On Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of "Structuralism"

On Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of "Structuralism"Author(s): Terence TurnerSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Dec., 1990), pp. 563-568Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743962 .

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Volume 3i, Number S. December I990 I s63

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HOWELL, N. I979. Demography of the Dobe !Kung. New York: Academic Press.

H U M B O L D T, A. V O N. I 8I9. Voyages aux regions equinoxiales di Nouveau Continent faits en 1799, I8oo, I8oI, 1802, I803 et I804. Vol. 2. Paris: N. Maze.

JAMIN, J., AND G. LENCLUD. I984. Une ethnographie de la violence est-elle possible? Etudes Rurales 95-96:9-2i.

KNAUFT, B. M. I987. Reconsidering violence in simple human so cieties: Homicide among the Gebusi of New Guinea. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 28:45 7-82.

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LIZOT, J. I988. "Los Yan6mami/" in Los aborigenes de Venezuela, vol. 3, Etnologia contemporanea. Edited by J. Lizot, PP. 479-583. Caracas: Fundaci6n La Salle/Monte Avila Edi- tores.

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On Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of "Structuralism"

TERENCE TURNER

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, III. 60637, U.S.A. 9 VIII 90

"Structuralism," as a form of anthropological thought preeminently associated with the work of Levi-Strauss, is generally conceived to be founded upon a concept of "structure" imported in more or less equal parts from linguistics and mathematics. The linguistic ideas from which Levi-Strauss drew inspiration are by now relatively familiar. The mathematical side of the story, however, has been much less well understood. This lack has now been remedied by Almeida's (CA 3I:366-77) mas- terful exposition of the mathematical ideas upon which Levi-Strauss appears, explicitly or implicitly, to have drawn: group theory with its concepts of group, transformation, and invariance and notions of topology, probability, and entropy derived from other forms of mathematics.

The concept of structure in terms of invariant constraints governing transformations is of course not con- fined to group theory or to mathematics; it is fundamental to any form of structural analysis. Levi-Strauss was not the first to apply it to the analysis of human phenomena: Marx's analysis of the transformation of values into prices of production in volume 3 of Capital has exactly this form, and many other examples could be cited, among the more notable from the works of Levi- Strauss's contemporaries Bateson and Piaget. Levi- Strauss's idiosyncratic manner of applying this concept to anthropological data, however, sharply differentiates him from these thinkers and others who have applied it to social, cultural, and psychological data. This idiosyncratic approach is the result of his attempt to synthesize the concept of the transformation group with the basic ideas of Saussurean linguistics and Prague phonology.

Almeida's article will be of great value to those wish-



564 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

ing to understand the mathematical ideas of structure, entropy, transformation, and invariance underlying the metaphorical uses of these concepts in the works of Levi-Strauss. It is to be hoped that it may stimulate some of these readers to apply these ideas in different ways and to better effect than Levi-Strauss and other "structuralist" analysts have thus far done. If, however, Almeida is proposing that closer examination of the mathematical ideas of transformation, invariance, group, structure, and entropy will lead to a better under- standing of Levi-Strauss's theoretical position and more effective applications of his analytical method, I must beg to disagree. I would argue, on the contrary, that Levi- Strauss's rather loosely metaphorical use of these ideas has been plagued from the outset by misconceptions and contradictions that have nothing to do with their mathematical properties.

Levi-Strauss's theoretical synthesis of linguistics and mathematics, creative and brilliant as it unquestionably is, has simply failed to work, as judged by its own criteria, when applied to the analysis of social and cultural phenomena. It is impossible to point to a single example of an analysis by Levi-Strauss of any set of social or cultural data that satisfies the criteria of his "mathematical" group-theoretical conception of structure: the identification of a finite set of transformations conserving some invariant aspect of the relations among their terms that defines the set as an integral whole. This is not to deny that his analyses abound with valuable in- sights and ideas; it is simply to point out that "structural analysis" in the exact sense entailed by the mathematical ideas he has sought to apply is not among them.

Neither the theoretical crisis of structuralism nor its lack of success in analytical practice can be attributed to the mathematical properties of the ideas of group, transformation, and invariance that it has attempted to de- ploy, nor are there any grounds for assuming that these concepts are somehow intrinsically inapplicable to social or cultural data. On the contrary, as I have pointed out, they have been fruitfully applied to such data by many other investigators. It follows that no amount of clarification of these ideas, however desirable in itself, can resolve the contradictions of the structuralist position.

