Introduction

Author(s): Norman E. Whitten, Jr.

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 11, No. 4, Social Structure and Social Relations (Nov.,
1984), pp. 635-641
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/644397
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 introduction

NORMAN E. WHITTEN, JR. -University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In July 1982, along with associate editors Stephen Gudeman, Harold W. Scheffler, and
Sylvia J. Vatuk, I issued a call for papers for a special issue of the American Ethnologist to
be devoted to social structure. Thirty years had passed since Claude Levi-Strauss published
his article "Social Structure" in Alfred L. Kroeber's (1953) edited book Anthropology Today.
In this influential work, social structure as ethnological model constructed by the anthro-
pologist is separated entirely from social relations, conceived of as the raw materials of
ethnography. By venting such an extreme opposition, Levi-Strauss seemed to many to tear
social anthropology and studies of social relations from the very fabric of society. A host of
analytical contrasts-conscious/unconscious, mechanical/statistical, language rules/game
rules (among others)-could, when properly modeled, be arranged to construct an order of
orders. Such analytical structuralism, it was argued, should imbue anthropology with com-
mon principles governing productive analysis in humanities and science: "social structure
is ... a method to be applied to any kind of social studies similar to the structural analysis
current in other disciplines" (Levi-Strauss 1953:525; see also Lane 1970:11-39; Piaget 1970:
1-16, 97-119).
Before and after publication of Levi-Strauss's article, structural studies of society and
social relations continued to be, in significant sectors of sociology and social anthropology,
a means by which to understand the systemization of social relations through time (see,
e.g., Merton 1957[1949]:131-194; 1975; Firth 1951:1-40; Radcliffe-Brown 1958:166-177).
These studies often seem opposed to structuralist method, which treats the study of any
phenomenon, whether natural or cultural, as a self-regulating system of transformations
mediated by deeper structures (e.g., Piaget 1970; Maranda 1972:335; Leach 1982). In spite
of efforts by British structuralists to recast issues on both sides of the opposition, the con-
trast between structuralist and structural perspectives, which emerged in the late 1940s,
has endured. As structural studies created an enormous literature in social anthropology
and sociology, structuralism influenced the study of culture and communication in many
disciplines, making serious inroads into fields removed from the "social sciences," such as
history, music, art, literature, folklore, psychology, and philosophy.
Structuralism, as method, proceeds from a concept of binary opposition drawn from lin-
guistics and critical Hegelian Marxism to work discontinuously against continuous entropy
taking place in any formation (e.g., Maranda 1972). British sociologist Michael Lane
(1970:32) elaborates on structuralist method in this way:

Structures . . . are characterized by relations, which for Levi-Strauss are all ultimately reducible to
binary oppositions. The structuralist method, then, is a means whereby social reality may be ex-
pressed as binary oppositions, each element, whether it be an event in a myth, an item of behaviour
or the naming and classification of natural phenomena, being given its value in society by its
relative position in a matrix of oppositions, their mediations and resolutions.

The modeling of structures by the positioning of oppositions so that they are ordered,
ultimately, by an algebraic or algorithmic rendition of their alleged syntax, is risky. It cer-
tainly demands clarity in the key concepts binary and opposition. In a critical discussion of

Copyright ? 1984 by the American Ethnological Society

0094-0496/84/040635-07$1.20/1

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Levi-Strauss's concept of binary opposition, philosopher T. K. Seung (1982:11-12) reminds
us that, from the discourses of Aristotle onward, philosophy has warned that a binary op-
position is not the same as a binary distinction. The former requires a common domain to
serve as a "third-term" reference system for each side of a series of semantic (implying
social) oppositions. Binary distinction, however, is merely a contrast (e.g., A/non-A).
. . . binary opposition expresses a three-term relation. For example, the binary opposition of odd and
even requires the domain of natural numbers as a substratum, which serves as a third term....
Binary opposition . . . requires three symbols: two positive terms and their relation [Seung
1982:11-12].

