Tremlett, (Post) Structuralism

(Post)structuralism
Oxford Handbooks Online

(Post)structuralism
Paul-François Tremlett
The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion
Edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler
Print Publication Date: Nov 2016 Subject: Religion, History of Religion

Online Publication Date: Jun 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198729570.013.16
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter suggests that structuralism and poststructuralism should be understood as

part of a ‘turn’ in social theory and philosophy to ‘systems.’ It explores Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s approach to myth, demonstrating that his approach entwines elements from
linguistics and dynamic systems theory that point ‘back’ to formalism and ‘forward’ to
poststructuralism. It then examines Lévi-Strauss’s critique of evolutionist and
functionalist accounts of ‘primitive’ religion and his engagements with work by Frazer
and Malinowski. The chapter shows the extent to which Lévi-Strauss’s approach
undermined notions of progress and accounts of the regulatory role of religion in the
closed social system described by functionalism. The chapter then moves on to explore
Jacques Derrida’s account of language and deconstruction and the critique of the
metaphysics of presence, suggesting that deconstruction also privileges the idea of the
open system. This is shown to have significant implications for textual, historical, and
sociological studies of religion.
Keywords: bricolage, deconstruction, dynamic systems theory, evolutionism, functionalism, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
myth, poststructuralism, structuralism
Chapter Summary
• Structuralism and poststructuralism should be understood as part of a ‘turn’ in social
theory and philosophy to ‘systems.’
• Lévi-Strauss’s approach to myth entwines linguistics and dynamic systems theory,
pointing ‘back’ to formalism and ‘forward’ to poststructuralism.
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(Post)structuralism
• Lévi-Strauss’s critique of evolutionist and functionalist accounts of ‘primitive’

religion undermine notions of progress and accounts of the regulatory role of religion
in the closed social system described by functionalism.
• Derrida’s account of language and deconstruction privileges the idea of the open
system and has significant implications for textual, historical, and sociological studies
of religion.
Introduction
Distributed at the intersections of sociology, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis,
linguistics, folklore, history, and political science (but also and probably more importantly
cybernetics, mathematics, biology, art, and music), structuralism and poststructuralism
have conventionally been associated with a turn to language in social theory (Callinicos
1999, 266) and with a rejection of humanism including the death of the author (Barthes
1977, 148) and the erasure of ‘Man’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 247; Foucault 1970, 387).
Indeed, structuralism and poststructuralism were distilled, according to skeptical Anglo-
Saxon commentators, in a Parisian laboratory somewhere on the Left Bank from the work
of a Swiss linguist whose key book seemed to suggest that the meaningfulness of words
resided in language rather than the intentions of any putative (p. 221) speaker (which
was ironic given that it was composed, after his death, from the notes taken by his
students during his lectures), and a Viennese doctor who was convinced that the dreams
and verbal slips of his bourgeois patients did not mean what they appeared to mean on
the surface. There was also the work of the German philologist—work which was
comprehensively ignored until long after his death in the madhouse. That structuralism
and poststructuralism are purported to have exposed the illusion of meaning’s guarantee
under the fiduciary signs of the author, Man, and God bears all the hallmarks of that
German’s furious tirade against metaphysics.
Yet, structuralism and poststructuralism are more than exquisite deliberations on

language. Beyond the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich
Nietzsche, the structuralist approach which convulsed anthropology and the study of
religion in the 1960s and 1970s was very much an intervention in debates initiated by
evolutionist thinkers such as James G. Frazer on totemism (1910) and functionalist
thinkers such as Bronislaw Malinowski on myth (1984). Within Frazer’s evolutionist
framework, totemism evolved into religion and religion into science. Societies were
ordained to progress—implicitly either under Western tutelage (colonialism) or within
parameters established according to the Western experience of modernity—stage by
stage, away from religion and towards science, industry, and democracy in a journey
towards ‘civilization.’ This linear theory of historical transformation was challenged by
structuralism and later poststructuralism, which posed a series of non-linear models
whereby change occurred not as the result of any theory of progress but according to
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contingent and complex interactions of elements. According to Malinowski’s functionalist

framework, myths functioned homeostatically to sustain social order in ‘primitive’
societies. However, re-framed according to structuralist and poststructuralist logics,
myths and societies were transformed into complex forms subject not to functionalist
laws of closed-system equilibrium but to open-system dynamics and non-linear processes
of transformation. In this chapter I will focus predominantly on the writings of the French
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) and the French philosopher Jacques
Derrida (1930–2004). I will argue that structuralism and poststructuralism form part of a
decisive and interdisciplinary ‘turn’ in social theory and philosophy towards ‘systems’
conceived as open and unstable. The consequences of this ‘turn’ for the study of religion
remain undecided.
The Structuralist Approach to Myth
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Structuralism has been characterized as a mode of analysis that privileges invariant

