Philippe Descola (2016), HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(3):33–44 — DOI-10.14318/hau6.3.005
Key takeaways
- Method and doctrine apart. Structural anthropology is both a method, from structural linguistics, and Lévi-Strauss’s view of social life (exchange of signs, the unconscious, a monist epistemology). The method can be used without the doctrine; Descola rejects the semiological emphasis (it keeps nonhumans passive) and the deduction of laws of mind from institutions.
- What the method is. Isolate a set of phenomena; look for relations among elements defined “not by intrinsic properties but by their position vis-à-vis one another”; order the possible combinations in a table of permutations. The model is “a heuristic device which provides the syntax of the transformations” from variant to variant, not a faithful description. After Pouillon: sets are brought together “in virtue of their differences”. “No human phenomenon has a meaning in itself.”
- Structure versus system. “A structure is not a system”: a structure exists only where invariant relations among the elements and relations of various sets allow moving from one set to another by a transformation. Transformation is “the keystone” of the analysis.
- Two regimes. Goethean: the variants are developments of an initial form, as the forms of marriage in Les structures élémentaires develop the principle of reciprocity from restricted to generalized exchange. Thompsonian: continuous deformation between already given forms, after D’Arcy Thompson’s grids, which Lévi-Strauss cites for myth. But myths differ from organisms: the group of a myth’s transformations is a virtual continuum on which the analyst performs arbitrary cuts, choosing the mythemes, so “each analyst will trace the path of transformation which his or her fancy will suggest”.
- Ontologies as a group. Descola’s animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism are the four combinations of similar or different interiority and physicality, a Goethean group in which no variant, naturalism included, is privileged. Structural comparison is the fairest “symmetrization” of observer and observed, though it rests on a demand for worldwide data only the West has so far produced.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 from the manuscript bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work
what-survives-translation) at the owner’s request: the manuscript
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list. It is read here
on its own merits. See the curation entry of that day.
Read on 2026-10-09 (NOTE-641). It is a reading of Lévi-Strauss, whose Structural Anthropology the record holds unread (LIT-775); no THEORY is filed from it, since it argues a method rather than establishing a finding.