Seung (1982:13-14) criticizes Levi-Strauss for blurring the boundary between binary opposi-
tion and binary distinction.
He further criticizes him, and other structuralists, for also blurring the distinction be-
tween any opposition (or contrast) that can be made by an analyst and a real opposition ob-
served in social relations. A recent (June 1984) example of real opposition is offered by con
tending factions maneuvering for electoral votes within the Democratic party of the United
States. A historical example is the conflict between white masters and black slaves in the
antebellum South. In both cases the domain of interpersonal, group, and institutional rela-
tions (i.e., the social system) establishes a theater of resolution and perturbation of conflict.
The context, or domain, or arena, or field of contention is itself a third relational force that
extends the order of contention by systemic ramification. The recent domain of intra-
Democratic party political processes within the contemporary United States is, to some ex-
tent, part of the asymmetric historical order of real conflicting systems of imperialist ex-
ploitation and human revolt.
In the summer of 1984, the publicly aired factional conflict within the Democratic party
is oriented toward the coming Democratic/Republican confrontation over succession to
the power of national governance. But the legitimate, carefully controlled real conflict that
will order the pattern of voting also exists in a social system of real contradiction (e.g.,
Gluckman 1965:199ff.). The trope "From the Outhouse to the Whitehouse" expresses nicely
the relationship between the black/white historical contradiction and the intrademocratic
patterned conflict. It alludes to a historically real state of black degredation and marginal-
ity in asymmetric opposition to white imperialist control. By deploying a preposition mean-
ing "upward" to mark a passage of minority peoples into a domain of social transforma-
tion, processes of ramifying oppositions are identified and cognitively intensified.
A third contrast also bedevils the study of social structure in contemporary ethnology:
both structuralist and structural studies of social relations have been, and continue to be,
taken by many to contrast with the study of process (see, e.g., Turner 1974 and the recent
upswing of interest in play, ludic phenomena, liminoid states, communitas, etc.). Perhaps
because of the double contrast (structural/structuralist, structural/processual) ethnologists
have ranged far and wide in search of their proper field or arena of study. Contemporary
ethnology and ethnography are today championing and criticizing everything from
Liminoid-Literary-Ludicity to Materialist-Marxist-Malthusiasm. A way of recasting such in-
credible polarities is found, for some, in a deployment of structuralism to understand
historical process within the disciplinary formations of anthropology itself. Marshall
Sahlins (1977:14-15), who describes our "Search for an Object" in this way, illustrates such
a structuralist-processual fusion:

the conflict between the symbolic and the pragmatic is a kind of original, founding contradiction,
reproducing itself across all the other oppositions that have carried anthropology from one theoret-
ical moment to the next. Many of the principles that now divide structuralism from materialism
would also differentiate Boas from Morgan, Durkheim from Spencer, Radcliffe-Brown from
Malinowski-even different sides of the same theoretical program, as the emphasis is at once on a

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 symbolic definition of culture and its technological determination in the work of Leslie White [See
also Sahlins 1976].

Reflecting on the issues raised over the past 30 years or so, and the expressive modes by
which they have been aired in professional and popular literature, and in reviewing the
debates engendered in previous special issues on Symbolism and Cognition (vol. 8, no. 3;
vol. 9, no. 4) and Economic and Ecological Processes in Society and Culture (vol. 9, no. 2), we
thought that a reassessment of the centralizing and problematic core of a sector of our sub-
discipline seemed especially appropriate. The varying ideas, methods, premises, and
theories of how one goes about gathering materials that pertain to social relations, and
organizing or ordering them so as to prepare an argument that relies on connected points of
relatively invariant reference-often called structure-have certainly pervaded the pages
of the AE and other cognate journals.
The very problem posed by the ethnography/ethnology paradox, as it is often called, is
highlighted by Levi-Strauss's extreme opposition between social relations seen as raw
materials and social structure as that which the anthropologist constructs as a model by
reference to appropriate scientific procedures. Among other things, the polarities of idio-
graphic/nomothetic and humanistic/scientific perspectives become bundled in contradic-
tory and complementary ways (depending on the level of analysis, scale of discourse, and
implied tertium quid) when one proceeds from "data" to "theory" (or "model"). Let us
return to the use of a concept of "structure" presented by Sahlins in 1977, during his stock
taking of social and cultural anthropology wherein Western European and Polynesian
history, including processes of radical change, are shaped by constitutive structures of
meaning: "Hawaiians were not just the passive victims of an imperialist praxis," he writes,
"the Hawaiian categorical order played a critical dialectical role, shaping the organization
of trade by the reciprocal action of its own meaningful system of demand" (1977:27).
Sahlins goes on to offer "a small paradigm of the development of a structure of conjunc-
ture":

