Dictionary:

structuralism

  (strŭk'chər-ə-lĭz'əm)

1. A method of analyzing phenomena, as in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, or literature, chiefly characterized by contrasting the elemental structures of the phenomena in a system of binary opposition.
2. A school that advocates and employs such a method.

An approach to, among other disciplines, human geography, which stresses the structures which underlie human behaviour. Fundamental themes include:

▪ the underlying elements of the structure remain more or less the same, but the relationships between them alter;
▪ things that appear ‘natural’ to us, like masculinity and femininity, are actually social constructs;
▪ individuals, too, are the product of relationships.

Thus, what individuals do may be what they are permitted to do by the overall circumstances—structures—in which they operate. These structures are the rules, conventions, and restraints upon which human behaviour is based. For example, within the structure of capitalism, the optimal location for an industry would be at the point of maximum profits. Within the structure of ‘green’ politics, the optimal site would be a site where environmental damage is least. The impact of structuralism on human geography was at its height in the 1970s.

A mode of 20th-century thinking that sees human phenomena as ‘structures’ rather than elements; it seeks to uncover the laws governing their relationships. Music, as so concerned with relationships between ideas, lends itself to structuralist analysis (or ‘semiology of music’).

In general terms, the doctrine that the structure of a system or organization is more important than the individual behaviour of its members. Structural inquiry has deep roots in Western thought and can be traced back to the work of Plato and Aristotle. Modern structuralism as a diverse movement-cum-epistemology began with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). In social and political theory, structuralism refers to the attempt to apply methods influenced by structural linguistics to social and political phenomena. Its distinctive methodological claim is that the individual units of any system have meaning only in terms of their relations to each other. Saussure, who did not use the term ‘structure’, preferring ‘system’, saw language as a system of signs to be analysed synchronically, that is, studied as a self-sufficient system at one point in time (rather than in historical development). The French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced Saussure's epistemology to social science, arguing that analysts should develop models to reveal the underlying structural mechanisms which order the surface phenomena of social life. Lévi-Strauss uncovered the ‘unconscious psychical structures’ which, he thought, underlay all human institutions. Within political science and international studies, structuralism has had an important influence. This is particularly evident in structuralist Marxism and in critical realist philosophies of social science which often claim that Marx's theory of exploitation is an example of an underlying causal mechanism at work in society.

In international relations, structuralism has two distinct senses. Latin American structuralism refers to influential doctrines developed by Prebisch and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Prebisch argued not only for national strategies of import-substituting industrialization but also for regional integration and international cooperation between exporters of primary products. These policies, and the analysis underlying them, became the official doctrine of the Third World through the activities of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), established in 1964 with Prebisch as founding chairman, and need to be carefully distinguished from the far less meliorative neo-Marxist ideas of the Latin American dependency school.

Secondly, structuralism may refer to the twist given to realist international relations theory by Kenneth Waltz. Instability and war were less the result of corrupt human nature or poorly constituted states than of changing distributions of power across states in an anarchical international system. Earlier realist explanations that had dwelt on the characteristics of individual states and their leaders were dismissed as reductionist. Debate between structuralists, often assisted by borrowings from microeconomic theories of imperfect competition, centred instead on which was likely to prove the more stable, a bipolar or a multipolar system.

— Peter Burnham/Charles Jones

structuralism, a modern intellectual movement that analyses cultural phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus the abstract codes and conventions governing the social production of meanings. Building on the linguistic concept of the phoneme—a unit of meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features—structuralism argues that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly ‘relational’: that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system, especially in binary oppositions of paired opposites. Their meanings can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analysing its function within a self‐contained cultural code. Accordingly, structuralist analysis seeks the underlying system or langue that governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of interchangeable units ( paradigms) and sequences of such units in combination ( syntagms), thereby outlining a basic ‘ syntax’ of human culture.

Structuralism and its ‘science of signs’ (see semiotics) are derived chiefly from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and partly from Russian Formalism and the related narratology of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928). It flourished in France in the 1960s, following the widely discussed applications of structural analysis to mythology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss. In the study of literary works, structuralism is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature ‘expresses’ an author's meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘ text’ is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism is less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work. The structuralist tradition has been particularly strong in narratology, from Propp's analysis of narrative functions to Greimas' theory of actants. The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of structuralist literary analysis notably in his book S/Z (1970)—and is famed for his witty analyses of wrestling, striptease, and other phenomena in Mythologies (1957): some of his later writings, however, show a shift to post‐structuralism, in which the over‐confident ‘scientific’ pretensions of structuralism are abandoned. For more extended accounts of this enterprise, consult Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), and Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974).

