Hegel explains that every situation presents two opposing things and their resolution; Fichte had termed these "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis."
"[1]Only those who practice structural analysis are aware of what they are actually trying to do: that is, to reunite perspectives that the "narrow" scientific outlook of recent centuries believed to be mutually exclusive: sensibility and intellect, quality and quantity, the concrete and the geometrical, or as we say today, the "etic" and the "emic."
As an illustration, Gê tribes of the Amazon were found to divide their villages into two rival halves; however, members from each half married each other, resolving the opposition.
[2] Lévi-Strauss took many ideas from structural linguistics, including those of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.
Saussure argued that linguists needed to move beyond the recording of parole (individual speech acts) and come to an understanding of langue, the grammar of each language.
The structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate unconsciously (albeit not in a Freudian sense).
For example, in the Amazon basin, two extended families would build their houses in two facing semicircles that together form a big circle.
He showed too that the ways people initially categorized animals, trees, and other natural features, were based on a series of oppositions.
These particular opposites (raw/cooked) are symbolic of human culture itself, in which by means of thought and labour (economics), raw materials become clothes, food, weapons, art and ideas.
It is a "total prestation" as Mauss called it, as it carries the power to create a system of reciprocity in which the honour of both giver and recipient are engaged.
Lévi-Strauss argued that exchange is the universal basis of kinship systems, the structures of which depend on the type of marriage rules that apply.
Lévi-Strauss' model attempted to offer a single explanation for cross-cousin marriage, sister-exchange, dual organization and rules of exogamy.
When groups exchange women on a regular basis, they marry together; consequently, each marriage creates a debtor/creditor relationship that must be balanced through the "repayment" of wives, either immediately or in the next generation.
[6] He deemed this the beginning and essence of culture, as it was the first prohibition to check natural impulses; secondarily, it divides labor by gender.
These status inequalities can destabilise the entire system or can at least lead to an accumulation of wives (and in the case of the Kachin, also of bridewealth) at one end of the chain.
[12] This "mother's brother" (from the perspective of the wife-seeking son) plays a crucial role in alliance theory, as he is the one who ultimately decides whom his daughter will marry.
Much earlier, and some 450 miles north of Paris, a specific type of applied anthropology emerged at Leiden University, Netherlands that focused frequently on the relationship between apparent cultural phenomena found in the Indonesian archipelago: Batak, Minangkabau, Moluccas, etc., though it was primarily aimed at training governors for colonial Indonesia.
This theory attracted students and researchers interested in a holistic approach, that was broad and deep, that related economic circumstances with mythological and spatial classifications and that explored the relationship between the natural world and religious, symbolic systems.
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.
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.
In generalised exchange systems, more groups imply greater complexity to ensure that all wife-givers will eventually be on the receiving end, an issue that Lévi-Strauss had already foreseen.
Leach argued that they are also (or even primarily) economic and political transactions and are frequently connected to transfers of rights over land, too.
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.
Critics also saw weaknesses in Lévi-Strauss' methods, in the fact that he looked for ideal structures, thereby neglecting the reality and complexity of actual practices.
Feminists critique Lévi-Strauss' claim that the underlying principle according to which all societies work is the exchange of women by men, who dispose of them as if they were objects.