ANTH 3690 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Hawaiian Religion, Roman Jakobson, Trubetskoy Family
Document Summary
Converted to anthropology while studying the elementary structures of kinship. Essentialism - humans are free agents in the world. Assuming there is a structure and things happening below the structure. Understand phenomenon and things in relation to other things. The concern with the elementary forms of minds and cultures. Structures: they are the mental structures of logic that are shared by all human beings. Not to be confused with british structuralism - interest for social structure. Structures are social structures: they are concrete institutions. To establish the way in which the units of cultural discourse are created. To establish how the units (pairs of opposing terms) are arranged and combined to produce current cultural production (myths, marriage rules, totemic arrangement) We can reduce the information about a cultural system down to the essential. Elementary structures: in french structural anthro, universal mental logics and their cultural manifestations. Maus"s concept of reciprocity and applies it to marriage in so-called primitive societies.