Theories in Social Anthropology II: Lévi-Strauss's Structuralism, Culture and Personality (Mead, Benedict, DuBois, Linton, Kardiner, Whiting and Child), Cultural Ecology, Environmental Anthropology, Neo-evolutionism (White, Steward, Sahlins) and Harris's Cultural Materialism

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), trained in philosophy and law in Paris, taught at São Paulo and made expeditions among the Caduveo, Bororo and Nambikwara of Brazil in the 1930s (recounted in Tristes Tropiques, 1955). In New York during the Second World War he met the linguist Roman Jakobson and took from structural linguistics — Ferdinand de Saussure's distinctions of langue and parole and of synchronic and diachronic study, and the phonology of Jakobson and Trubetzkoy — the model for his anthropology. Just as the speakers of a language follow rules of phonology and grammar of which they are unaware, and just as phonemes have meaning only through their contrasts with one another, so kinship, myth, totemism and cuisine are systems of signs whose elements take meaning from their relations, and whose structure is generated by the unconscious workings of a mind that is everywhere the same and thinks in binary oppositions (nature and culture, raw and cooked, high and low, male and female) and their mediation. Structure, for him, is not Radcliffe-Brown's network of observable social relations but a model built by the analyst to explain them. His Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) founded alliance theory: the incest taboo, universal and yet cultural, is the point where nature passes into culture, because it forces men to give up their sisters and daughters to other groups and so obliges exchange; marriage is the exchange of women between groups, following Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift and its obligations to give, receive and return. Elementary structures prescribe the category of spouse; complex structures, as in modern societies, only forbid some. Restricted exchange, between two groups that give women to each other, goes with bilateral cross-cousin marriage and dual organisation; generalised exchange, in which A gives to B, B to C and C back to A, goes with matrilateral cross-cousin marriage and builds a wider, riskier integration; patrilateral cross-cousin marriage produces delayed exchange that reverses direction each generation. "The atom of kinship" (1945) is the smallest unit — brother, sister, her husband and their son — whose attitudes form a balanced set of oppositions, explaining the avunculate. In "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955) and the four volumes of Mythologiques (1964–71: The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, The Naked Man) he broke myths into "mythemes" and read them, like an orchestral score, across their variants, to show that myth works to mediate contradictions the mind cannot resolve, as in his reading of the Oedipus myth. In Totemism (1962) he argued that animals are chosen as totems not because they are good to eat but because they are "good to think": the differences between species serve to mark differences between social groups. The Savage Mind (1962) presented "the science of the concrete", the bricoleur working with whatever lies to hand, as logical as modern science though differently organised, and distinguished "cold" societies that resist historical change from "hot" ones that make it their engine; the culinary triangle of raw, cooked and rotten appeared in 1965. Critics said the structures could not be tested and that history, the individual and practice vanished from his account; Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach carried structural analysis into British anthropology while arguing with its master, Leach applying it to the myths of Genesis, and George Homans and David Schneider (1955) offered a sentiment-based explanation of the preference for matrilateral marriage, which Needham (Structure and Sentiment, 1962) answered by distinguishing prescriptive from preferential systems.

The culture-and-personality school grew among Boas's students in the 1920s and 1930s from his view that each culture is a distinctive historical whole and from the new influence of psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology. It asked how culture shapes personality, how the individual acquires culture through child-rearing, and whether what a society calls normal or abnormal is fixed by biology or by culture. Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), in Patterns of Culture (1934), argued that each culture selects a small arc from the great "arc of human potentialities" and integrates itself around a dominant configuration or ethos, so that a culture is, in the phrase often used of her view, "personality writ large". Borrowing Nietzsche's terms from The Birth of Tragedy, she called the Zuñi of New Mexico Apollonian — sober, restrained, cooperative, distrustful of excess — and the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast Dionysian — seeking ecstasy and excess, in the potlatch as in their visions; the Dobu of the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, drawing on Reo Fortune's ethnography, she described as suspicious and treacherous. From this she drew the lesson of cultural relativism, including the relativity of normality: a person deviant in one culture may be honoured in another. In "Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning" (1938) she compared how smoothly societies move children into adult roles. During the Second World War she wrote studies of national character "at a distance", the best known being The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) on Japan, which contrasted "shame cultures" relying on external sanctions with "guilt cultures" relying on an internalised conscience; she also wrote Race: Science and Politics (1940) against racism. Margaret Mead (1901–1978), Benedict's student and friend, went to Samoa in 1925–26 to test whether the storm and stress of adolescence was universal, and reported in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) that adolescent Samoan girls passed through it with little conflict, so that adolescence was shaped by culture rather than by biology. Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) studied the Manus children. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) compared three New Guinea peoples: among the mountain Arapesh both men and women were gentle, cooperative and "maternal"; among the Mundugumor (Biwat) both were aggressive and violent; among the Tchambuli (Chambri) the temperaments were reversed from Western expectations, the women brisk, managing and dominant and the men decorative and emotionally dependent — from which Mead concluded that temperaments considered masculine or feminine are culturally patterned. With Gregory Bateson she used photography and film in Balinese Character (1942); Male and Female (1949) returned to gender; Culture and Commitment (1970) distinguished postfigurative cultures, in which children learn from elders, cofigurative ones, in which they learn from peers, and prefigurative ones, in which adults learn from the young. In 1983 Derek Freeman, in Margaret Mead and Samoa, attacked her Samoan findings as mistaken; the controversy that followed raised questions about fieldwork, verification and the nature-nurture debate, and anthropologists remain divided over how far Freeman's critique holds.