For more information on structuralism, visit Britannica.com.

Based on the findings in anthropology, ethnology, and psychology by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his search for primordial societal constructs or patterns which serve as the basis for all later cultural developments, Structuralism in architecture connotes the referral to basic structural forms, archeforms, from which architectural design and construction can derive. The Dutch architect, Aldo van Eyck, is often cited as a main representative, although structural ideas have also been expressed by early Le Corbusier, by Louis Kahn, and by others.

Movement of thought which exerted a great influence on French intellectual and literary life in the post-war period. It covers a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology to literary criticism, and a common definition is not easily found. Broadly, it seeks to define facts of human existence, from marriage customs to events in novels, in terms of organized structures of which they are parts. In studying cultural phenomena, it finds meaning not in single elements, but in their relationship (often one of binary opposition) to other elements within a given signifying system.

In the mid-1940s the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the term ‘structuralist’, inspired by contemporary linguistics under the influence of Roman Jakobson, to characterize his method of analysis of social phenomena. ‘Structuralism’ thus became a label by which many intellectuals, or at least their commentators, were to denote until the mid-1970s an approach, a technique, or a fully fledged philosophy, depending on the degree of identification of the speaker. It can be said to have survived in the first two senses and to be embodied in permanent achievements in various disciplines, though conspicuously replaced on the fashionable and mythical plane by Post-Structuralism and deconstruction [see Derrida]. But whereas Structuralism actively sought to supersede Existentialism and phenomenology, since it held that their reliance on consciousness and lived experience was what Bachelard called an ‘epistemological obstacle’ to the scientific recognition of hidden structures, the relations between Structuralism and its successors is dialectical rather than purely antagonistic.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Barthes, who played a major part in the propagation of the Structuralist outlook, both because of a unique combination of gifts as a profound analyst and a popularizer of genius and because of the breadth of his interests. This was obvious early on in Mythologies, which laid the foundations of his enduring fame with the educated layman. In fact, the term he uses there to describe his account of society and its artefacts at one stroke, as communication ruled by sign systems, is ‘semiology’, a word we owe to the father of ‘structuralist’ linguistics, Saussure. Lévi-Strauss's catholicism in applying his newly forged techniques not only to expected concerns such as kinship, totemism, or myths but also to modern practices in cookery, clothes, or town-planning is matched by Barthes's illuminating insights into contemporary behaviour and institutions. He bridges the heterogeneity of the media in order to reveal the coherence of the message conveyed through advertising, scholarly or legal discourse, photographs, films, exhibitions, garments, or cars.

This universality of application is a typically Structuralist ambition. The description of ‘the human mind’, which is overtly Lévi-Strauss's long-term aim, is tacitly present in the work of all those who felt his influence. It allied his work with that of thinkers who had similarly broad ambitions, including Freud (via Lacan), Marx (via Althusser), Sartre (via Barthes), ancient and modern theorists of rhetoric (including Genette and the Belgian ‘Groupe μ’), and even contemporary physicists and biologists. While Michel Foucault's work is not explicitly Structuralist, its regular inclusion under that label is fully justified by the contrast between its wide scope and its concentration on synchrony, where relations between historically contemporary elements are the sole source of intelligibility.

The regular coexistence of two features which are normally found at opposite ends of the cognitive spectrum, a concern for the multiplicity of phenomena and a stress on fundamentals, marks Structuralist authors as thinkers sensitive to the concrete charms of appearance despite their essential conviction that truth is found in immanence and not manifestation. It is, however, their assertion of the ultimate dominance of deep logico-semantic levels, whatever the variegated effects produced by ‘transformations’ of basic elements, which is the major cause of the keen objections levelled at Structuralism by those who—whether Existentialist, Christian, or Marxist—sought to preserve an active belief in human agency in matters personal and historical. This outcry is understandable in view of the extreme and often blatantly provocative form in which the Structuralist rejection of the humanist basis of such philosophies was often expressed. Furthermore, the silence of most Structuralists during the events of May 1968, together with the sometimes forbidding look of their books, readily led to accusations that their credo was the ideology of conservatism and technocracy. But the Structuralist way of exploring the depths automatically implies convincing descriptions of the surface, and this aspect, which makes up a large part of their appeal, also tempers the despondency naïve observers might feel on reading that they are not acting, speaking, or thinking but being ‘acted’, ‘spoken’, or ‘thought out’ by language and unconscious formations.

