Anthropology as a Semiology: Lévi-Strauss’s Methodological Protocols

Abstract

In the past decades there have been a number of authors within the social sciences who have subscribed with considerable optimism to the view that a conceptual unification of these sciences around a central methodological programme would bring revolutionary social scientific developments. The content of such a programme has of course been the subject of endless debate but a very common view has been that all the social sciences have similar objects—types of communication — and that prescriptive techniques for dealing with these different objects ought to be derived from an examination of disciplines such as cybernetics, systems and information theory and linguistics, which appear to attain high levels of rigour in their analyses of communicational processes.¹ The ideal of a ‘master science’ which somehow respects the disparity between diversity and unity, universality and particularity, is constantly in mind.