N ote s a nd Q ue rie s in A nthrop ology

Sa va ge M ind s

May 21, 2014

Nick Seaver

Structura lism: Thinking with C ompute rs

This post is part of a series on the history of computing in sociocultural

anthropology.

In his foundational 1955 article “The Structural Study of Myth,” Claude

Lévi-Strauss outlined the program for a structuralist, cross-cultural study

of mythology. The basic premise is prototypical structural anthropology: to

analyze myths, one must decompose them into their constituent units (or

“mythemes”). Thus decomposed, hidden mythical patterns can be made

evident. These patterns are the real “content” of myths, according to Lévi-

Strauss — they persist across different tellings of the same myth, and they

reflect the inner structures of the mind. More important for the

structuralist project, they recur in different myths, cross-culturally,

reflecting the psychic unity of mankind.

Lévi-Strauss’s notecards (1955:435)

1

Materially, such a structural analysis required note cards. With a mytheme

on each card, they could be physically rearranged into a two-dimensional

grid, with the rows and columns indicating their shared features.

However, there was a problem. As Lévi-Strauss writes:

At this point it seems unfortunate that, with the limited means at

the disposal of French anthropological research, no further

advance can be made. [...] A variant of average length needs

several hundred cards to be properly analyzed. To discover a

suitable pattern of rows and columns for those cards, special

devices are needed, consisting of vertical boards about two

meters long and one and one-half meters high, where cards

can be pigeon-holed and moved at will; in order to build up

three-dimensional models enabling one to compare the

variants, several such boards are necessary, and this in turn

requires a spacious workshop, a kind of commodity particularly

unavailable in Western Europe nowadays. (443)

This sudden concern for materiality is striking in contrast to Lévi-Strauss’s

focus on the abstract structure of mind. According to him, the progress of

structuralism is very literally halted by the size of his office! Compounding

the problem of proliferating notecards was the proliferation of analytical

dimensions. Two or three dimensions could be grasped intuitively and

physically, but beyond that, “progress in comparative mythology depends

largely on the cooperation of mathematicians who would undertake to

express in symbols multi-dimensional relations which cannot be handled

otherwise” (436). Computers offered a kind of conceptual space that

could substitute for physical space: “as soon as the frame of reference

becomes multi-dimensional [...] the board-system has to be replaced by

perforated cards which in turn require I.B.M. equipment” (443).

Although Lévi-Strauss did not use computers as tools, he used them to

imagine the future of structuralist analysis — the recovery of deep

patterns from expanding corpora of mythological material, arrayed in

dimensions that could only be grasped with the aid of computers. The

putative ability of computers to handle boundlessly large data sets and

multidimensional relationships between symbols reflects Lévi-Strauss’

structural ideal: the incorporation of all mythological material into a single

analysis, sorted along all possible axes. By collapsing boards, cards, and

2

multiple dimensions into a single figurative device, the imagined

computer allows Lévi-Strauss’ ideal method to exist, in theory.

Edmund Leach on the computer

In his 1961 Rethinking Anthropology, Edmund Leach focused on a

different connection between structuralism and computing: their reliance

on binary opposition.

If an engineer tries to explain to you how a digital computer

works he doesn’t spend his time classifying different kinds of

nuts and bolts. He concerns himself with principles, not with

things. He writes out his argument as a mathematical equation

of the utmost simplicity, somewhat on the lines of: 0 + 1 = 1; 1 + 1

= 10. (6-7)

In Leach’s imagination, the particularities of actual computers do not

matter—they provide a system in which unfathomable (or perhaps simply

unfathomed) complexity is spun out from the purest of binaries. This style

of explanation, Leach argues, is useful for understanding “what goes on in

society, how societies work” (6) and the potency of binary codes:

“although the information which can be embodied in such codes may be

enormously complex, the basic principles on which the computing

machines work is very simple” (7). Although imagining culture as 1s and

0s may be “frivolous” (7), Leach nonetheless endorses a kind of

mathematical formalism:

The merit of putting a statement into an algebraic form is that

one letter of the alphabet is as good or bad as any other. Put

the same statement into concept language, with words like

paternity and filiation stuck in the middle of it, and God help you!

(17)

Algebra — the substitution of variables for constants, so as to describe

forms and relationships — allows Leach to think that he can avoid the

tangles of “concept language,” purifying cultural heterogeneity into

fundamental relationships or topologies. Variables, the language of

mathematics and computation, provide the figures Leach desperately

wants, neither “good or bad,” but purely symbolic — a status notably

unavailable to empirical cultural facts, which tend to be tangled up in all

sorts of complicating webs.

