Henri Hubert: The Sociology of Religious Time
Mauss’ colleague and coauthor, the French sociologist and anthropologist Henri Hubert (1872–1927) was a specialist of the ethnic culture of Byzantine and the ancient Celts.256 He was one of the founders of the French sociology of religion.
Among celtologists, Hubert’s works are recognized as classics.257 They are built on a combination of ethnological and sociological methods, which allow us to look at Hubert as the first French ethnosociologist.
Hubert also systematically occupied himself with the theme of the sociology of time and forms of understanding of time in different religious traditions and archaic societies. He devoted a special essay to this topic, Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic.258
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: Mystical Participation
If Durkheim and Mauss did not pass any final judgments on progress and evolution in society, emphasizing the functionalist approach and the constancy of social structures, then another French anthropologist and sociologist, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), familiar to Mauss, set out to describe the social progress and evolution of societies and show people what the main difference between primitive societies (“savages”) and contemporary civilization consisted of.
He advanced the general hypothesis that there are two types of thought: “primitive,” which is based on the “mystical participation” of the savage with the surrounding world, and “contemporary,” based on observance of the laws of logic and the strict differentiation of subject and object (with a transparent and rational procedure for the verification of judgements). Lévy-Bruhl called “primitive” thought “pre-logical” and contemporary thought “logical.”259 If in this case we drop the supposed unconditional superiority of “logic” over “pre-logic,” something which seemed self-evident for the evolutionist Lévy-Bruhl, with whom the anthropologists Lévi-Strauss and Evans-Pritchard argued in detail, then we can agree with Lévy-Bruhl’s description of the fundamental features of “simple” society, which Ethnosociology equates with the ethnos. “Mystical participation,” the absence of a dual “subject-object” topography, the non-observance of Aristotelian laws of logic — all this, indeed, characterizes typically ethnic thought.
Marcel Griaule: Mythology of the Dogon
Marcel Griaule (1898–1956), a specialist of Africa and its ethnic societies, was a key ethnologist and anthropologist of the French school, who carefully studied the mythology and social attitudes of the Dogon tribe of Mali as well as their masks, ritual dances, hunting methods, and art.260
Among the Dogon, Griaule discovered extremely original forms in the manufacture of sacred wood statues, replete with incredible refinement. It became clear that this tribe had a developed and complex religious mythology, including various types and series of gods, spirits, and other persons, united by a masterfully elaborated theology.
Griaule set out his theoretical methods for the study of ethnoses in his book Methods of Ethnography.261
Maurice Leenhardt: Personality and Myth in Archaic Societies
The French missionary and ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954) was engaged in anthropological and sociological field studies in New Caledonia for more than twenty years. Upon returning to Paris, he chaired the department of Primitive Religions, which Mauss had chaired before him.
At the center of Leenhardt’s attention stood the problem of the relation between myth, personality, and social identity in archaic societies. His main work is devoted to the ethnoses and cultures of Melanesia and to the generalizing figure of “Do Kamo,” in which the Melanesians’ ideas about “man,” “spirit,” “god,” “life,” and “personality” are concentrated and which Leenhardt interpreted as the totality of super-individual social relations and ties.262
Leenhardt’s Do Kamo corresponds in its general features to that which Sociology and Anthropology call “personality” and represents a unique social view associated with values, attitudes, and norms.
Marcel Granet: Chinese Society
Marcel Granet (1884–1940), an outstanding specialist of Chinese culture, a student of Durkheim, and a colleague of Marcel Mauss, was another well-known French sociologist and ethnologist. He devoted the majority of his works to the study of Chinese society, its ethnic, cultural, and political structure. Granet’s works on Chinese civilization are to this day fundamental for the study of China.263
Granet combined a linguistic, sociological, and historical approach of the study of society, proposing to separate the process of sociological cognition into two main spheres:
1. The study of religious and mythological ideas;
2. The thorough analysis of the general legal system, including systems of kinship, the mode of family life, customs, and government laws.
Granet’s essay Matrimonial Categories and Proximate Relationships in Ancient China became the starting point for the eminent anthropologist and ethnologist Levi Strauss’ elaboration of the famous “theory of kinship.”
Granet and his studies of Chinese society, for which he tried to cast aside the entire arsenal of ideas, methods, categories, and axioms customary for the European scholar, greatly influenced the work of another first-rate French sociologist, Louis Dumont, who studied Indian society using the same methods.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Key Figure of Ethnosociology
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) is a key figure for all of contemporary Anthropology and Ethnosociology. His works have tremendous philosophical significance, and he is rightfully considered the most important figure in structuralism as a philosophical and methodological phenomenon.
Lévi-Strauss’ work is multidimensional and multifaceted so we will isolate only those aspects of it that are fundamental for Ethnosociology as a discipline and comprise its theoretical and methodological basis.
