Structural Anthropology - British Neo-Structuralism

British Neo-Structuralism

The British brand of structuralism was mainly espoused by Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach, who were both critical towards the structural-functionalist perspective and who drew on Lévi-Strauss as well as Arthur Maurice Hocart. However, they also found grounds for critiquing Lévi-Strauss. Leach, who in stark contrast to Lévi-Strauss was more concerned with researching people's actual lives than with the discovery of universal mental structures, found that the latter's analysis of the Kachin contained serious flaws. According to Leach, Lévi-Strauss' project had been overly ambitious, meaning that his analyses were too superficial and the available data treated with too little care. While part of his analysis of the Kachin was simply based on incorrect ethnographic information, the rest reflected Kachin ideology but not actual practice.

In theory, Kachin groups were supposed to marry in a circle ideally consisting of five groups. In reality, the system was strongly imbalanced with built-in status differences between superior wife-givers and inferior wife-takers. Lévi-Strauss had incorrectly assumed that wife-takers would be of higher rank than wife-givers; in reality, it was the other way round, and the former usually had to make substantial bridewealth payments to obtain wives. Overall, some lineages would accumulate more wives and material wealth than others, meaning that the system cannot be said to be driven primarily by reciprocity. In actual reality, the marriage system was quite messy and the chance of it breaking down increased with the number of groups involved. In generalised exchange systems, the more groups there are the more complex it becomes to keep track of all transactions and to ensure that all wife-givers will eventually be on the receiving end, an issue that Lévi-Strauss had already foreseen. He thought that in practice there will be competition for women, leading to accumulation and therefore asymmetries in the system. According to Leach, in Kachin reality instabilities arose primarily from competition for bridewealth. Men sought to get the maximum profit in forms of either bridewealth or political advantage out of the marriage of their daughters. Lévi-Strauss had only accorded a symbolic role to marriage prestations, effectively overlooking their significance within the system. Leach argued that they are also (or even primarily) economic and political transactions, and are frequently connected to transfers of rights over land, too.

Kinship is therefore not an isolated domain but linked to economic and political structures. Marriage exchanges need to be analysed within their wider economic and political context rather than in isolation, as Lévi-Strauss tended to do. Leach charged the latter with neglecting the effects of material conditions on social relations. He also challenged the claims to universality made by Lévi-Strauss about the model, doubting whether structures generated by marriage rules would be the same in different social contexts.