How is the theory of structuralism helpful in understanding the concepts of caste and gender? (Answer in 250 words)

- How is the theory of structuralism helpful in understanding the concepts of caste and gender? (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Structuralism treats social facts as systems of relations rather than as things. Applied to caste and to gender it shows both to be classifications, ordered by oppositions, not lists of groups or attributes.
Body
1. The apparatus: Levi-Strauss held that meaning lies in relations between terms, not in the terms, and that binary oppositions organised at an unconscious level generate observable variants through transformation. Analysis proceeds by locating the oppositions and the rules mediating them.
2. Caste as a relational scheme: Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus derives the whole system from one opposition, pure and impure, with hierarchy as the encompassing of the contrary and the separation of status from power. Caste becomes intelligible as position in a scheme, not as an aggregate of occupations, which is why rank alters as relations alter.
3. Gender as classification: the Elementary Structures makes the exchange of women the founding transaction, placing women as signs in an alliance system. Ortner's question, whether female is to male as nature is to culture, extends the same logic; menstrual seclusion and pollution rules are then classificatory boundaries, as Mary Douglas argued of dirt.
4. What it cannot reach: it is ahistorical and silent on power, labour and agency. Berreman showed caste as lived stratification and conflict; MacCormack and Strathern showed the nature-culture pair is not universal.
Conclusion
Structuralism supplies the grammar of both institutions and explains their internal coherence. It must be supplemented by political economy to explain who benefits and how either changes.