structures (or structuring structures) said to function like grammar in language—that is,
like an unconscious set of rules that determines sequences of words although these rules
remain largely hidden to ordinary language speakers. This opposition of grammar
(langue) to speech (parole) and of a hidden depth to a visible surface is a key feature of
Saussure’s linguistics. Saussure developed a series of oppositions—diachronic to
synchronic, signifier to signified, and syntagmatic to paradigmatic—to capture the sense
of (p. 222) language as a system of (ordinarily hidden) rules and relationships for which
the focus of analysis was not individual words as carriers of meaning but the structuring
relations between words. Fredric Jameson has described this as a “movement from a
substantive way of thinking to a relational one” (1972, 13).
For Saussure then, the structural study of language concentrated not on speech as it
unfolded in time (diachronically) but on grammar as a closed system that might be caught
in an analytical ‘snapshot’ (synchronically). According to Saussure, language was a
system of differences—acoustic differences of sound and ideational differences of
meaning (for an overview see Sturrock 1993). Words (signs) signify or point, but meaning
resides not in signs/words as containers of meaning—there is no essential tie between
signs and that to which they point—but is generated according to horizontal, syntagmatic
relations of combination (e.g. the positioning of personal pronouns in relation to verbs in
a sentence) and vertical, paradigmatic relations of substitution (e.g. the use of a word in a
sentence always implies the potential use of other words that are related either
semantically or phonetically).
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work has been summarized very much in these terms: that is, as a
search for unconscious and therefore hidden structuring structures that are analytically
comparable to a grammar in that they generate variable (religious and cultural) forms
that are in turn analytically comparable to speech. For Lévi-Strauss the structures in
question are cognitive. That is, they are the species-specific, cognitive structuring
structures—the mental architectures that every single member of Homo sapiens is born
with—that lie behind all the varied products of human culture and religion (to study
culture and religion is therefore to study the mind at work).
In Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth (1993a) the influence of Saussure is immediately

apparent: the myth is not to be read simply as a narrative that unfolds diachronically.
Instead, the narrative is suspended and key events (‘bundles of events’ or, elsewhere,
‘mythemes’) are extracted as the proper subject matter of the analysis:
It is impossible to understand a myth as a continuous sequence. This is why we

should be aware that if we try to read a myth as we read a novel or a newspaper
article, that is line after line, reading from left to right, we don’t understand the
myth, because we have to apprehend it as a totality and discover that the basic
meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the sequence of events but—if I may say
so—by bundles of events although these events appear at different moments in the
story. Therefore, we have to read the myth more or less as we would read an
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orchestral score, not stave after stave, but understanding that we should
apprehend the whole page and understand that something which was written on
the first stave at the top of the page acquires meaning only if one considers that it
is part and parcel of what is written below on the second stave, the third stave,
and so on. That is, we have to read not only from left to right, but at the same time
vertically, from top to bottom. We have to understand that each page is a totality.
And it is only by treating the myth as if it were an orchestral score, written stave
after stave, that we can understand it as a totality, that we can extract the
meaning out of the myth.
(Lévi-Strauss 2001, 40)
Lévi-Strauss’s method of ‘reading’ horizontally and vertically draws upon