Rather than consider that the failure of structural analyses to model the data might indicate that some- thing is wrong with the models, Levi-Strauss has attempted to rationalize the situation by blaming the data. Over the years there have appeared an increasingly elab- orate series of assertions of the intrinsically fragmen- tary, decentered, open-ended, ever-changing, bricole, in sum, relatively unstructured properties of the phenomena he has sought to analyze, accompanied by shifts in the definition of the phenomena themselves away from the more overt and concrete forms of social or cultural constructs to the more abstract, ineffable, and empirically unconstrained structures of thought, interpreted as simple patterns of associations and tropes. His fascination with the notion of entropy, the ultimate disintegra-

tion of structure, may be seen as another expression of this same tendency.

Having set off more than 40 years ago in search of social and cultural structures with the properties of invariance-conserving groups of transformations, declar- ing that "the proof of the analysis is in the synthesis," Levi-Strauss and those who have most faithfully im- itated his methods have invariably discovered that the synthesis has failed to materialize. In the meantime structuralism, which began by challenging the reductionism of positivist, empiricist, and psychologistic approaches to cultural phenomena in the name of their sui generis structural properties, has revealed itself to be an even more radical reductionism, predicating the ultimate dissolution of all cultural structures, culture itself, subjectivity, meaning, history, and (last but not neces- sarily least) anthropology into a simplistic form of asso- ciationist psychology, claimed to be radically continu- ous in its formal structures with the sensory properties of natural things. I would like to offer some thoughts on three interrelated aspects of this ironic intellectual tra- jectory: the contradictory relation between linguistic and mathematical elements in the structuralist concept of structure, the theme of entropy, and the structuralist conception of the relation of nature and culture.

Levi-Strauss's application of the notion of the transformation group to anthropological data has been determined by his a priori assumption that individual instances of social or cultural structures should take the form of paradigms of contrastive relations on the model of the feature paradigms of Prague structural phonology. It follows that any given cultural phenomenon (a particular society's kinship system or its "variant" of a myth) can only be considered to represent a single transformation of the structure which it is taken to manifest. The main effect of this assumption has been to displace the location of the totality corresponding to the mathematical "group" of transformations (i.e., of "structure" properly speaking) to a level of theoretically posited meta- totalities transcending particular societies and cultural constructs: "groups" of myth "variants" or the set of all "elementary structures" of kinship. It has proved impossible, however, to define these hypothetical meta- totalities with the precision required for the identification of invariant constraints delimiting the sets of transformations ascribed to them. It has, in short, been impossible to define these hypothetical constructs in terms that satisfy the minimal requirements of the "mathematical" concept of structure with which Levi- Strauss began.

Levi-Strauss appears never to have entertained the possibility that "structural" relations in the group- theoretic sense (groups of transformations, invariant constraints) might be identified at the level of the internal organization of particular kinship systems or myths. In his earliest "structuralist" papers on kinship, he assumed that individual kinship-marriage systems as wholes (or rather those parts of them that he chose to deal with) could be treated as individual transformations



Volume 31, Number S, December 990 1 565

in a "group" composed of instances of the same type from different societies. In his later work on myths and totemic classifications, the individual myth "variant" was taken as an integral individual transformation or permutation, and the "group of myths" consisting of variants from different societies and/or epochs was conceived as the locus of the invariant constraints (i.e., the "group" in the mathematical sense) governing the structural relations among, and a fortiori within, the variants.