The oppositions on each side of the proportion are realized historically by their engagement with
distinctions on the other side . . . history proceeds by the appropriation of events within structures of
significance.... Made relevant by the encoding of events, these structures, moreover, become
something more than simple logical proportions; they are the very frame of historic action. They
constitute the specific social system of cultural assimilation and resistance: an organization of inter-
group relations that selectively engages different categories of the Hawaiian population and func-
tionally valorizes certain modes and types of intercourse with Europeans.

Ideas such as these seemed to many anthropologists to unite the issues raised in the AE
special issues mentioned above. Accordingly, we expected to receive a substantial number
of articles in response to the call for papers. It was with some surprise that, although the
flow of papers representing serious scholarship-often provoked by lively and at times
acrimonious debate-continued and perhaps accelerated during 1982-83, no stock of
papers appeared to configure easily into a special issue on social structure. To avoid a
backlog of suitable papers, the journal published a number of potentially appropriate ar-
ticles on social structure in vol. 10, compiling three special sections (in nos. 1 and 2) by
combining papers on social structure and social relations with others on related topics.
Some of the comments made to the editor and associate editors subsequent to the call
for papers are worth mentioning as they reflect, perhaps, collective perceptions held by
many other cultural anthropologists from various vantage points within the United States:
"Issues of social structure are now dead"; "The study of social structure is no longer at the
cutting edge of cultural anthropology"; "Nobody really does that kind of thing anymore."
Such remarks would seem to be seriously contradicted by the continuous flow of papers on
such topics as household, family, kinship, networks, group formation and maintenance,

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ethnic relations, politics, political economy, power, corporation, bureaucracy, stratifica-
tion, leadership, law, succession, kin classification, developmental sequences, and a
myriad of other pertinent subjects and concomitant issues that pervade the literature in
ethnography and ethnology.
To understand better the font of such negative commentary, I returned to Levi-Strauss's
"Social Structure" article, which itself sought to weld British empiricist anthropology in
Malinowskian and Radcliffe-Brownian dimensions to North American Boasian ethnography
and ethnology on the anvil of les sciences humaines. Kinship, economics, and linguistics all
undergo transformations on this anvil to demonstrate that it is through structure that
culture itself "communicates" varied messages at different social levels that range from
the "natural" to the "cultural," each level reproducing the nature/culture polarity within
itself. James A. Boon, in his review essay in this issue, notes that Levi-Strauss's tertium quid
in any series of oppositions does not derive from any realm of social system but is, rather,
esprit, or "mind" (see also Leach 1982:238). Confusing though it may have been at the time,
and riddled with ambiguity though it may be today, the fusion manifest in "Social Struc-
ture," based as it is on the construction of contrast sets that suggest radical oppositions be-
tween data and theory, seems to continue to drive anthropology toward replicating theoret-
ical moments:

Social structure has nothing to do with empirical reality but with the models which are built up
after it ... social relations consist of the raw materials out of which the models making up the social
structure are built [Levi-Strauss 1953:525].