(p. 223)
Saussure’s model of language with its syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions, but also
Vladimir I. Propp’s formalism and his earlier work on fairy tales (see Hawkes 1983, 67). It
also points to Lévi-Strauss’s fascination with music (Tremlett 2008a, 58–61) and a more
general but important eclecticism: structuralism, as will be seen momentarily, cannot be
reduced to its linguistic inheritances. Once extracted, the ‘bundles of events’ or
‘mythemes’ are re-composed into binary oppositions that are then compared to other
versions of the same myth or other myths from the same cultural area: “to study a myth is
to study the relationships of ‘transformation’ … between the different versions of the
myth and between the myth and other myths. With this approach, neither a single version
nor a synthesis of several versions is an appropriate object of study. A myth should be
considered, rather, as the set of all its versions” (Sperber 1996, 27).
In the study of myth advocated by Lévi-Strauss, it is the shifts in pattern of the key
‘bundles of events’ across differing versions of the myth that are significant. For example,
in The Raw and the Cooked (1992 [1970]) Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that a number of
apparently distinct myths collected from different South American cultures are
structurally interrelated: myths about the origins of fire, the origins of wild pigs, and the
origins of tobacco turn out to be variations or transformations of one another (Lévi-
Strauss 1992, 107). But, once we have our “permutation group” (Lévi-Strauss 1993a,
223), what then? And what of meaning?
Myth and Meaning
Structuralism challenges traditional theories of meaning. For example Carl Jung and
Joseph Campbell assumed, like Lévi-Strauss, that to study myth was to study the mind
(Capps 1995, 236). However, whereas for Jung and Campbell the study of myth revealed
universal, psychological archetypes pointing to deep and profound meanings about
human existence and possibilities for well-being, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis
transformed myth into a mathematical formula (see Lévi-Strauss 1993a, 228). But, Lévi-
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Strauss never claimed that myths were without meaning: at the end of The Raw and the
Cooked he stated that
Each matrix of meanings refers to another matrix, each myth to other myths. And
if it is now asked to what final meaning these mutually significant meanings are
referred—since in the last resort and in their totality they must refer to something
—the only reply to emerge from this study is that myths signify the mind that
evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part. Thus there is
simultaneous production of myths themselves, by the mind that generates them
and, by the myths, of an image of the world which is already inherent in the
structure of the mind.
(Lévi-Strauss 1992, 340–341)
In an interview he went further and said “in everything I have written on

(p. 224)
mythology I have wanted to show that one never arrives at a final meaning” (Lévi-Strauss
and Eribon 1991, 142). As Derrida has pointed out, Lévi-Strauss abandons “all reference
to a centre, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute
archia” (Derrida 2002, 361). Saussure’s signs were always routed to a real world through
the idea that they signified objects, states, and phenomena. The poststructuralist twist
was to claim that signs did not point beyond language to an ‘outside’ world but only to
other signs in a process of infinite deferral or différance (meaning both to differ and to
defer). Myths, it turns out, are thoroughly poststructuralist: they signify other myths as
one myth turns into another, the series assuming complex non-linear forms in the process
(Lévi-Strauss 1996, 157).
But of course myths are also supposed to be windows onto the human mind. How is it that
myths can turn into other myths seemingly all by themselves? Lévi-Strauss claims to be
able to show “how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact
and, as I have already suggested, it would perhaps be better to go still further and,
disregarding the thinking subject completely, proceed as if the thinking process were
taking place in the myths, in their reflection upon themselves and their
interrelation” (Lévi-Strauss 1992, 12).
Dynamic Systems
Earlier I suggested that structuralism could not be reduced to its linguistic inheritances.
The mathematician and philosopher Jean Petitot (2009) has persuasively demonstrated
that Lévi-Strauss’s work is intersected by other influences and thinkers, undermining
claims that “structuralism is of formalist, logicist and linguistic descent” or that it
celebrates exclusively “a static, algebraic and combinatory concept of structure” (Petitot
2009, 276). Indeed, Petitot indicates an alternative or additional genealogy for Lévi-
Strauss’s writings which includes the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson for whom
structures are “morphodynamically (self-) organised and (self-)regulating wholes” (Petitot
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2009, 276). The theory of self-organizing structures (dynamic systems theory) also
derives from Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and points to an active rather than static
notion of structure as summarized by Frank Capra:
To understand the phenomenon of self-organization, we first need to understand

the importance of pattern. The idea of a pattern of organization—a configuration
of relationships characteristic of a particular system—became the explicit focus of
systems thinking in cybernetics and has been a crucial concept ever since… . Is
there a common pattern of organization that can be identified in all living
systems? … Whenever we look at life, we look at networks … The first and most
obvious property of any network is its non-linearity—it goes in all directions …
Because networks of communication may generate feedback loops, they may
acquire the ability to regulate themselves … The pattern of life … is a network
pattern capable of (p. 225) self-organization … we can say that self-organization is
the spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behaviour in open
systems far from equilibrium, characterized by internal feedback loops and
described mathematically by non-linear equations. (1996, 80–85)
According to Christopher Johnson (2003, 92–103), Lévi-Strauss’s approach to myth was

