Structuralism, Reloaded

The attempt to institute a viable structuralist explanatory project in the social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology) has been beset, since its inception, with what some have considered to be insurmountable difficulties. Four such roadblocks deserve mention. 1) The first, I refer to as Piaget’s question [Piaget 1970, 113]: “how do [social] forms acquire structural organization?” While structuralist analysts have been content with describing static or “synchronic” patterns or dealing with the “functions” of structures, the main analytic task is to account for the emergence of large scale structures from the concatenation or assemblage of lower order structural components. In essence, Piaget’s question boils down to pointing out that all structuralism must perforce be a genetic (or “generative”) structuralism or else be condemned to irrelevance. It is no accident that Pierre Bourdieu adopted this Piagetian term to refer to his own project. 2) The second (but not less important), I refer to as Nadel’s Paradox [DiMaggio 1993]. This concerns the fact that while structuralist analysts attempt to develop, objective or purely formal (that is culture-free) definitions of social structure, social structure is non-negligibly constituted by the very cultural elements that are elided by analytic (or mathematical) fiat. Thus, either the analyst consciously incor-