Structural Anthropology by Adam Mars-Jones
"Structural Anthropology" by Adam Mars-Jones explores the application of psychoanalytic methods to understand cultural narratives and social dynamics. The work begins with a lecture format where the speaker presents structural anthropology as a means to investigate societal behavior, suggesting that these methods can unearth surprising insights into both distant and contemporary cultures. The speaker illustrates this methodology through a compelling anecdote involving a woman who discovers her husband’s infidelity, leading to a series of dramatic actions that symbolize deeper cultural tensions.
Mars-Jones dissects the story into five thematic units, each representing dichotomies such as nature versus culture and comedy versus tragedy. Through these themes, he examines the implications of the characters' actions in relation to broader cultural patterns, emphasizing the role of rituals and counter-rituals in societal constructs. The narrative ultimately aims to elevate mundane details into a mythic framework, encouraging a deeper understanding of human motivations and societal norms. The text asserts that structural anthropology can reveal profound truths about contemporary life, challenging readers to reconsider traditional interpretations of personal and collective experiences.
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Structural Anthropology by Adam Mars-Jones
First published: 1982
Type of plot: Didactic, parody
Time of work: The late twentieth century
Locale: The British Isles
Principal Character:
An expert , in the field of structural anthropology
The Story
"Structural Anthropology" begins in the form of a lecture on its title subject, as an authority in the field explains how the social science discipline might be seen as an application of the methods of psychoanalysis to an entire social community rather than to an individual person. In his introductory remarks, he notes that the separate approaches of the two techniques that "seek to discover the workings of the human mind" might be combined so that the anthropologist's traditional field of exploration—a culture "at a distance conducive to objectivity"—could be expanded to "uncover much that is startling in our own culture." To support his position, he shows how Sigmund Freud, the pioneering practitioner of the psychoanalytic method, was intellectually linked across space to President Woodrow Wilson, across time to scientist Leonardo da Vinci, and across time and space to Greek mythological king Oedipus, setting an example of resistance to "self-imposed limits" that restrict and restrain imaginative extrapolation.
The theoretical conceptions of the speaker, familiar in academic discourse, are temporarily set aside as he recounts an incident that he will use to demonstrate the efficacy of the method he is championing. Maintaining a tone of objectivity, the speaker describes how a woman, returning unexpectedly to her home, discovers her husband in an adulterous liaison. She leaves unnoticed, returns at the usual time, and puts sleeping-pills in his dinner. While he is sleeping, she sticks "his hand to his penis with Super Glue." The doctors and nurses treating the man are compelled to devise a number of original procedures to restore everything to its natural arrangement. The point of the story, according to the speaker, is that it has mythic resonance and that its deeper meanings can be revealed through the techniques of structural anthropology, which he will apply and illustrate in the remainder of the narration.
Following this section, which functions as a kind of prologue, Adam Mars-Jones divides the story into five discrete units, each of which establishes a dichotomy: nature/culture, limp/stiff, food/drug, private/public, and comedy/tragedy. Within each unit, the speaker delves further into the motives of the parties in the story and links their actions to larger cultural trends. The first unit is focused on glue, which the speaker sees as a figure for the degree of adhesion between mutually opposing entities, as well as an inert substance that the wife chooses because it lacks the capacity for resurrection. As the narrative progresses, various examples of disconnection are mentioned ("the collective unconscious" independent from "chronological sequence"), leading toward the next unit, which the speaker labels "the secondary axis of oppositions."
Here, the physical dimensions of the wife's actions are examined. The social and personal requirements regarding arousal and containment are analyzed in terms of their effects on "social order and the next generation" The speaker contends that the purpose of the wife's revenge is to parody virility, as artificial stiffness in this case reveals incapacity. The point here is that any permanent condition, unmediated by change, is a pathological state, laughable and disgusting to an impartial observer.
The third unit considers the contrary forces operating in terms of a choice to sacrifice variety for consistency. Marriage requires the diminution of momentary excitement in the interest of the future generation, so that in an "economy of duties and pleasures," the speaker asserts, a man "renounces sex as drug" and accepts "sex as food"; thus, he explains, hunger will be satisfied rather than stimulated. However, in the case of the adulterous husband, a demand for excitement has been met by the wife "drugging his food," using the drug (glue) as a narcotic rather than a stimulant in order to publicly dramatize her feelings about the betrayal of the marriage agreement.
In the fourth unit, the speaker discusses the ways in which a private commitment is ratified by a public ritual, one of the crucial components of a myth. The ritualistic accouterments of a marriage ceremony are reversed in the wife's actions, the church replaced by its "symbolic inverse," a hospital. The speaker shows how this has a direct appeal to the "collective unconscious" and notes that in practice, structural anthropology "increases mystery in the process of explaining it."
The final unit continues the concept of counter-ritual, aligning it with folktales in which a character (the wife) metamorphoses from one character (Captive Maiden) into another (Witch). The speaker explains how the wife has involved the community—surgeons and nurses—in her action, with attending women in the hospital representing a suppressed cultural desire as they "re-enact the transformation of the female from subservient employee to ambiguous manipulator." In concluding, the speaker claims that the "sordid or trivial" details of the original story have been absorbed into "the tangled richness of myth," a strong argument for a method that can reveal hidden, sometimes forbidden, truths about a contemporary social construct.