In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics,
structuralism is the methodology that implies
elements of human culture must be understood
by way of their relationship to a broader,
overarching system or structure.
It works to uncover the structures that underlie
all the things that humans do, think, perceive,
and feel.
Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher
Simon Blackburn, structuralism is "the belief
that phenomena of human life is not intelligible
except through their interrelations.
These relations constitute a structure, and
behind local variations in the surface phenomena
there are constant laws of abstract culture".Structuralism
in Europe developed in the early 1900s, in
the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow
and Copenhagen schools of linguistics.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when structural
linguistics was facing serious challenges
from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading
in importance, an array of scholars in the
humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for
use in their respective fields of study.
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
was arguably the first such scholar, sparking
a widespread interest in structuralism.The
structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied
in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology,
sociology, psychology, literary criticism,
economics and architecture.
The most prominent thinkers associated with
structuralism include Claude Lévi-Strauss,
linguist Roman Jakobson, and psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan.
As an intellectual movement, structuralism
was initially presumed to be the heir apparent
to existentialism.
However, by the late 1960s, many of structuralism's
basic tenets came under attack from a new
wave of predominantly French intellectuals
such as the philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault, the philosopher Jacques Derrida,
the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and
the literary critic Roland Barthes.
Though elements of their work necessarily
relate to structuralism and are informed by
it, these theorists have generally been referred
to as post-structuralists.
In the 1970s, structuralism was criticized
for its rigidity and ahistoricism.
Despite this, many of structuralism's proponents,
such as Lacan, continue to assert an influence
on continental philosophy and many of the
fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's
post-structuralist critics are a continuation
of structuralism.
== Overview ==
The term "structuralism" is a related term
that describes a particular philosophical/literary
movement or moment.
The term appeared in the works of French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss and gave rise in France
to the "structuralist movement," which influenced
the thinking of other writers such as Louis
Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,
as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos
Poulantzas, most of whom disavowed themselves
as being a part of this movement.
The origins of structuralism connect with
the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics,
along with the linguistics of the Prague and
Moscow schools.
In brief, Saussure's structural linguistics
propounded three related concepts.
Saussure argued for a distinction between
langue (an idealized abstraction of language)
and parole (language as actually used in daily
life).
He argued that the "sign" was composed of
both a signified, an abstract concept or idea,
and a "signifier", the perceived sound/visual
image.
Because different languages have different
words to describe the same objects or concepts,
there is no intrinsic reason why a specific
sign is used to express a given signifier.
It is thus "arbitrary".
Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships
and contrasts with other signs.
As he wrote, "in language, there are only
differences 'without positive terms.'"Proponents
of structuralism would argue that a specific
domain of culture may be understood by means
of a structure—modelled on language—that
is distinct both from the organizations of
reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the
"third order".
In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example,
the structural order of "the Symbolic" is
distinguished both from "the Real" and "the
Imaginary"; similarly, in Althusser's Marxist
theory, the structural order of the capitalist
mode of production is distinct both from the
actual, real agents involved in its relations
and from the ideological forms in which those
relations are understood.
Blending Freud and Saussure, the French (post)structuralist
Jacques Lacan applied structuralism to psychoanalysis
and, in a different way, Jean Piaget applied
structuralism to the study of psychology.
But Jean Piaget, who would better define himself
as constructivist, considers structuralism
as "a method and not a doctrine" because for
him "there exists no structure without a construction,
abstract or genetic".Although the French theorist
Louis Althusser is often associated with a
brand of structural social analysis which
helped give rise to "structural Marxism",
such association was contested by Althusser
himself in the Italian foreword to the second
edition of Reading Capital.
In this foreword Althusser states the following:
Despite the precautions we took to distinguish
ourselves from the 'structuralist' ideology
..., despite the decisive intervention of
categories foreign to 'structuralism' ..., the
terminology we employed was too close in many
respects to the 'structuralist' terminology
not to give rise to an ambiguity.