Lévi-Strauss applied the method of structural linguistics to primitive, archaic societies. He primarily engaged with the native peoples of North and South America. The Russian linguists, founders of phonology, and outstanding representatives of Structuralism, Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890–1938) exerted a big influence on Lévi-Strauss. During the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss emigrated to the US, where he met Jakobson and Boas. It is symbolic that Boas died of a heart attack literally in the arms of Lévi-Strauss. The founder of Structural Anthropology received the baton from the founder of Cultural Anthropology.
In 1973 Lévi-Strauss was made a member of the French Academy.
The Equality of Cultures: Structural Anthropology
At all stages of his work, Lévi-Strauss advanced the idea of the fundamental equality of cultures and insisted on the impossibility and inadequacy of projecting the criteria of one culture onto another.264 In this matter, he concurred entirely with the starting point of Franz Boas and American Cultural Anthropology. But Lévi-Strauss was the one to grant this approach the status of a fundamental scientific methodological principle as well as a philosophical and humanistic truth.
A society can be understood only in terms of its own cultural and civilizational context, but immersion into the context of the researched society demands the renunciation of commitment to the context of the society to which the researcher himself belongs. Consequently, we cannot at all evaluate societies different from our own. We can only describe and classify them.
Lévi-Strauss brought to light and harshly rejected all forms of ethnocentrism and racism, involved both in the biological hierarchization of ethnoses and in the forms of Eurocentrism, evolutionism, progressivism, universalism, and the assessment of a civilization in accordance with its technical, economic, or social indicators.
Any assertion containing a direct or indirect indication that one type of society, culture, or social way is better than another is unscientific, ideological, and racist. Lévi-Strauss admitted that infrequently in common speech, journalism, and politics, this principle is not observed, and because of this such discussions lose
their objective sense and act as forms of “false consciousness.” Lévi-Strauss was convinced that such an approach should be eliminated, since it is incommensurable with the humanistic view of the equality of different cultures, whose differences cannot be hierarchized without bumping up against the ideas of racism, oppression, violence, and the debasement of social, ethnic, and cultural worth. It is not even correct to say that one society is more or less developed than another, since the term “development” is a value concept of Western European civilization. Society does not develop — it lives. It lives as it thinks it must.
Lévi-Strauss formulated the principles of such an approach in his work “Structural Anthropology.” It is Structural Anthropology, which, as a scientific and philosophical orientation, corresponds most precisely to Ethnosociology and overlaps with it in practically in all fundamental parameters.265
Binary Code
Methodologically, “Structural Anthropology” comes down to the study of the structure of society, which can be thought of in the form of binary opposites.266 These oppositions do not at all have to be as radical as is/is not, one/nothing, light/dark, with which European culture predominantly deals. Archaic societies have more nuanced pairs: raw/prepared, tillage/hunting for game, etc.267 At the same time, however, one of the classic aspects of archaic culture consists of the withdrawal of strict binary opposites and the introduction of new reconciling, mediating term. Lévi-Strauss thought of the figure of the trickster (a coyote or crow) in many Indian myths, studied by Radin, as one such mediating principle.
According to Lévi-Strauss, the detection of binary opposites allows one to interpret myth correctly, distinguishing in it the smallest structural semantic element, the mytheme.
Lévi-Strauss’ main idea consists of the following: a myth is a completed intellectual matrix, which must be learned through special operations on the basis of mythology (the special logic of myth).
From his point of view, a myth should be studied as a paradigm; the reading of a myth is carried out through periods, like a written score of notes, not like a written text. Only thus can we see and correctly discern the harmony in it. In reading notes we can pay attention first and foremost to the melody unfolding in sequence on the musical line, or else to the harmony, which is considered vertically. At the same time, in the analysis of myth the most important thing is to accurately single out the periods, i.e., those places where a carrying over of the musical sentences notes occurs and a new block of myth begins. This minimal atomic fragment of myth, which is no longer subject to further subdivision and represents a completed element, from which mythological narration is formed, is what Lévi-Strauss calls a “mytheme.”
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
In his monumental work The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that for primordial social systems the exchange of women between clans, phratries, and other groups served as the basis of social structuring and was the main communicational matrix, like the exchange of words in language.268
In contrast to the “kinship theories” of other authors, Lévi-Strauss considered neither the family nor the lineage as the basis of the building of the social structure of society, but the relations between families and lineages. According to his ideas, at the basis of society lies an operation of exchange, which is directed towards the establishment of equilibrium: the giver must receive the equivalent of his gift. The operation of exchange can be likened to borrowing: one gives another something on credit, which the other must return.
