Page 111 - Prathima Volume 12

A Review of Postcolonial Scholarship: Conducting Research on Culture and Society
word meanings and its sentence organization, especially in speech. This is "structure",
then, in a completely different sense than Radcliffe Brown's sense. de Saussure
thought that speech (actual talking) was organized by a background "structural"
system that he called Language (or langue, in French). This system was based on the
notion that the world as perceived by humans had to be cut up into smaller pieces --
words, say -- in order to be understood, and this is what language does. It does this
through "binary oppositions", or "differences that make a difference", both at the level
of sound (as in the difference in sound between the English words "sit" and "pit" (two
spoken sound-words that differ minimally only according to their initial sounds, "s"
and "p"); and at the level of concept (by, I suppose, the difference between siting on the
ground and falling in a hole). The result is a "system" of meanings and sounds that are
held in place by such binary differences. At this point the distinguishable sounds,
called "phonemes" by the American linguist Sapir, but "signifiers" by de Saussure, are
arbitrarily attached, by conventions of actual speech, to particular concepts -- called
"signs" by de Saussure -- to form words as we know them. Hence, for example, the
concept of sitting (the sign) is attached to the sound (the signifier) made when we say
the word "sit" forming a unit that we call a "word" but which de Saussure called a
"symbol".

Levi-Strauss took this idea and tried to apply it beyond language to everything else in
the world: kinship, myths, religion, behavior and so forth. But, more than this, he
thought the binary logic (those elementary oppositions I talked about above) must be a
result of the way the brain worked; that is, that they must be reflective of the structure
of the human brain. Leach is a little skeptical about this, but likes the idea that, perhaps,
it just makes sense to humans to organize knowledge (and hence cultural practices as
well) using binary logic: left-right, raw-cooked, natural-cultural and so forth. We can
find the same sort of thing going on in Sahlins' (1985) work, and it lingers on in the
kind of semiological analysis that people do at the University of Chicago to this day.
Furthermore, Louis Dumont's (1981) analysis of caste as outlined in Homo
Hierarchicus is based on the same notion: Caste, for Dumont, is a system of knowledge
that produces a social system. That is, a system of knowledge organized by the
elementary Vedic opposition between being "pure" and being "impure" or polluted,
that created a social system "defined" by "pure" Brahmans at the top and completely
"impure "Dalits ("untouchables" at the bottom, with every other caste sorted out in
between according the purer group above and the less pure group below.

“Structuralism” as Radcliffe Brown (1952) used it, or even someone like Mary
Douglas (2015 [1966]) later on, referred to social structure. That is, structured
relations between people occupying socially constructed roles and statuses. On the
other hand, structuralism, as Levi-Strauss (1969) or, for that matter, Leach (1961),
were using referred to the application of de Saussure's (1966 [1959]) linguistics to the

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