With a very few exceptions ... our interpretation
of Marx has generally been recognized and
judged, in homage to the current fashion,
as 'structuralist'...
We believe that despite the terminological
ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts
was not attached to the 'structuralist' ideology.
In a later development, feminist theorist
Alison Assiter enumerated four ideas that
she says are common to the various forms of
structuralism.
First, that a structure determines the position
of each element of a whole.
Second, that every system has a structure.
Third, structural laws deal with co-existence
rather than change.
Fourth, structures are the "real things" that
lie beneath the surface or the appearance
of meaning.
== In linguistics ==
In Course in General Linguistics the analysis
focuses not on the use of language (called
"parole", or speech), but rather on the underlying
system of language (called "langue").
This approach examines how the elements of
language relate to each other in the present,
synchronically rather than diachronically.
Saussure argued that linguistic signs were
composed of two parts:
a "signifier" (the "sound pattern" of a word,
either in mental projection—as when one
silently recites lines from signage, a poem
to one's self—or in actual, any kind of
text, physical realization as part of a speech
act)
a "signified" (the concept or meaning of the
word)This was quite different from previous
approaches that focused on the relationship
between words and the things in the world
that they designate.
Other key notions in structural linguistics
include paradigm, syntagm, and value (though
these notions were not fully developed in
Saussure's thought).
A structural "idealism" is a class of linguistic
units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions)
that are possible in a certain position in
a given linguistic environment (such as a
given sentence), which is called the "syntagm".
The different functional role of each of these
members of the paradigm is called "value"
(valeur in French).
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists
between World War I and World War II.
In the United States, for instance, Leonard
Bloomfield developed his own version of structural
linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark
and Alf Sommerfelt in Norway.
In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste
continued Saussure's project, and members
of the Prague school of linguistics such as
Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted
research that would be greatly influential.
However, by the 1950s Saussure's linguistic
concepts were under heavy criticism and were
soon largely abandoned by practicing linguists:
Saussure's views are not held, so far as I
know, by modern linguists, only by literary
critics and the occasional philosopher.
[Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited
wrong film and literary theory on a grand
scale.
One can find dozens of books of literary theory
bogged down in signifiers and signifieds,
but only a handful that refer to Chomsky.
The clearest and most important example of
Prague school structuralism lies in phonemics.
Rather than simply compiling a list of which
sounds occur in a language, the Prague school
sought to examine how they were related.
They determined that the inventory of sounds
in a language could be analysed in terms of
a series of contrasts.
Thus in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent
distinct phonemes because there are cases
(minimal pairs) where the contrast between
the two is the only difference between two
distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat').
Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features
also opens up comparative scope—it makes
clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese
speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/
in English is because these sounds are not
contrastive in Japanese.
Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis
for structuralism in a number of different
fields.
== In anthropology ==
According to structural theory in anthropology
and social anthropology, meaning is produced
and reproduced within a culture through various
practices, phenomena and activities that serve
as systems of signification.
A structuralist approach may study activities
as diverse as food-preparation and serving
rituals, religious rites, games, literary
and non-literary texts, and other forms of
entertainment to discover the deep structures
by which meaning is produced and reproduced
within the culture.
For example, Lévi-Strauss analysed in the
1950s cultural phenomena including mythology,
kinship (the alliance theory and the incest
taboo), and food preparation.
In addition to these studies, he produced
more linguistically focused writings in which
he applied Saussure's distinction between
langue and parole in his search for the fundamental
structures of the human mind, arguing that
the structures that form the "deep grammar"
of society originate in the mind and operate
in people unconsciously.
Lévi-Strauss took inspiration from mathematics.Another
concept used in structural anthropology came
from the Prague school of linguistics, where
Roman Jakobson and others analysed sounds
based on the presence or absence of certain
features (such as voiceless vs. voiced).
Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization
of the universal structures of the mind, which
he held to operate based on pairs of binary
oppositions such as hot-cold, male-female,
culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable
vs. tabooed women.