To use the ultimate anthropological cliché, we might say that for Leach

and Lévi-Strauss, computers proved “good to think.” They served not as

tools for calculating, but as tools for thinking about mythical, social, or

cultural orders. As computers grew in influence and popularity over the

course of Leach’s career, he regularly returned to them as models of

mind, society, and culture. In his book on Lévi-Strauss (1970), Leach

himself suggested that computers functioned totemically for scientists

like classes of animals did for “primitive thought”: as symbolic structures

people could use to “make sense of the events of daily life by reference

to codes composed of things outside themselves” (95).

The structuralist engagement with computing inaugurated a number of

enduring themes for the use of computers in anthropology:

1. Computers frequently function as both tools for studying and metaphors for thinking about

objects of anthropological interest, be they minds, social rules, cultural knowledge patterns, or

ecological systems.

2. Computers, figured as indefatigable calculating machines, help to imagine promising futures for

labor-intensive formal analyses: large-scale data collection and complex symbolic operations are

3

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made more plausible by the assumption that imminent technologies will make them easier.

3. Computational methods (or in this case, the imagination of them) draw anthropologists into

interdisciplinary methodological discussions about science, systematicity, and rigor: for Lévi-

Strauss, this was primarily with mathematicians (see Andre Weil’s mathematical appendix to The

Elementary Structures of Kinship); for Leach, with software engineers (Leach was fond of tracing

his approach to anthropology back to his own training as an engineer).

Without engaging computation practically or materially, Leach and Lévi-

Strauss mine it symbolically for homologies. If computers can spin great

complexity out of simple binaries, why not culture? If “explanation” can be

reduced to a statement of fundamental principles for the computer, then

why not for society? The fact that their computer is an imagined one

makes the homology all the more powerful: Leach can think that

computers are only about 1s and 0s and Lévi-Strauss can imagine them

freeing up the space in his office, working with pure and decontextualized

symbols, because these computers do not exist. There is no hot room full

of engineers, troubleshooting, coding, and constructing the image of

purity and unflappable logic that appears in these texts. The computer, for

Leach and Lévi-Strauss, is just an object to think with, providing a

decontextualized, rigorously symbolic, and tirelessly iterating model of

structuralism taken to its logical limits.

1. Roland Barthes describes the basic actions of structuralism in “The Structuralist Activity” as

“dissection,” by which an object is broken up into parts (mythemes, phonemes, themes, etc.) and

“articulation,” by which those part are reorganized into relations with each other. Structuralists

thus produce a simulacrum of their object, but, Barthes notes, this is an “interested simulacrum,”

constructed expressly for the purpose of making certain features or relations thereof more

evident than they had been in the original. Robin Horton, in his article “African Traditional

Thought and Western Science,” argues similarly for theorizing in general: “All theory breaks up

the unitary objects of commonsense into aspects, then places the resulting elements in a wider

causal context. That is, it first abstracts and analyses, then re-integrates” (1967:62). For a modern

example, see how Netflix analyzes movies. ↩

2. This gridding practice was criticized by many anthropologists as a moment of subjectivity

masquerading as objectivity, or as Jack Goody called it, The Domestication of the Savage Mind. ↩

3. See later, Horst and Miller’s argument in Digital Anthropology that this pairing of the simple and

the complex is a feature of the fundamentally “dialectic” nature of digitality. ↩

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Nick Seaver is a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Irvine. He is

currently conducting research with developers of algorithmic music

recommender systems in the US. You can follow him on Twitter at

@npseaver.

View all posts by Nick Seaver →

3 thoughts on “Structuralism: Thinking with Computers”

Pingback: Computers and Sociocultural Anthropology | Savage Minds

Matthew

Timothy

Bradley

This sudden concern for materiality is striking in

contrast to Lévi-Strauss’s focus on the abstract

structure of mind.

I see where you are coming from, but reading about his

note card computing was actually what helped me begin to

understand his bricolage concept. I’m not an expert in Lévi-

Straussian theory, but I think he probably meant physical

bricolage as more than a metaphor for a cognitive style. I

understand him to have been saying that the two were

types of a kind.

Computers, figured as indefatigable calculating

machines, help to imagine promising futures for

labor-intensive formal analyses: large-scale data

collection and complex symbolic operations are

made more plausible by the assumption that

imminent technologies will make them easier.

Madame Héritier made some early applications of that sort

to kinship data.

May 21, 2014 at 2:18 pm

Héritier, Françoise. 1975. « L’ordinateur et l’étude du

fonctionnement matrimonial d’un système omaha. » In Les

Domaines de la parenté: filiation, alliance, résidence, ed. by

Marc Augé, 95–115. Dossiers africains. Paris: F. Maspero.

Nick

Seaver

Thanks, Matthew. I think you’re absolutely right — the

“science of the concrete” was actually quite material, in

ways that complicate some of our contemporary received

notions about structuralism and the mind. I should have

been clearer that I was referring more to that received

wisdom than making an argument about structuralism per

se. (And thanks for the reference!)

May 21, 2014 at 2:23 pm