The contribution of anthropological structuralism to the development of the concept of “cultural identity” as the object of contemporary anthropological research

Abstract

The concept of “cultural identity”, as a matter of anthropological consideration today – in the sense of its dynamic and relational character, but before that as a means of signifying human groups and simultaneously expressing what the members consider their contextual characteristics – is based on the process of cultural identification, which is the product of the act of division, delineation and classification as culturally cognitive operations arising from the experience of the surrounding reality. The initial anthropological interest in these acts we find in anthropological structuralism and its intention of searching for rules of logic which determine the ways in which we shape our world and the symbols we use to do it. Viewing identification as an attempt to establish logical reasons for a certain quality to be signified in this way in general, has its basis in the way in which structural anthropologists explained the establishing of symbolic connections between different human groups, or rather the meaning of the signs used for this purpose.