A third influence came from Marcel Mauss (1872–1950),
who had written on gift-exchange systems.
Based on Mauss, for instance, Lévi-Strauss
argued that kinship systems are based on the
exchange of women between groups (a position
known as 'alliance theory') as opposed to
the 'descent'-based theory described by Edward
Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes.
While replacing Marcel Mauss at his Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair, Lévi-Strauss'
writing became widely popular in the 1960s
and 1970s and gave rise to the term "structuralism"
itself.
In Britain, authors such as Rodney Needham
and Edmund Leach were highly influenced by
structuralism.
Authors such as Maurice Godelier and Emmanuel
Terray combined Marxism with structural anthropology
in France.
In the United States, authors such as Marshall
Sahlins and James Boon built on structuralism
to provide their own analysis of human society.
Structural anthropology fell out of favour
in the early 1980s for a number of reasons.
D'Andrade suggests that this was because it
made unverifiable assumptions about the universal
structures of the human mind.
Authors such as Eric Wolf argued that political
economy and colonialism should be at the forefront
of anthropology.
More generally, criticisms of structuralism
by Pierre Bourdieu led to a concern with how
cultural and social structures were changed
by human agency and practice, a trend which
Sherry Ortner has referred to as 'practice
theory'.
Some anthropological theorists, however, while
finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's
version of structuralism, did not turn away
from a fundamental structural basis for human
culture.
The Biogenetic Structuralism group for instance
argued that some kind of structural foundation
for culture must exist because all humans
inherit the same system of brain structures.
They proposed a kind of neuroanthropology
which would lay the foundations for a more
complete scientific account of cultural similarity
and variation by requiring an integration
of cultural anthropology and neuroscience—a
program that theorists such as Victor Turner
also embraced.
== In literary theory and criticism ==
In literary theory, structuralist criticism
relates literary texts to a larger structure,
which may be a particular genre, a range of
intertextual connections, a model of a universal
narrative structure, or a system of recurrent
patterns or motifs.Structuralism argues that
there must be a structure in every text, which
explains why it is easier for experienced
readers than for non-experienced readers to
interpret a text.
Hence, everything that is written seems to
be governed by specific rules, or a "grammar
of literature", that one learns in educational
institutions and that are to be unmasked.A
potential problem of structuralist interpretation
is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar
Catherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist
danger of collapsing all difference."
An example of such a reading might be if a
student concludes the authors of West Side
Story did not write anything "really" new,
because their work has the same structure
as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love
(a "formula" with a symbolic operator between
them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact
that they belong to two groups that hate each
other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing
forces") and conflict is resolved by their
death.
Structuralist readings focus on how the structures
of the single text resolve inherent narrative
tensions.
If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple
texts, there must be some way in which those
texts unify themselves into a coherent system.
The versatility of structuralism is such that
a literary critic could make the same claim
about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's
Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage
between their children despite the fact that
the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl")
and then the children commit suicide to escape
the arranged marriage; the justification is
that the second story's structure is an 'inversion'
of the first story's structure: the relationship
between the values of love and the two pairs
of parties involved have been reversed.
Structuralistic literary criticism argues
that the "literary banter of a text" can lie
only in new structure, rather than in the
specifics of character development and voice
in which that structure is expressed.
Literary structuralism often follows the lead
of Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas,
and Claude Lévi-Strauss in seeking out basic
deep elements in stories, myths, and more
recently, anecdotes, which are combined in
various ways to produce the many versions
of the ur-story or ur-myth.
There is considerable similarity between structural
literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal
criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological
study of myths.
Some critics have also tried to apply the
theory to individual works, but the effort
to find unique structures in individual literary
works runs counter to the structuralist program
and has an affinity with New Criticism.
== History and background ==
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism,
such as that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre,
was the dominant European intellectual movement.
Structuralism rose to prominence in France
in the wake of existentialism, particularly
in the 1960s.
The initial popularity of structuralism in
France led to its spread across the globe.