The possibility that the syntagmatic and pragmatic aspects of the organization of social or cultural constructs with some ethnographic claim to constitute "wholes" in their own right might themselves be the carriers of "structural" information-might even constitute the primary level of "structural" relations in the sense required by the transformation-group model-was excluded by Saussurean definition, whereby all such relations were consigned to the residual, and structurally irrelevant, category of parole. All such features are ac- cordingly eliminated at the outset of structuralist analysis by Levi-Strauss's slash-and-burn methodological pro- cedures of first abstracting his data from their pragmatic contexts as components of diachronic processes of social action and then flensing away the syntagmatic aspects of their internal organization (e.g., narrative structure for myth, developmental cycles of family and domestic group for kinship systems, generative schemes for classifications). The remaining debris is rearranged, by analytical bricolage, into Saussurean paradigms of relations among individual signifiers, conceived as obtain- ing homogeneously, that is, synchronically and without significant variation, for the variant as a whole. At this point it is of course impossible to define "transformations" among these relations, that is, internal variations in the relations among the elements of the set, set off in contrast to some pattern of invariant constraints. While it is true that Levi-Strauss often speaks of "transformations" as components of individual myth "variants," he treats them analytically simply as alternative forms of "value" contrast in the Saussurean sense (e.g., raw: cooked) rather than as operations upon such contrasts that form part of an invariance-conserving "group" of operations (i.e., a "structure" in the mathematical sense) within the same "variant." If "structure" is defined in terms of an invariant relation among a plurality of transformations, it therefore becomes paradoxically impossible to speak of the "structure" of a single "variant," i.e., the structure of a myth or a kinship system. The "structure" of the "variants" as a group can only be located outside any of them, at the level of the relations between them, that is, the level of the "group" of variants as a whole. It has proved impossible, however, either to identify any empirical basis for such supracul- tural "groups" or, as I have already indicated, to define them with the formal precision required by the theory.

These two issues are interdependent in practice: dem- onstrating the operation of invariant constraints with sufficient precision to distinguish clearly which pro- posed "transformations" belong to the group and which

do not would in practice imply the identification of some connection between the theoretical closure of the structural model and some aspect of the empirical data that it purports to illuminate. Instead, as I have men- tioned, Levi-Strauss's work has moved in the opposite direction, towards ever greater programmatic and empirical imprecision: from formally constrained group of per- mutations to open-ended chain of associations, from invariance to metaphor, from structured totality to "a multidimensional body, whose central parts disclose a structure, while uncertainty and confusion continue to prevail along its periphery ... [which] after being broken down by analysis, will [never] crystallize again into a whole with the general appearance of a stable and well defined structure" (I969:3). This well-known passage from the Overture to The Raw and the Cooked is offered as a general characterization of the nature of mytholog- ical thought, but it is in fact an admirably concise de- scription of the effectively unstructured character of Levi-Strauss's own structural analyses. It is true that he devotes several memorable passages in the Overture to arguing that the two come to the same thing, but as his only evidence consists of his own structural analyses of myths his argument on this point rather begs the question. Levi-Strauss to the contrary, the inevitable question raised by a critical examination of his uses of his basic notions of structure is whether it might not after all matter quite a lot whether "the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine take place through the medium of theirs" (I969:I3).

As will by now have become clear, I believe that Levi- Strauss's way of subsuming empirical cases within his mathematical model of structure by first reducing them to internally uniform, synchronic feature paradigms is the central contradiction in his theoretical position. I use the term "contradiction" advisedly, because the effect has been to juxtapose the separately viable components of his concept of structure-the transformation-group model and the Praguean feature paradigm-in such a way that neither can be applied to the data in an appropriate way, with the result that each ends by being projected onto hypothetical constructs that lack the properties required for its successful application. It is in this sense that the structuralist concept of structure may be fairly said to be self-dissolving, and it is thus that structuralism came in practice to play the un- wonted role of the first poststructuralism (as Derrida [I970] was among the first to recognize).

Against Levi-Strauss's notion of "structure," as Saus- surean langue, I would urge that it is precisely the level of parole, that is, of the pragmatic contextual relations and internal syntagmatic organization of integral cultural constructs, or what he calls "variants," that af- fords the most fruitful basis for applying the model of the transformation group to social and cultural phenomena. The internal organization of such constructs is re- plete with relatively complex clusters of relations and transformational operations (episodes of narrative,



5661 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

stages of developmental cycles, discrete rites within complex ceremonies, or successive stages of exchange systems) which have both paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties. These clusters are differentiated through changes in their formal and semantic features that are directly related to their pragmatic relations to the social contexts in which they are enacted and the perspectives and intentions of the actors who perform them. It is this level of structural complexity, one far richer and more powerfully organized than the spectral Saussurean vision of langue, that offers real counterparts of mathematical "groups" and transformational structures (see Turner I 977, I979, 1980, I985).