informed by these ideas of self-organizing patterns of life. So, what of the mind—the
“uninvited guest” (Lévi-Strauss 1993b, 80)—and the deep grammar lying behind myth
and religion/culture more generally?
When dynamic systems theory is deployed to frame the question of cognition, a picture of
the human mind emerges that is at odds with recent work in the cognitive theory of
religion (see Sperber 1996; Boyer 2001). Cognition or thinking—for Boyer and Sperber—
is the translation of sensory experiences into information about an independently
existing, outside world, a view which privileges the idea of a fixed and unchanging
cognitive architecture. By contrast, dynamic systems theory claims that the mind “does
not react to environmental stimuli through a linear chain of cause and effect, but
responds with structural changes in its nonlinear, organizationally closed, autopoietic
network” (Capra 1996, 269; see also Ingold 2001; Fodor/Piattelli-Palmarini 2011, 72–92;
Tremlett 2011). If the mind is a non-linear, dynamic system—a claim that may be inferred
from products of the mind such as myths which ‘grow’ or self-organize, proliferating in
spiral fashion like a ‘crystal’ to form an “intermediary entity between a statistical
aggregate of molecules and the molecular structure itself” (Lévi-Strauss 1993a, 229)—
then key assumptions of cognitive theory such as the modularity thesis appear suspect.
‘Primitive’ Religion: Evolutionism,

Functionalism, and Entropy
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At the centre of early theories of so-called primitive religion are two explanatory frames—
evolutionism and functionalism. These rival theoretical positions were staked out in the
study of religion around arguments regarding totemism, magic, and animism and what
Lévi-Strauss would later call “la pensée sauvage.” Evolutionism posits a model of linear,
developmental progress, allegedly measurable in terms of technology and the
correspondence of ideas (as mental representations) to the external environment.
According to this model, religion is explanatory in character and will wither away as
scientific (accurate, mental) representations of the world proliferate. For evolutionists
such as Frazer, the question of religion was a question of representation—a question of
the correspondence of a religious truth-claim with the actually existing world. It was for
this reason that evolutionists predicted the demise of religion in the face of the advance
of science. Functionalism emerged as a rival to evolutionism. It ignored the truth content
(p. 226) of religion to concentrate on the function of religion in society. Functionalists
posited an equilibrium model of society that de-privileged history and ruled out change.
For functionalists such as Malinowski, religion was primarily an element in a complex,
closed, homeostatic system. Both evolutionism and functionalism rendered non-Western
societies outside of history, either because they had become stuck in some backward
stage of development (evolutionism) or because they were insulated against historical
change by a range of homeostatic mechanisms/institutions including religion
(functionalism). The structuralist intervention placed key elements of evolutionist and
functionalist theories of religion and society in doubt.
According to Lévi-Strauss, the evolutionist hypothesis accounts for cultural diversity by

ranking cultures on a scale of developmental progress. He argues that this method of
classification cancels out the diversity of cultures by transforming non-Western cultures
and societies into stages of the West’s own past. The rationalist critique of religion and
religious thought played a key role in this ranking procedure. For example, near the
beginning of The Golden Bough (1987 [1922]) Frazer set out the thesis that magical
beliefs and practices are founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding causality,
specifically that homeopathic magic applies the “Law of Similarity” and contagious magic
the “Law of Contact or Contagion” (Frazer 1987, 11). For Frazer, magical thought as
representational thought is remarkable because of the lack of correspondence between it
and the actually existing world. This lack renders it, for Frazer, empty. Magic is a child-
like fantasy and a flight of fancy which the modern, scientific mind has surpassed. By
contrast, for Lévi-Strauss, magic and science sit side by side as “two parallel modes of
acquiring knowledge” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 13). He states that the “thirst for objective
knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call
‘primitive’. Even if it is rarely directed towards facts of the same level as those with which
modern science is concerned, it implies comparable intellectual application and methods
of observation” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 3). As such, Lévi-Strauss applies the notion of
bricolage to allow for a kind of empathic or imaginative reconstruction of la pensée
sauvage. Bricolage is a form of assembling which works with whatever comes to hand,
but la pensée sauvage also suggests that the assemblages of the ‘bricoleur’ emerge from
cognitive operations qualitatively different to those of the scientist or engineer. The
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evolutionist premise of ranks is thereby rejected and replaced by the idea of “two
strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to
that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it” (Lévi-Strauss 1966,
15).
Johnson (2003, 116) has claimed that the “thermodynamic or informational concept of
entropy”—including game theory and Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics,
communication patterns, and feedback loops—influenced Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to think
against the grain of linear change posited by the evolutionists but also against the
hermetic, cryogenic chambers imagined by the functionalists. Lévi-Strauss’s idea of ‘hot’
and ‘cold’ societies—the latter existing in a Rousseau-esque relation with ‘nature’ and the
former rapaciously consuming their resources and those of other cultures, before finally
falling subject to entropic collapse—is evidence of this influence:
I have suggested … that the clumsy distinction between ‘peoples without

