• STRUCTURALIST AND PARTICIPANT'S VIEW SOCIOLOGIES STEPHEN TuRNER University of Missouri, Colum bia The American Sociologist 1974, Vol. 9, (August) : 143-146 The structuralist view of social life pre- sented by Levi-Strauss and Leach seems pecu- liar, even bizarre, to many American Soci- ologists.1 This is unfortunate, because their approach may lead to some genuine insights into social life that no amount of correlational analysis or systems theorizing can produce; and, in any event, structuralism constitutes a corrective to the superficialities of these more familiar enterprises. What I shall say here is intended to dispel some of this sense 1 A distinction needs to be observed between struc- turalism as it will be discussed here, as a view of social life, and the structuralism of the "structuralist pro- gram." The structuralist program is an attempt to give a methodological account of a great variety of areas of intellectual activity. Boudon (1971) and Piaget (1971) present versions of thia account. An analogy may be drawn between this program and the Unity of Science movement of the thirties, with the difference that the structuralist program is an attempt to satisfy philosophical urges that only the French could be driven by, whereas the Unity of Science movement was an attempt to satisfy philosophical urges of a international sort . of unnaturalness by placing the distinctive conceptual approach characteristic of the structuralist view of social life in perspective within the history of sociological thought. The Contrast to Participant's View Sociologies Frequently the easiest way to convey an understanding of a conceptual approach is through a characterization of contrasting ap- proaches. The contrast between the structur- alist view and the standard views can be seen in terms of the difference between the objects they take themselves to be examining. The view of an adequate sociological explanation of an institution implicitly taken by Weber, Pareto, and Mead runs something like this : an institution has been adequately accounted for when the subjective viewpoints of the indi- vidual actors who participate in the institu- tion have been properly tagged. Weber, for example, would account for the institutions of authority in society X by saying "members of society X accept 'traditional' bases for