental question is whether the term has the same meaning in all cases, or to what extent distinct varieties of 'structuralism' may be distinguished. The best known critic of Radcliffe-Brown's type of structuralism is Edmund Leach. In Rethinking Anthropology he contends that the aim of social anthropology should be generalization rather than comparison, and challenges Radcliffe-Brown's conception of both social structure and the comparative method. The communication orientation thus provides anthropology with a unifying concept. The concern with assimilating different types of data and constructing relations of transformation between them is one of the major preoccupations of Levi-Strauss's structuralism. It also results in a more interdisciplinary approach than was the case for the British or French sociologists.