(p. 227)
history’ and others could with advantage be replaced by a distinction between

what for convenience I called ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies [les sociétés froides et les
sociétés chaudes]: the former seeking, by the institutions they give themselves, to
annul the possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity
in a quasi-automatic fashion; the latter resolutely internalizing the historical
process and making it the moving power of their development.
(Lévi-Strauss 1966, 233–234)
In The Savage Mind (1966) and the essay “The Scope of Anthropology” (1994, 29–30)
Lévi-Strauss fabricates a series of binary associations: egalitarian vs. hierarchical, ‘cold’
vs. ‘hot’ and elsewhere, clocks vs. steam engines (Johnson 2003, 122). According to Lévi-
Strauss, egalitarian, cold, clockwork societies require a minimum amount of initial input
energy to get them going and are characterized by a negative feedback loop where
“information on the output of the system is fed back to its input, to ensure that
subsequent output is maintained within a limited set of parameters” (Johnson 2003, 123).
By contrast, hierarchical, hot, steam-powered societies generate energy through
exploitation (“differentiations between castes and between classes are emphasized
unceasingly in order to draw from them change and energy” [Lévi-Strauss 1994, 29]) and
are characterized by a positive feedback loop whereby “the system is subject to an
exponential growth that knows no limits” (Johnson 2003, 123). Lévi-Strauss deployed
these chains of metaphor to reimagine societies as different types of system. Whereas the
hot societies of the West are characterized by exploitation as a means of guaranteeing a
rapid pace of change, the cold societies of the Amazon ‘chose’ stasis and, as such, engage
the environment in a manner guaranteeing “both a modest standard of living and the
conservation of natural resources” (Lévi-Strauss 1994, 28). In the classic functionalist
theories of religion, the role of religion was to act as a stabilizing body of practices and
ideas against potentially pathological complexes. However, for Lévi-Strauss totemism,
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magic, and animism offer rather a window onto “different solutions to common problems
in the organization of social life” (Doja 2008, 93).
Poststructuralism, Derrida, and Deconstruction
Where does structuralism end and poststructuralism begin? In everything I have

discussed so far, the suggestion has been that a clear boundary between them is difficult
to draw. According to Johnson (1993, 7), structuralism privileges “the ‘closed-system’
models of linguistics and mathematics,” although arguably Lévi-Strauss’s work has
always gone beyond the closed-system to explore “forces of interaction and change, both
within and between systems” such as in his definition of ‘hot’ society. Nevertheless it is
here at the tendentious border identified by Johnson (1993) that I will locate
poststructuralism and Derrida’s oeuvre.
Derrida’s basic contention is that Western philosophy has been structured by what he
calls the metaphysics of presence. In Of Grammatology, Derrida suggests that the
privileging of speech (presence) over writing (absence or distance) constitutes a
(p. 228)
strategy to guarantee that meaning is stabilized and crystallized, thus ensuring the
possibility of communication and understanding between speakers. According to Derrida,
speech has traditionally been seen as a natural act that facilitates direct or unmediated
communication between speakers. For Aristotle for example, “spoken words … are the
symbols of mental experience … and written words are the symbols of spoken words’ and
this is because, for Aristotle, “the voice, [as] producer of the first symbols, has a
relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind” (Derrida 1997, 11). The
presence of speech to mind is the guarantee of reason’s transparency to itself in the
proximity of thought to speech and then on to speaker to speaker. This intimacy and
immediacy allows speakers to know what they mean, to mean what they say, and to
understand what has been said. This speech community is disrupted by writing (in much
the same way that in sociology, modernity disrupts the communing community of the
Gemeinschaft) because writing requires interpretation and interpretation contaminates
understanding with all kinds of temporal and spatial distortions. Derrida seeks to unravel
this metaphysics of presence by arguing that writing is not corrupted speech but rather
both speech and writing are instances of systems that, in their instability, must always fall
prey to interpretation. Importantly, Derrida situates this claim beyond philosophy in
relation to biology and cybernetics (Derrida 1997, 9), suggesting a relationship with
structuralism that, according to Johnson (1993), aligns Derrida’s conception of writing
“with the metamorphic and adaptational (‘open-system’) models found in systems theory,”
that is “models which were never properly assimilated and applied by structuralist
theory” (1993, 8; see also 1993, 191). It is this notion of the open system that provides a
point of departure for exploring Derrida’s idea of deconstruction.
According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method or a procedure and he provides a

definition of sorts in Of Grammatology:
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The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside.

