6.5 Social Structures

The concept's career: Radcliffe-Brown's social structure (positions and relations — the organism's skeleton — Unit 2.3); Lévi-Strauss's structuralism (the deep logical structures beneath kinship and myth — the mind's grammar: binary oppositions, myth-variants as transformations); the agency turn — Bourdieu's habitus (structured structures predisposing action — structure inside the body) and Giddens's structuration (structure as both medium andoutcome of action); and the anthropological usage today: "social structure" as the patternedrelations (kinship, caste, gender, economy) that both enable and constrain — Nepal's structure named: the caste-gender-region-generation lattice beneath every interaction (Sociology Unit 2.6's skeleton, here given its theory).