Structuralism rejected the concept of human
freedom and choice and focused instead on
the way that human experience and thus, behaviour,
is determined by various structures.
The most important initial work on this score
was Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volume The
Elementary Structures of Kinship.
Lévi-Strauss had known Jakobson during their
time together at the New School in New York
during WWII and was influenced by both Jakobson's
structuralism as well as the American anthropological
tradition.
In Elementary Structures he examined kinship
systems from a structural point of view and
demonstrated how apparently different social
organizations were in fact different permutations
of a few basic kinship structures.
In the late 1950s he published Structural
Anthropology, a collection of essays outlining
his program for structuralism.
By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement
was coming into its own and some believed
that it offered a single unified approach
to human life that would embrace all disciplines.
Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused
on how structuralism could be applied to literature.The
so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism
was Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault.
== Interpretations and general criticisms
==
Structuralism is less popular today than other
approaches, such as post-structuralism and
deconstruction.
Structuralism has often been criticized for
being ahistorical and for favouring deterministic
structural forces over the ability of people
to act.
As the political turbulence of the 1960s and
1970s (and particularly the student uprisings
of May 1968) began affecting academia, issues
of power and political struggle moved to the
center of people's attention.In the 1980s,
deconstruction—and its emphasis on the fundamental
ambiguity of language rather than its crystalline
logical structure—became popular.
By the end of the century structuralism was
seen as an historically important school of
thought, but the movements that it spawned,
rather than structuralism itself, commanded
attention.Several social thinkers and academics
have strongly criticized structuralism or
even dismissed it in toto.
The French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricœur
(1969) criticized Lévi-Strauss for constantly
overstepping the limits of validity of the
structuralist approach, ending up in what
Ricœur described as "a Kantianism without
a transcendental subject".
Anthropologist Adam Kuper (1973) argued that
"'Structuralism' came to have something of
the momentum of a millennial movement and
some of its adherents felt that they formed
a secret society of the seeing in a world
of the blind.
Conversion was not just a matter of accepting
a new paradigm.
It was, almost, a question of salvation."
Philip Noel Pettit (1975) called for an abandoning
of "the positivist dream which Lévi-Strauss
dreamed for semiology" arguing that semiology
is not to be placed among the natural sciences.
Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) criticized structuralism
as failing to explain symbolic mediation in
the social world; he viewed structuralism
as a variation on the "logicist" theme, and
he argued that, contrary to what structuralists
advocate, language—and symbolic systems
in general—cannot be reduced to logical
organizations on the basis of the binary logic
of oppositions.
Critical theorist Jürgen Habermas (1985)
accused structuralists, such as Foucault,
of being positivists; he remarked that while
Foucault is not an ordinary positivist, he
nevertheless paradoxically uses the tools
of science to criticize science (see Performative
contradiction and Foucault–Habermas debate).
Sociologist Anthony Giddens (1993) is another
notable critic; while Giddens draws on a range
of structuralist themes in his theorizing,
he dismisses the structuralist view that the
reproduction of social systems is merely "a
mechanical outcome".
== See also ==
Antihumanism
Engaged theory
Genetic structuralism
Russian formalism
Structuralist film theory
Structuration theory
== 
Notes ==
== 
Further reading ==
Angermuller, J. (2015): Why There Is No Poststructuralism
in France.
The Making of an Intellectual Generation.
London: Bloomsbury.
Élisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent
Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser,
Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press,
New York, 2008..
=== Primary sources ===
Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de
Saussure
Essais de linguistique générale, Roman Jakobson
The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude
Lévi-Strauss
Structural Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Mythologiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Lacan
Reading Capital, Louis Althusser
S/Z, Roland Barthes
The order of things, Michel Foucault
À quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?,
Gilles Deleuze (in: Histoire de la philosophie,
Idées, Doctrines.
Vol. 8: Le XXe siècle, Hachette, Paris 1973,
pp. 299–335; edited by François Châtelet)
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern
Anthropology, Patrick Wilcken
