Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Author(s): W. G. Runciman
Source: The British Journal of Sociology , Sep., 1969, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 253-
265
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science
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What is structuralism?t
Very broadly, the term 'structure' serves to mark off questions about
the constituents of the object under study from questions about its
workings. In sociology (or anthropology or history), therefore, ques-
tions about 'structure' can be answered in as many ways as there are
held to be kinds of constituents of societies. The old-fashioned answer
would be to say that societies are made up of institutions; the fashion-
able answer would be to say that they are made up of messages. But
they can equally well be held to be made up of groups, or relationships,
or classes, or roles, or exchanges, or norms and sanctions, or even
shared concepts and symbols. There is always the risk of lapsing un-
wittingly into metaphor, as in the discredited analogy of society as an
organism. But beyond this, the test of one answer as against another
can only lie in its explanatory value in the context where it is employed.
The only common assumption underlying all the answers is that if a
society (like anything else) is to be satisfactorily explained, then the
question 'what is it made of?' will have to be answered as well as, if not
actually prior to, the question 'why does it do what it does?'
This, however, is to say very little-so little, in fact, as to lend support
to the well-known remark of Kroeber that to invoke the word 'struc-
ture' in the discussion of societies or cultures (or organisms, or crystals,
or machines) adds nothing 'except to provoke a degree of pleasant
II
III
IV
This rapid and rather cavalier survey of a complex topic cannot sug
more than a very tentative general conclusion. But if my argumen
at all well founded, it suggests that 'structuralism', whether i
Anglo-Saxon or its Gallic version, should not be claimed to constitu
H263
Notes
265