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Reading Notes On Structural Anthropology: Do Dual Organizations Exist by Claude Levi-Strauss |
This chapter of Levi-Strauss's book, Structural Anthropology, attempts to understand whether there are dual organizations within a societal structure. He explains that there are several organizational structures to a society, with different segments of the society believing in a different organization. Whereas some writers, such as Radin, tried to find the true structure of the society, Levi-Strauss believed that there could be different viewpoints of looking at the society.
He uses many examples from the Bororo of South America to Indonesian peoples to illustrate the existence of dual organizations. Through these examples, we find many different forms and mixtures of dual organizations. He discusses three main types: diametric dualism, concentric dualism, and triad.
Diametric dualism is a division into two parts (i.e. an east-west axis separating some aspect of the village). Concentric dualism is the relationship between the center and the periphery. The men may perform their religious activities in the center of the village, while the women must remain on the periphery. Finally, the triadic structure refers to the separating of things into three classes. For example, the Bororo are divided into three classes.
These three organizations coexist and there are transitions from one to the other. Levi-Strauss uses these structures as the foundation for his writing and examines several societies under this context. He then proceeds to describe binary and ternary systems, where is you take a binary system and describe it as a ternary system, then certain anomalies in the original description disappear. He gives a ternary description of the Indonesian, Bororo, and Winnebago structures. Some of these systems are so complicated that they have developed myths to explain the process to their own members.
The detail with which Levi-Strauss examines these societies is impressive. I find it doubtful that the inhabitants of these societies, the Bororo for instance, have ever thought to spend so much time thinking about their own society however. They understand how the system works for them but probably not in as much detail as the anthropologist studying it. However, they know the little nuances that may never be discovered by an outsider. For when studying such a thing as a society it becomes clear that things do not have to operate on a logical scale. Levi-Strauss gave a nice description of the Bororo, Winnebago, and Indonesian societies, but it would only take a minor exception to toss his theory out.