It is also at the level of the individual "variant," the particular kinship system, myth, or narrative, that structure is articulated with the intentional orientation of actors and thus with meaning, subjectivity, and "cen- teredness" in the social context of action. The divorce of structural analysis in its Levi-Straussian form from all three sets of considerations, like the divorce of structure itself from the individual social and cultural forms that are its putative bearers, is again a result of Levi-Strauss's a priori commitment to Saussurean ideology rather than a necessary concomitant of the transformation-group concept. Displacing the concept of structure outside any concrete cultural construct and thus, in effect, any individual social or cultural system separates it by definition from any articulation with subjective consciousness, in- terpretive meaning, social action, or social structure. These separations thus converge with the fundamental antinomies of Saussurean linguistic ideology, inter alia the separation of cognition from action, culture from society, paradigm from syntagm, text from context, structure from historical process, and subjectivity from the structures of consciousness. This inert and conceptually atomized theoretical universe is the appropriate setting for Levi-Strauss's elegiac musings on the theme of entropy.

To take the internal structure of cultural constructs or subsystems of social relations as an appropriate field for structural analysis is not in itself either to reify social or cultural units at this level or to abandon any comparative analysis of their structures. It is, however, to insist that before structures can be compared or the transformations between them defined, they must first be understood for what they are. Constructs or products that the members of a society themselves define as wholes, either pragmatically by reproducing them ac- cording to a relatively invariant form or conceptually by claiming them to be sets of relations or events that belong together, are in themselves susceptible to analysis as patterns of variation constrained within relatively invariant limits. Indeed, this level of phenomena is the primary level, in both ontological and epistemological senses, of social and cultural structure, as the locus of cogeneration of variation and invariance, feature contrast and syntagmatic combination. This is the level at which relative "totalities" in a structurally relevant sense are concretely produced in action and therefore manifested in empirically observable regularities, pro-

ductions, and forms of consciousness. Comparative models of the relations between such primary-level structures a la Levi-Strauss are of course also possible, but they must be recognized as secondary abstractions, not reified as universal psychological structures ontolog- ically and epistemologically prior to concrete social and cultural constructs, not to mention specific societies or cultures.

What constitutes a social or cultural unit or "totality" will of course vary with the context and ends of the analysis as well as the stipulations of the culture in question. An individual performance of a myth, for instance, or the normative form of the myth if one is recognized by the culture, a set of myths treated as a cycle, a myth and the ritual or social context to which it may refer or of which it may form part, and the capitalist mode of production may each constitute a totality for analytical purposes, depending on the contextual cir- cumstances and the level of theoretical concerns in question. The structures of myths that, although treated as distinct stories, seem related may be compared, either within or across cultures, and the contrasts among them perhaps represented as groups of transformations. It should be clear, however, that if the myths or other constructs being compared have been properly analyzed to begin with, the "variants" comprising such a model will look very different from the simple paradigmatic arrays of Levi-Strauss's "groups" of "variants." Each will con- sist of schematic or syntagmatic (in the case of myths, narrative) forms, comprising multiple paradigmatic arrays of relations connected by transformations, governed by invariant constraints (Turner 1980, I985).

The secular tendency in the development of Levi- Strauss's "structuralist" position, as a result of the internal contradictions I have attempted to point out, has been the unravelling of the structuralist concept of "structure." It is this process of theoretical decomposi- tion, I suggest, that is reflected in Levi-Strauss's melan- choly fascination with the theme of entropy. I would therefore wholeheartedly agree with Almeida, but for somewhat different reasons, that the formal aspects of Levi-Strauss's conception of structure are directly related to this preoccupation. Almeida attempts to ac- count for the prominence of this theme in Levi-Strauss's work as a logical corollary of his mathematical notions of structure, by way of thermodynamics, probability, and statistics. In contrast, I see Levi-Strauss's "entropic" dissolution of culture into an infracultural theory of the "natural" psychological forms of perception and cognition, his location of cultural "structure" in a naturalis- tically conceived "esprit humain," in sum his general programmatic reduction of culture to nature as the con- sequences of his having projected cultural "structure" outside of particular cultures in the first place. He had nowhere else to go.

