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The Frankfurt theorists inverted the claims of the Enlightenment and reconstructed them as mythical forms, 29 Nigel Dodd while new forms of systems theory incorporated nature as environment more directly into the compass of social theory, as central to the ways in which social systems define and reproduce themselves. This configuration of ideas that defines the relationship of modern social thought and life (between nature, society, science, change) has shifted powerfully during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Units within kinship, such as husband, nephew, cousin, wife, uncle or child, or the elements of myth, which opposed one another or mediate relations between other elements) could be subjected to formal analysis and their structural properties 21 Nigel Dodd understood (Lévi-Strauss 1977). Underlying this argument is the view that there are fundamental structures that can be discovered within the mass of empirical data on kinship and myth. This is the basis on which we should try to understand ‘culture’.

This diffuse, disaggregated notion of power is integral to the notion of governmentality. This concept refers to specific ‘arts’ and ‘techniques’ of government, calculations and tactics for the exercise of will upon a target population using a batter of ‘scientific’ knowledges: social statistics, criminology, psychology and psychiatry, medicine, architecture, economics and law. Foucault’s analysis is historical and must be understood as such: he suggests that, over a long period and throughout the West, these techniques of governmentality have gradually risen to a position of pre-eminence over all other forms of power, bringing in their wake a proliferation of governmental apparatuses and different forms of knowledge.