A Note on Braudel's Structure as Duration

In his first major work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in the same year as Levi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Fernand Braudel took as his object a vast geographical area and treated it in terms of three time scales: the long term, the conjunctural, and that of events. The fact that Braudel has, over the years, indicated his particular interest in one of these time scales, the long term or longue duree, has affected the appreciation of his work by critics and admirers alike, as well as the future of Annales, the journal founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, in whose footsteps as editor he followed. If Levi-Strauss seeks and finds an epistemological guarantee for the concept of structure in the human brain, Braudel's adherence to historical time denies the possibility of ultimate guarantees and of overcoming the epistemological problem of dualism. Although for both Braudel and Levi-Strauss the term structure refers to a key concept, the epistemological and ontological referents of structures are distinct for these authors.2 For Braudel, unlike Levi-Strauss, structures are very much a part of reality; a structure is