From his earliest structuralist writings, Levi-Strauss sought to locate the extracultural source of cultural structures in psychology. He was therefore concerned with psychology at the level of structures that could be conceived as crosscutting cultural differences: in a word,



Volume 3I, Number 5, December I990 | 567

at the level of "nature" (although at the beginning this was still relatively narrowly conceived as "human nature"). The psychological notions upon which he drew at first, however, contained Freudian, social- psychological, and other elements redolent of affective and pragmatic attachments to social relations and cultural forms. This made them ill-suited to a psychology of universal cognitive principles. Nor did they offer a theoretical basis for grounding the pure relational structures of the "linguistic unconscious" in natural processes of perception or cognition abstracted from social and cultural context, on the one hand, and subjective consciousness, on the other.

Levi-Strauss resolved these difficulties partly through a shift in substantive focus (from social structure and shamanism to the formal structures and concrete natural symbolic codes of myth) and partly through a new resynthesis of his basic theoretical paradigm. This con- sisted essentially in recasting his earlier, more abstractly formal linguistico-mathematical conception of structure, already located in a generic, species-level "unconscious mind" beyond culture or subjectivity, in the concrete, sensory terms of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of perceptual patterns as the unconscious in- frastructures of consciousness. Judging from textual evidence, the key step appears to have been Levi-Strauss's metaphorical identification of his unconscious linguistico-mathematical "structures" with Merleau-Ponty's perceptual "Gestalten," one of the central concepts in the latter's synthesis of philosophical, psychological, and Marxian theories of knowledge and forms of consciousness (see Merleau-Ponty i962:esp. 38, 68, IOI, I30; i964a:I3, 23-24, 77; i964b:49, 87-88; I964C:67, I23; I968:I94-95, 205, e264-66).

For Merleau-Ponty, a perceptual or sensory Gestalt was a pattern of associations of sensory properties pre- sented by an object of perception in its relation to the body of the perceiving subject. Transmitted by the neu- rophysiological apparatus of perception to the conscious mind, such patterns served as unconscious shapers of the forms of subjective consciousness (concepts, judg- ments, etc.), thus playing the role of Kant's tran- scendental a priori categories of reason and forms of sensibility. The importance of these patterns for Merleau-Ponty lay largely in their being simultaneously subjective and objective, thus opening "a way beyond the subject-object correlation which has dominated phi- losophy from Descartes to Hegel" (i964c:I23). The Ges- talt constituted by the act of perception was irreducibly subjective not only because it embodied the physical relation of the perceiving subject to the object but also because it implied an embryonic form of intentionality in the attention of the subject to the perceived Ges- talt. For Merleau-Ponty this element of intentionality was an intrinsic part of the Gestalt. Levi-Strauss disre- garded these aspects of Merleau-Ponty's notion and em- ployed the concept of the perceptual Gestalt in a way suited to his own quite different project of absorbing the subject (or, more precisely, the unconscious structures of consciousness) into the object, dismissing subjectivity

and specifically cultural forms of consciouness as mere epiphenomena.

To this end, Levi-Strauss seized upon Merleau-Ponty's emphasis that the perceptual channel through which Gestalten are conveyed to consciousness is not part of subjectivity but rather has, in relation to it, the character of a continuation of the natural world of objects and their sensory properties. The frontier of subjectivity was thus displaced from the boundary between the sensory apparatus and the natural object of perception to that between the sensory apparatus, now itself imbued with the epistemological properties of a natural object, and subjective consciousness.

To Levi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty's concept thus appeared to offer a concrete basis for his conception of the presocial, "natural" character of mental structures, with the additional decisive advantage of being anchored directly in extramental nature. It was now possible for him to claim not only to have dissolved culture into the structures of the mind but to have dissolved mental structures and the mind itself into nature. It was a heady moment for entropology: culture and with it society, history, subjectivity, and consciousness could now be resolved, or dissolved, into a naturalized plane of "structures" beyond time, consciousness, meaning, and, as it turned out, for practical analytical purposes structure as well. With the adoption of Merleau-Ponty's Gestalten as the material infrastructure of his linguistico-mathematical structural paradigms, Levi-Strauss's theory be- came a full-fledged totemism in its own right, in the precise sense of an alienation and naturalization of social and cultural products. He appropriately turned to totemism as the prototypical instance of the constitu- tion of forms of cultural consciousness through the perceptual recognition of natural patterns of sensory properties (the totemic species and their relations of similarity and contrast with one another).