They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by
inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always
inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily
from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion
from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being
able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always
in a certain way falls prey to its own work.
(Derrida 1997, 24)
For Derrida, language exceeds and overwhelms. Deconstruction is a process through

which this excess and overwhelming can be glimpsed. In Memoires for Paul de Man
Derrida writes that “there is always already deconstruction, at work in works, especially
in literary works. Deconstruction cannot be applied, after the fact and from the outside,
as a technical instrument of modernity. Texts deconstruct themselves by
themselves” (Derrida in Moran 2000, 452). Derrida’s insight is that texts weave the
illusion of (p. 229) possessing a central meaning. A deconstructive reading reveals that
such a core meaning is never in fact attained and indeed is subverted by other meanings
within the text. Derrida’s claim that “there is no outside-text” [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]
(1997, 158) suggests that a text can never be set apart as a discrete object either from
the contexts of its production or from the contexts of its interpretation, which, in any
case, generate only more text. Thus textual meaning is always an effect or function of
context and there is no possibility for predicting or indeed controlling further
contextualization. Translation is especially susceptible to deconstruction, as translation is
never the generation of a copy but always, for Derrida, an alteration (see Derrida 2004).
What is the significance of such alterations?
As the catastrophe of disturbance and seasonal differentiation could not be

logically produced from within an inert system, one must imagine the
unimaginable: a little push entirely exterior to Nature. This apparently “arbitrary”
explanation responds to a profound necessity and thus reconciles many
exigencies. Negativity, the origin of evil, of society, of articulation, comes from
without. Presence is surprised by what threatens it. On the other hand, it is
imperative that this exteriority of evil be nothing or nearly nothing. The little push,
the “slight movement” produces a revolution out of nothing … A nearly non-
existent force is a nearly infinite force when it is strictly alien to the system it sets
going.
(Derrida 1997, 256–257)
Derrida’s work has immense significance for those working with sacred texts as
translators and interpreters and for those studying religions more generally. For example,
if translation and interpretation have become techniques for fixing meaning, then
deconstruction can operate in the other direction by providing emancipatory routes out
from traditional or canonical interpretations of texts designated ‘sacred.’ As such, it has
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been claimed that deconstruction offers “play, with its connotations of free
experimentation and endless alternatives” (Bible and Culture Collective 1995, 131).
However, deconstruction can problematize both ‘repressive’ and ‘progressive’
interpretations, not just hegemonic readings but radical readings as well.
Jürgen Habermas has suggested an affinity between Derrida’s notion of deconstruction

and Jewish mysticism (Callinicos 1989, 78–79; Habermas 1987, 181–184). According to
Habermas, the undecidability of language becomes a confirmation of what in Judaeo-
Christian thought is known as ‘the Fall’—the moment that registers the exile of human
beings from God. Without that comforting (metaphysics of) presence there is only the
cacophony of language, de-centered and forever subject to deconstruction. Bryan Rennie
has extended this insight a step further to claim that Derrida’s work expresses “a longing
for a centre” (Rennie 2001, xiv; see also Permenter 2001). This opens sufficient space for
Rennie to argue for an affinity between Derrida’s thought and that of Mircea Eliade.
Sherwood and Hart (2005, 24) have even claimed an affinity between Derrida and Rudolf
Otto indicating perhaps the implication of poststructuralism in the very essentialisms it
seeks to break down (see Tremlett 2008b).
(p. 230) Deconstructing Social Systems
For those keen to apply Derridean insights to sociological rather than textual and
philological questions (see also Mandair, “Postcolonialism,” this volume), Ernesto Laclau’s
poststructuralist intervention in Marxist thought offers a pertinent point of departure.
Laclau begins with conceptions of historical agency and argues that Marx articulates two
different theories of history: the first is history as the linear unfolding of a predetermined
journey to communism; however, Laclau rejects the idea of history as already being
decided. The second is history as struggle. According to Laclau, when history is
conceived as struggle it means that the social system must always remain open, but this
is “not as the result of the empirical impossibility of its specific coherence being fulfilled,
but as something which ‘works’ within the structure from the beginning” (1990, 29). In
other words, in the same way that deconstruction is always already at work in texts, it is
also always at work in social systems meaning that they are always prey to
deconstruction and therefore, to change. The zero-sum game of the secularization thesis
—with its either/or binary of secular/religious for the identity of the social—would appear
to be particularly vulnerable to a deconstructive reading.
Page 12 of 18