. . . anthropology considers the whole social fabric as a network of different types of orders. The kin-
ship provides a way to order individuals according to certain rules; social organization is another
way of ordering individuals and groups; social stratification, whether economic or political, pro-
vides us with a third type; and all these orders can themselves be put in order by showing the rela-
tionships which exist between them, how they interact on one another ... [Levi-Strauss 1953: 547-548].

With ideas such as these in focus, and with phrases such as "studies in social structure
have to do with the formal aspects of social phenomena; . . . they are difficult to define,
and still more difficult to discuss" (Levi-Strauss 1953:524) before my eyes, I took another
hard look at accepted AE papers with the intent of sampling current work pertinent to the
study of social relations and social structure in one issue of the journal. Volume 11, number
4, my final issue as editor, is the result.
The issue opens with G. Carter Bentley's spirited paper on Maranao disputing, which
returns us to the point at which Miles Richardson's (1982) paper ended the special issue on
Economic and Ecological Processes in Society and Culture-the relationships that exist and
must be uncovered in interpretive ethnography between "being in the world" and "truth
and truthfinding" (see also Gudeman and Whitten 1982:229). This is the very dynamic that
was used subsequently to bring forth the second special issue on symbolism and cognition
(Whitten and Ohnuki-Tierney 1982:641). To the issues addressed previously in this journal,
Bentley adds a key social organizational dimension of "third-party functions and
authority." By arguing that structure is a consequence of reflexivity over dispute, he also
brings us a step closer to understanding how ethnography itself can be a theory-construc-
tive endeavor involving both anthropological organization of "data" and informant or con-
sultant exegesis.
The articles section of this issue closes with an equally provocative paper by Harold W.
Scheffler, who argues that "in some instances terminological structure may be a fully or
semiautonomous form of social structure; in other instances . . . the system of kin classifi-
cation . . . shapes both interpersonal and intergroup relations." Between the first and last
papers-each of which represents a distinct perspective with a specifiable set of pro-
cedures within contemporary cultural anthropology-are six papers that address various

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facets of social structure and social organization. We also include one paper on a new
method by which to address what anthropologists call Galton's Problem -the issue of how
much credence is to be given to diffusion in determining the position of a cultural trait in
the society being sampled for purposes of making cross-cultural generalizations.
Richard Parmentier addresses himself to the recurring issue of "how a specific society
conceptualizes and actualizes the interconnection between social units that are structural-
ly transient and those that are structurally permanent." To do so he relies on linguistic
labeling of groups that, viewed diachronically, have gone through disruptive, radical
change to emerge at the time of study as sectors of a recognizable structure demonstrating
cultural continuity. Thomas A. Arcury addresses issues of household composition by refer-
ence to competing theories of change-class conflict versus adaptation-a competition
which relies, in no small part, on the macro- (Marxist)/micro- (theory of the competitive
market) divide discussed in Economic and Ecological Processes in Society and Culture
(Gudeman and Whitten 1982:224).
Issues of power and authority next become focal, though they also enter the preceding
papers. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant demonstrates a way by which a fresh model of develop-
mental sequence may be constructed "by tracking the power careers of individual men and
women" and by relating these careers systematically to patterns of economy and demog-
raphy through time. By so doing she advances the methodology inherent in the social rela-
tions (observed) - social organization (adjustments through time) - social structure (relative
invariants) perspective developed so carefully by Raymond T. Firth (1951), and combines
these with Richard N. Adams's (1975) contributions to a general theory of social power that
relies on a methodological dualism of energy and structure.
Focus on the individual also characterizes the paper by Philip A. Dennis and Michael D.
Olien. The authors argue that, for what is now eastern Nicaragua and eastern Honduras, the
indigenous "kings" without a kingdom, reported in the literature between 1633 and 1860,
wielded power appropriated externally from the British to rule over subjects without inter-
nal control over the processes of Miskito social differentiation. Rather than view the
"kings" as "middlemen," as has been the case to date, the authors treat them as power
brokers-those people in a tertiary, or interface, power formation able to appropriate con-
trol systems from without to increase their hereditary authority among the Miskitos them-
selves. In other words, as the real opposition between a stratified imperial system and an
egalitarian one grows wider, some power flows to a third formation and a domain of
kingship may thrive (see, e.g., Leach 1982:155-159).
Daniel Bradburd takes us to the Middle East to revive the problem inherent in the rela-
tionship between rules (structure) and practice (relations). He presents fresh ethnographic
data on the Komachi nomads of southern Iran to demonstrate the interplay between struc-
tural rules that constrain and strategy rules that facilitate, each rule system existing at a
complementary level of public and private discourse. The Middle East is, of course, a land
characterized accurately by the late Carleton Coon as a "cultural mosaic." In such regions,
issues of structure and the ordering of social relationships for comparative purposes in-
evitably generate the problem of how one controls for selective or random borrowing (let
us say, of a publicly expressed marriage rule) by one group, category, or network of people
from another. The sophistication developed in turning up methodologies to determine
whether or not two sample units are independent is offered by Malcolm M. Dow, Michael
L. Burton, Douglas R. White, and Karl P. Reitz. In the penultimate paper, Ellen Woolford of-
fers another methodology for generating the range of many kin-term systems. Such systems
are those to which anthropologists so often turn for a set of relatively invariant contrasts,
complementarities, and classifications by which to map structural relations. Scheffler's ar-