Words and women act as the top-priority objects of exchange in simple societies. Speech is the exchange of words between people. It is significant that in ordinary forms of communication, intrinsic to all human cultures, the mutual exchange of speech formulas (dialogue) is a law. For instance, in common greetings, the people meeting one another say “Hello!” which must be followed a reciprocal “Hello!” required not by the concrete situation, but by the very nature of speech as exchange. Let us recall that the French ethnologist and anthropologist Marcel Griaule engaged in the meticulous study of the ritual practices of speech among the archaic Dogon.
At the basis of speech lies language, its logic, its structures, and its paradigms, which predetermine by what model and in correlation with what regularities the exchange of speech will occur. They are potential, not visible, and always appear not of themselves, but through the constructing of speech as an actual verbal sequence. Speech is that which is found on the surface; language is that which is concealed within.
The same logic underlies the exchange of women in the structure of matrimonial relations and in the general fabric of kinship and affinity. It is based on the principle of equivalence and follows regulations as unambiguous as speech does. But just the bearer of the language, especially in illiterate societies, very often does not have a notion of the stable and logical grammar that he uses unconsciously, according to linguistics, so too do the structures of matrimonial relations not lie on the surface, but remain potential and concealed, and the clarification of their regularities demands certain efforts.
Lévi-Strauss undertook these efforts, developing, following Mauss, the idea of the “gift,” and also the mechanism of exchange of gifts (gift/return gift) as the social basis of society, only applied to the exchange of women, who are the generalization of the “gift” as such, since they concentrate in themselves other forms of exchange, including the exchange of objects and words. The structure of kinship, based on gender exchange, can thus be considered as the “universal grammar of society.”
Restricted Exchange
Lévi-Strauss distinguishes two types of exchange of women in primitive societies, i.e., two types of social language of marriage: “restricted exchange” and “generalized exchange.”269 Restricted exchange represents the classic case of the segmentation of a society into two or a multiple of two exogamous phratries. The simplest case: a tribe separated into two halves, which live either on a common territory (for instance, at different ends of a village), or at some distance apart. Between the two phratries, A and B, there occurs an exchange of women. The men (fathers and brothers) give their women (daughters and sisters) to the men of the other tribe to wed, who act in exactly the same way with their daughters and sisters. The quantity of exogamous groups can be four, six, and theoretically more, but we nowhere meet with more than eight. Schematically, this can be shown as follows:
A↔B
A↔B
A↔B
C↔D
C↔D
E↔F
Figure 8. Type of restricted exchange of women among lineages.
A principle of equivalence is observed in such a model of the organization of marriage. Phratry A gives Phratry B as many women as it receives in exchange. For this reason, Lévi-Strauss says that under conditions of the deindividualization of archaic societies, this can be thought of as a cycle of loans and returns. In the qualitative index of a woman of the tribe, the most important thing is the fact of her belonging to phratry A, B, C, D, etc. Depending on that, and only on that, she is or is not an object of legitimate erotic and social attention, i.e., possessing the social status of wife. In the case of a mismatch she becomes a taboo; she ceases to be an object of exchange. The cruel cults of murdering girls in some primitive tribes, which we recalled earlier, are connected with this, which can often be seen as analogous to the destruction of excessively produced goods, which in certain cases have no chance of finding a consumer. Not every young woman of a child-bearing age is a woman who can marry; she must be a woman — “nao” (the opposite of taboo); that is, she must belong to a certain phratry, permitted for the marital union. This is as unchangeable as the construction of speech according to entirely predetermined rules, which no one can change arbitrarily and which change only together with language (i.e., with society as a whole).
In societies of limited exchange, a dual code, which lies at the basis of mythological and religious systems, as well as of social in
stitutions met with in complex and multi-layered societies and cultures, is strictly observed. But it is precisely this type of society that forms the structure of the ethnos, the basic foundation of the model of “kinship-affinity.” It most clearly exhibits the line that separates and unites people according to a dual model of one’s kin and one’s own [TN: affines]. Kin relates to Phratry A. One’s own (or “one’s others”) relates to Phratry B.
The law of such separation, embodied in the prohibition against incest (by which is most often understood the prohibition of incest between brother and sister, i.e., the prohibition of marital relations in the limits of the same generation), configures the fundamental model of eros, applied to the socium. Affectivity (the feeling of love, affection, tenderness, confidentiality) is divided into two parts: generic (nearness to parents, brothers, sisters, and children) and marital (realized in erotic relations only with member of the opposite sex and phratry). In both cases, spontaneous affectivity, nearness, and tenderness is limited by structural prohibitions, i.e., by the introduction of distance. Love for one’s kinsmen is censored by the taboo of incest; love for a member of the opposite phratry, the fundamental otherness of this phratry, is secured in the very social system of the exogamous groups. This paradigm of the division of affectivity gives rise to the basis of social gender, which is preserved inviolably in the most complex societies. But in a society of direct exchange the socialization of the sexes acts as the most vivid and complete form.
The Foundations Page 21