(Post)structuralism
Conclusions
In this chapter I began by demonstrating that Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism emerged as a
critique of evolutionist and functionalist thought in anthropology. Thinkers including
Frazer and Malinowski were interested in questions concerning the origins of religion
through the postulation of a linear theory of progress and the function of religion through
the postulation of a closed, equilibrium model of society. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist
interventions offered a completely novel way to begin to understand religion, not merely
through the imaginative exploration of la pensée sauvage but also because Lévi-Strauss’s
experiments in anthropology and linguistics but also music, philosophy, cybernetics,
biology, and art opened out new problems and questions, the ramifications of which are
still being explored today. His work on myth in particular, with its elision of the subject
through the suggestion that it’s the myths that ‘think,’ constitutes a fundamental
challenge for a field of study operating according to a humanist and subject-centered
epistemology. Derrida’s work has similarly performed a radical challenge for the study of
religion. His approach to language as an open system marked by différance and
deconstruction poses difficult questions both for those working on religious texts and
their translations and for those interested in sociological questions of religion. Most of all,
I hope this chapter has demonstrated that structuralism and poststructuralism constitute
much more than a ‘linguistic turn’ and draw together influences and strands of thought
that are part of a wider and ongoing interdisciplinary-epistemic shift in social theory and
philosophy.
(p. 231) Glossary
Bricolage
in French, it means DIY or do-it-yourself (the ‘bricoleur’ is the odd-job-person). The
implication in Lévi-Strauss’s work is of a mode of thinking that assembles connections
with whatever materials are to hand rather than according to any predetermined
schema or plan. Elsewhere the term has been used to refer, metaphorically, to
qualitative research methods where it “denotes … practices explicitly based on notions
of eclecticism, emergent design, flexibility and plurality. Further, it signifies
approaches that examine phenomena from multiple, and sometimes competing,
theoretical and methodological perspectives” (Rogers 2012, 1).
Cybernetics
“The study of artificial or natural systems which store information and use feedback
mechanisms to guide and control their behaviour” (Honderich 1995, 173).
Deconstruction
deconstruction for Derrida is not a method but the assumption that texts—in effect all
assemblages be they linguistic, cultural, or historical—are composed of unstable
articulations of elements.
Page 13 of 18

(Post)structuralism
Différance
meaning both to differ and to defer, Derrida’s neologism points to the endless slippage
of meaning from word to word in a potentially endless regress.
Dynamic systems theory
the idea that systems—language systems, social systems, religious systems, biological
systems—are self-organizing and can change in unpredictable ways according to both
endogenous and exogenous logics or factors.
Entropic
“A measure of unavailable energy in a physical system. Since usable energy is lost in
irreversible energy transfers, entropy increases in closed systems (the second law of
thermodynamics)” (Honderich 1995, 238).
Evolutionism
the idea that social, religious, political, and economic systems develop uniformly from
simple to complex forms in a manner said to resemble the evolution of biological forms
and systems according to principles of selection, fitness, and adaptation.
Formalism
perhaps more accurately designated as Russian Formalism, this refers to the ideas of a
circle of early twentieth-century Russian scholars including V. I. Propp and Roman
Jakobson whose work on linguistic and literary forms would influence the thought of
Lévi-Strauss (during World War II, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson met in New York—both
had fled Europe to escape the Nazis).
Functionalism
in anthropology and sociology, the idea that institutions such as religion can be studied
as ‘parts’ contributing to the maintenance of the social whole.
Linear
refers to the representation of a set of relationships or events by a straight line.
Metaphysics of presence
Derrida claims that this idea has structured much of the Western philosophical
tradition. The idea itself privileges the notion of a foundational point which anchors
meaning and reference through binary oppositions such as speech and writing. It is
precisely this metaphysics that Derrida seeks to open out to deconstruction.
Pensée sauvage
has been translated in English as “savage thought,” although in French the phrase is
also a pun on “wild pansies.” According to Lévi-Strauss, this type of thinking is wild (as
in untamed), natural, and universal. The phrase represents a departure from the
ranking of cognitive operations constitutive of evolutionist thought.
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(Post)structuralism
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(p. 232)
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Derrida, Jacques. 2004. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara

Johnson. London and New York: Continuum, 67–186. Original edition, 1981.
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Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Johnson, Christopher. 1993. System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
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Mythology 1, translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Harmondsworth:
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(p. 233)
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Harmondsworth: Penguin, 206–231. Original edition, 1963.
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IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Original edition, 1988.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude and Didier Eribon. 1991. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss,
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Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1984. “Myth in Primitive Psychology.” In Magic, Science and

Religion and Other Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 93–148. Original edition,
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Rennie. New York: SUNY Press, 95–116.
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Strauss.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss, edited by Boris Wiseman.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 275–295.
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of Mircea Eliade, edited by Bryan Rennie. New York: SUNY Press, ix–xxiv.
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Qualitative Report 17(48): 1–17. <http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR17/rogers.pdf>.
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Other Testaments, edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart. London and New York:
Routledge, 3–26.
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Equinox.
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New York: Continuum.
Tremlett, Paul-François. 2011. “Structure Amongst the Modules: Lévi-Strauss and

Cognitive Theorizing about Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23(3–
4): 351–366. doi: 10.1163/157006811X608421
Further Reading
Belsey, Catherine. 2002. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
. [A very accessible introductory text.]

Critchley, Simon and William R. Schroeder, eds. 1998. “Part IX: Structuralism and After.”
In A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 507–612
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(Post)structuralism
. [Part IX offers excellent overviews of individual thinkers associated with structuralism and
poststructuralism including (p. 234) Lévi-Strauss and Derrida but also Althusser, Deleuze,
Irigaray, and Kristeva among others. For more advanced readers.]
Sturrock, John, ed. 1980. Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
. [This excellent volume consists in essays summarizing the thought of scholars including Lévi-
Strauss and Derrida, but also Foucault and Lacan.]
Paul-François Tremlett
Paul-François Tremlett is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University,

UK. His publications include Lévi-Strauss on Religion: The Structuring Mind (2014)
and Religion and the Discourse of Modernity (2011).
Page 18 of 18

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Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Nov 2016 Subject: Religion, History of Religion

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter suggests that structuralism and poststructuralism should be understood as

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

• Lévi-Strauss’s critique of evolutionist and functionalist accounts of ‘primitive’

Yet, structuralism and poststructuralism are more than exquisite deliberations on

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

contingent and complex interactions of elements. According to Malinowski’s functionalist

The Structuralist Approach to Myth

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

Structuralism has been characterized as a mode of analysis that privileges invariant

In Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth (1993a) the influence of Saussure is immediately

It is impossible to understand a myth as a continuous sequence. This is why we

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

(Lévi-Strauss 2001, 40)

Lévi-Strauss’s method of ‘reading’ horizontally and vertically draws upon

Myth and Meaning

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(Lévi-Strauss 1992, 340–341)

In an interview he went further and said “in everything I have written on

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

To understand the phenomenon of self-organization, we first need to understand

According to Christopher Johnson (2003, 92–103), Lévi-Strauss’s approach to myth was

‘Primitive’ Religion: Evolutionism,

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

According to Lévi-Strauss, the evolutionist hypothesis accounts for cultural diversity by

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

I have suggested … that the clumsy distinction between ‘peoples without

history’ and others could with advantage be replaced by a distinction between

(Lévi-Strauss 1966, 233–234)

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Poststructuralism, Derrida, and Deconstruction

Where does structuralism end and poststructuralism begin? In everything I have

According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method or a procedure and he provides a

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The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside.

(Derrida 1997, 24)

For Derrida, language exceeds and overwhelms. Deconstruction is a process through

As the catastrophe of disturbance and seasonal differentiation could not be

(Derrida 1997, 256–257)

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

Jürgen Habermas has suggested an affinity between Derrida’s notion of deconstruction

(p. 230) Deconstructing Social Systems

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(p. 231) Glossary

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Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

London: Yale University Press.

Callinicos, Alex. 1989. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge: Polity

Capps, Walter, H. 1995. Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline. Minneapolis:

Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Derrida, Jacques. 2004. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara

Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by

Hawkes, Terence. 1983. Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Methuen.

Subscriber: Boston College Libraries; date: 06 July 2018

Ingold, Tim. 2001. “From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Boundaries

Jameson, Fredric. 1972. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of

Johnson, Christopher. 2003. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years. Cambridge:

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1993a. “The Structural Study of Myth.” In Structural

Anthropology Volume 1, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1993b. “Linguistics and Anthropology.” In Structural Anthropology