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ticle, which argues that in some instances structure (as that which we analyze in kinship
systems) may itself be a consequence of kinship classification, ends the section.
Boon's review of two books edited by Ino Rossi -Structural Sociology and The Logic of
Culture-focuses directly on the invocations, evocations, agitations, confusions, and scin-
tillating ambiguities inherent in the lumping and splitting going on in contemporary struc-
turalism by its allies and opponents. One of many intriguing aspects of this essay is the sug-
gestion of contrast between the actual work of Levi-Strauss and the -ism that this work has
fostered. Where, then, is structuralism to be placed in a paradigm built up of binary opposi-
tions, if Levi-Strauss's own work is to be contrasted to the structuralist method he espouses?
Sustained ambiguity is Boon's answer, a motivating force toward greater precisions, further
oppositions, enduring polarities with a continuous search for relationships between tertiary
formations and domain framing from moment to moment in cultural process.
The brief manifestation of a facet of debate between Donald E. Brown and George N.
Appell underscores the need for agreed-upon domains by which to order apparent opposi-
tions. Here, between ethnological generalization and ethnographic observations, there re-
mains something of an expanding void wherein scholars travel freely by means of idio-
syncratic analytical vehicles.
Many would argue that the journey into varied sets of human social relations by means
of a step-by-step methodology appropriately operationalized should be complemented by
a reverse trip out of ethnography via a series of steps that are guided by linked propositions
forming into some paradigmatic or preparadigmatic set, eventually to constitute a theory
of culture that transcends specific cultural context, level, model, or scale.
Where the internal analysis made by the critically reflexive native exegete (philosopher,
poet, scientist, or whatever) ends, and where the ethnologist's alleged external rigor with
regard to various data sets drawn from ongoing lifeways begins, continues to be a problem
for most of us. Whatever may underlie an order of orders, and wherever we may turn up the
generator of the disorder of disorders, remains sufficiently allusive to provide an ongoing
agitation toward even stronger confluence of the sometimes alleged antinomic pursuits of
ethnography and ethnology. By understanding social structure and social relations as an-
choring, framing, and dialectical features of both continuity and change, our theories,
methods, field strategies, and eliciting epistemologies and techniques, together with the
mutual understanding of conjoined intellects across polarized and complementary
cultures, should be enhanced. These final editorial comments are made, and this issue of
my editorship is directed, toward such enhancement and toward provoking more thought
among the readership about the issues raised, suggested, or implied.

Acknowledgments. I appreciate the critical readings of drafts of this introduction by Dorothea S.

(Sibby) Whitten. All faults and opinions herein are mine.

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