The second phase of the school replaced Benedict's configurations with more explicit models linking child-rearing, personality and institutions. Ralph Linton (1893–1953), in The Study of Man (1936), gave anthropology the distinction of status and role — a status as a position with its rights and duties, a role as its dynamic aspect — and of ascribed and achieved statuses, and in The Cultural Background of Personality (1945) the idea of status personality, the personality traits expected of the occupants of particular statuses. From 1936 Linton and the psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner (1891–1981) ran a seminar in New York, first at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and then at Columbia, in which anthropologists presented ethnographic cases for psychoanalytic interpretation. Kardiner's The Individual and His Society (1939) and The Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945) set out the concept of basic personality structure: primary institutions — family organisation, feeding, weaning, sphincter training, sexual discipline and the subsistence economy — shape a basic personality shared by the members of a society, and this personality in turn is projected into secondary institutions — religion, folklore, mythology and ritual — which answer the needs and tensions it creates. Cora DuBois (1903–1991) tested the model in the field on the island of Alor in the then Netherlands East Indies (1937–38); in The People of Alor (1944) she combined ethnography, life histories and projective tests such as the Rorschach, which were interpreted "blind" by specialists who knew nothing of the culture, and she introduced the concept of modal personality: not a single personality shared by all, as basic personality implied, but the most frequent type in a statistical distribution, allowing for individual variation. She connected the irregular mothering of Alorese infants, whose mothers worked in the fields, with the anxious, distrustful adults the tests revealed. The cross-cultural, statistical turn came with John W.M. Whiting and Irvin L. Child, whose Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study (1953) used ethnographic data from the Human Relations Area Files to test psychoanalytic hypotheses on dozens of societies: the indulgence or severity of oral, anal, sexual, dependence and aggression training was correlated with adult beliefs about the causes of illness, which served as a projective system reflecting "socialisation anxiety". Whiting and his wife Beatrice Whiting then organised the Six Cultures project (1954 onward), with teams studying child-rearing in Kenya, Mexico, Okinawa, the Philippines, New England and Khalapur in northern India, the last written up by Leigh Minturn and John Hitchcock as The Rajputs of Khalapur. National character studies (Benedict, Mead, Geoffrey Gorer) extended the approach to modern nations and were criticised for stereotyping and for building large claims on child-care practices such as swaddling. By 1961 Francis L.K. Hsu proposed the name psychological anthropology for the broadened field, which went on to include cognition, emotion, self and personhood, and psychiatric anthropology. The school's lasting contribution was to put the individual and socialisation into anthropology; its weaknesses were circular reasoning — inferring personality from institutions and then using it to explain them — and generalisations about whole peoples.

