Social Structures

Diane E. King

Social structure has been used in anthropology as the descriptor for a variety of conceptualizations of human organization. The term, wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss, “has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it.” The building up of such models was a central preoccupation in anthropology in the mid-20th century. These theorists built on an ancient conversation dating from Plato, Ibn KhaldÛn, and Vico and stretching to the figures who laid the foundations for 20th-century social theorizing: Freud, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. The models addressed social phenomena ranging from marriage rules to political forms. Several features of this conversation in anthropology distinguished it from a similar one in sociology taking place during the same period in which such themes as class, norms, and inequality were emphasized. These included a concern with non-Western political organization and kinship structures and terminologies, which were shown to be overlapping ...

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