Their topics include Jos Platenkamp and the Leiden tradition in
structural anthropology, Omaha and all that: basic issues and new horizons in the study of relationship terminologies, exchange and the constitution of people under a welfare regime, secularization or normalization of religion in Indonesia: from custom to Pancasila and back to Adat, the British interregnum in Java 1811-16: an experiment in supra-national fraternal governance, and the mediation of intercultural competence as a form of applied anthropology.
The literary critic Roland Barthes, the cultural historian Michel Foucault, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacanall were structuralists of one sort or another, and all declared their indebtedness to Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of "
structural anthropology." Half a century later, all these names are still by-words for strenuous difficulty and theoretical sophistication; though they are classics by now, they retain the acrid perfume of the avant-garde.
The ten essays are informed by three strands of thought that have had special impact on the modern study of the body in performance: structuralism and
structural anthropology, the early work of ethnologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the writing of Michel Foucault.
First,
structural anthropology emerges out of a set of esthetic questions; second, these esthetic questions raised by anthropological "data" have implications for esthetic theory and specifically the esthetics of modern art.
One of the more glaring ones, which appears in his essay "The Effectiveness of Symbols" (in
Structural Anthropology [1963]), and is basic to his entire method, was his notion of "inductive property," by which "structures," salt crystals as much as myth--affect one another through what I can only call their "structuration." The example brilliantly worked through was that of a Cuna Indian shaman in the San Blas Islands off Panama and Colombia in the Caribbean who is able to coordinate his nightlong song with the transformation of the heaving body of a woman laboring in obstructed childbirth such that her body is "restructured" and the baby is born.
Lotman's treatment of history implicitly also includes Claude Levi-Strauss's approach to
structural anthropology. According to the latter, anthropology and history are very close disciplines, though psychologically different:
In his seminal works
Structural Anthropology (trans.