After half a century in which evolution had been a discredited word in American anthropology, Leslie A. White (1900–1975) at the University of Michigan revived it. For White culture is a symbolic system, made possible by the uniquely human capacity for "symboling", and a thing sui generis to be studied by its own science, which he called culturology (The Science of Culture, 1949). Culture has three subsystems — technological, sociological and ideological — and the technological determines the others. Its evolution is measured by energy: "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased", summarised as C = E × T, where C is the degree of cultural development, E the energy harnessed and T the efficiency of tools. Human muscle, then domesticated plants and animals, then fossil fuels mark the great steps (The Evolution of Culture, 1959). White's evolution is universal or general — of culture as a whole, not of particular cultures. Julian H. Steward (1902–1972) argued instead for multilinear evolution: not a single sequence for all humanity, nor the unique history of each culture, but parallel sequences in cultures that face similar environments with similar technologies. In Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955) he defined cultural ecology as the study of the processes by which a society adapts to its environment, and set out its method: analyse the interrelation of the exploitative technology and the environment, then the behaviour patterns involved in that exploitation, then how far these affect other parts of culture. The culture core is the constellation of features most closely related to subsistence and economic arrangements; secondary features are more free to vary by diffusion and history. His study of the Shoshone of the Great Basin (Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups, 1938) related their scattered family bands to sparse and unpredictable wild foods; "Cultural Causality and Law" (1949) compared the parallel rise of irrigation civilisations in the Old and New Worlds; and he proposed levels of sociocultural integration, from the family through multi-family communities to the state. Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) and Elman Service reconciled White and Steward in Evolution and Culture (1960): specific evolution is the adaptive, branching change of particular cultures in their environments (Steward's concern), general evolution the progress of culture as a whole toward higher levels of energy capture and organisation (White's). Sahlins wrote Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), contrasted the Melanesian big man with the Polynesian chief (1963) and in Stone Age Economics (1972) called hunter-gatherers "the original affluent society", with few wants easily met; Service's Primitive Social Organization (1962) gave the sequence band, tribe, chiefdom and state. Sahlins later turned away from ecological explanation to a cultural, structural history (Culture and Practical Reason, 1976; Islands of History, 1985). Ecological anthropology of the 1960s moved from culture to the population and the ecosystem: Roy Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors (1968) argued that among the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea a ritual cycle culminating in the kaiko pig festival regulated the size of pig herds, the frequency of warfare and the distribution of land and people, acting as a homeostatic mechanism, and distinguished the "operational model" of the analyst from the "cognized model" of the people; Andrew Vayda and others wrote in the same systems language. Fredrik Barth's "Ecologic Relationships of Ethnic Groups in Swat" (1956) applied the idea of the niche to ethnic groups sharing a region. From the 1970s political ecology (the term used by Eric Wolf in 1972) added power, markets and the state, and environmental anthropology grew to include indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge, conservation and protected areas, sacred groves, resource conflicts and displacement, and climate change; in India, Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha's This Fissured Land (1992) wrote an ecological history of the country's forests and peoples.

Marvin Harris (1927–2001), trained at Columbia and later at the University of Florida, turned the ecological and evolutionary currents into an explicit research strategy he called cultural materialism. In The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) he wrote a combative history of the discipline that judged every school by whether it advanced a nomothetic, scientific explanation of cultural similarities and differences; it was there that he named Boas's approach "historical particularism". Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (1979) set out the strategy. Every sociocultural system has three levels. The infrastructure consists of the mode of production — the technology and practices for expanding or limiting basic subsistence, especially in relation to a particular habitat — and the mode of reproduction — the demography, mating patterns, fertility, mortality and the practices, including contraception, abortion and infanticide, that expand or limit population. The structure consists of the domestic economy (the organisation of the family, the division of labour by age and sex, domestic discipline) and the political economy (the organisation of the society as a whole, taxation, war, class and caste). The superstructure consists of the behavioural and mental aspects of art, religion, ritual, sport, science and ideology. The principle of infrastructural determinism holds that the etic, behavioural modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the domestic and political economy, which in turn determine the superstructure; Harris accepted feedback but insisted that research should look first to the infrastructure. He took the terms emic and etic from the linguist Kenneth Pike (1954), who had coined them from phonemic and phonetic: emic accounts use categories meaningful to the people studied, etic accounts the observer's categories, and cultural materialism gives explanatory priority to etic, behavioural data. Harris applied the strategy to puzzles that seemed irrational from the outside. "The Cultural Ecology of India's Sacred Cattle" (Current Anthropology, 1966) argued that the taboo on slaughtering cows is adaptive in a peasant economy, because cattle supply bullocks for ploughing, dung for fuel and manure, and milk, and scavenge on crop residues without competing for human food; Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches (1974), Cannibals and Kings (1977) and Good to Eat (1985) extended the argument to the Jewish and Islamic pork taboo, warfare and female infanticide, witch hunts, Aztec sacrifice and food preferences. Critics — among them Sahlins, whose Culture and Practical Reason (1976) defended the symbolic order against "practical reason" — accused Harris of reducing meaning to material utility, of reading functionality into every custom, and of ignoring history and power; Indian scholars pointed out the regional variety and economic costs of cattle keeping that the sacred-cattle argument simplified. The debate between materialist and symbolic or interpretive anthropology, carried on through the 1970s and 1980s, leads directly to the next chapter.