It remained only to develop the complementary side of Merleau-Ponty's argument, to wit, that the mental association of sensory perceptions to form cultural structures is itself a natural process, modelled by the neuro- physiological structure of the perceptual channel, and to generalize both sides as a universal theory of the elementary structures of cultural reason. This Levi-Strauss did in The Savage Mind (i962), which he dedicated to Merleau-Ponty in recognition of his profound but never explicit intellectual debt (there is, oddly, no cita- tion of Merleau-Ponty in the text or bibliography).

The Savage Mind, in its original French edition as La pensee sauvage, is itself wittily produced as a little sensory Gestalt, a perceptual icon of the new theoretical synthesis it expounds. The front cover is decorated with a wild pansy, emblematic of the natural Gestalten of perceptual properties that are appropriated by "wild" (natural) thought as the basis of the semiotic representa- tions and categories of culture. The wild pansy, whose name also means "natural thought" or "savage mind" in French, not only serves for this reason as an apt represen- tation of the point that the structures of conscious thought are based upon naturally given perceptual Ges-



568 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

talten but because of its employment as a symbol for "thought" in the cultural "language" of flowers in Re- naissance Europe also conveys the connotation that such naturally derived Gestalten become the basis for the semiotic structures of cultural signification. On the back cover appears a wolverine, embodiment of the natural character of thought itself (Levi-Strauss inserts an otherwise puzzling excursus on the intelligence of wol- verines in the text to establish this association). The text itself, a specimen of culturally articulated parole, is appropriately suspended between the two covers, represen- ting the langue of natural forms through which it is connected to the natural world to which it refers. The cultural content of this parole (that the source of cultural structures of consciousness lies in the use of patterns of concrete perceptual properties by equally natural mental processes of pattern recognition and association) amounts merely to a redundant expression of the structure of its framing Gestalt, the binary opposi- tion between the two covers of the book, is of course the meta-point. The redundancy of culture is its fundamental point. Levi-Strauss's remark upon seeing the English edition of his book ("I did not recognize my own work"), which has been widely taken as a comment on the maligned but actually quite reasonable translation, is more readily understandable, I suggest, in a more concretely visual sense, as a reaction to the failure of the British publishers to reproduce the French cover-the thoughtful contemplation of which might have saved many a hard-pressed Anglophone cultural theorist the trouble of reading the redundant text within.

With the cultural structure of his own theory thus located, with the pages of his text, as a redundant expression of the eternal dialectic between animate and vegeta- ble nature, i.e., between natural intelligence and the natural patterns of sensory experience, the program of "entropology" announced in the last pages of Tristes Tropiques (I955) was sensorily, as well as conceptually, complete. What has followed has simply elaborated the same basic position.

The events of I 968 briefly challenged the hegemony of

this austere ideology of meta-alienation, with its ultimate message that the alienation of social consciousness as natural structure is itself determined by the natural structure of consciousness. The aftermath, however, has proved Levi-Strauss a surer prophet of the unhappy consciousness of late 2oth-century capitalism than the Soixante-huitards. One imagines his ironic amusement as he contemplates the historic entropy of his own theory at the hands of the poststructuralists and decon- structionists as they struggle to make virtues of his theoretical vices.

References Cited DERRIDA, JACQUES. I970. "Structure, sign, and play in the dis-

course of the human sciences," in The languages of criticism and the sciences of man: The structuralist controversy, Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press.

LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE. I955. Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon. i962. La pensee sauvage. Paris: Plon. i969. The raw and the cooked. New York: Harper.

MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE. i962. The phenomenology of perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

I i963. The structure of behavior. Translated by A. L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press.

. i964a. The primacy of perception. Edited by James M, Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

. I964b. Sense and nonsense. Translated by H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

. i964c. Signs. Translated by R. C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

. i968. The visible and the invisible. Edited by Claude Lefour, translated by A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern Uni- versity Press.

T U R N E R, T E R E N C E. I 9 7 7. Narrative structure and mythopoeisis: A critique and reformulation of structuralist approaches to myth and poetics. Arethusa 10:103-63.

. I979. "Kinship, household, and community structure among Kayapo," in Dialectical societies. Edited by D. Maybury- Lewis, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

. I980. Le denicheur d'oiseaux en contexte. Anthropologie et Societs 4(3):8 5- i i5

. I985. "Animal symbolism, totemism, and the structure of myth," in Natural mythologies: Animal myths and metaphors in South America. Edited by G. Urton. Salt Lake City: Univer- sity of Utah Press.



Documents

On Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of "Structuralism"