This dual focusing is reflected in the fact that many Structuralist authors are also good writers, and have taken a professional interest in the generation of literary effects. Barthes was again here first in the field, because he grasped a nettle which other Structuralists carefully avoided: the shortcomings of the Saussurean linguist's purely differential and binary definition of signs when one leaves the original source of Structuralism—phonology—to graduate to the complex realities of society and art, ruled by laws which, although shadowy, have more to do with more recent concerns of linguistics such as semantics and pragmatics.

Yet the binary principle, even taken only as one instance of the human mind's propensity to order and classify, was to prove heuristically fertile in literary and filmic analysis. Such analysis centred on journals such as Communications and Poétique; apart from Barthes, the most important figures included Greimas, Genette, Metz, and Todorov. Greimas also drew attention to other grammatical and semantic sources for the scientific grounding of modern poetics, especially the analysis of narrative, where he systematized two oppositions between surface and depth which had been described in various terminologies by theorists from different traditions without gaining, until then, the classic status they now have. One is the distinction between the ‘story’ as a catalogue of events and the various ‘discourses’ which, through different manipulations of these events, can foster wholly different effects, such as suspense. The other is the distinction between ‘actors’, or characters, the mimetic units which the naïve reader endows with a fictitious anthropomorphic identity, and ‘actants’, the logical forces whose constellation, deployed in time, generates the plot. The fact that characters have pertinence both on the syntactic plane of plot and the semiotic plane of general significance further highlights the similarity between a plot, a grammatical sentence, and even the semantic structure of a word (or ‘sememe’), which has also been an extremely fertile notion, e.g. in the work of Umberto Eco.

As for the Structuralist obsession with epistemology, it foregrounds the human mind and its processes in a way which parallels the self-consciousness and formalism typical of modernist works. This made the study of the latter very rewarding for Structuralist analysis when it ventured beyond its prudent beginnings centred on folk-tales (following Vladimir Propp's pioneering work) or James Bond novels (e.g. in Communications, no. 8). This feature—which heralded the Post-Structuralist challenging of the ‘human sciences’, on the grounds that their reliance on natural languages destroys their claims to the metalanguage of science—eventually so reduced the distance between critic and writer that this traditional opposition all but disappeared, until the aspirations of authors such as Barthes or Sollers rescued it.

Structuralism inherited from the Nouveau Roman its insistence on the active reader or spectator. While this has become a tenet of recent critical orthodoxy, this invocation of the reader's activity is not only opportunistic; applied to art and to society as a whole, it is what will probably remain as the legacy of Structuralism, together with the memory of an exhilaratingly productive moment in intellectual history. The customary listing of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as the patron saints of the movement does not do justice to its extraordinarily populous and varied genealogy; yet the invocation of these ‘masters of suspicion’ is justified. For those who have learned from Structuralism to ‘read’ the entire human text, and nature itself, as something which does not ‘go without saying’ but has instead to be decoded, the world will never be the same again.

[Annette Lavers]

Bibliography

• J. Piaget, Le Structuralisme (1968)
• F. Wahl, Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? (1968)
• O. Ducrot and T. Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage (1972)
• T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977)
• A. Lavers, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (1982)
• J. Sturrock, Structuralism (1987)

A general intellectual movement whose headquarters have been in France, and whose heyday was in the 1960s. The common feature of structuralist positions is the belief that phenomena of human life are 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 structure. Thus superficially diverse sets of myth, or works of art, or practices of marriage, might be revealed as sharing the same pattern. Structuralism owes its origin to the work of Saussure in linguistics, and one form of the doctrine holds that all sign systems are linguistic in nature. One of the early successes of structuralist investigation in linguistics was the discovery that phonetic units (phonemes) gain their identity through a network of relationships (opposition, difference) between sounds rather than through the brute physical nature of a given sound. Structuralism in linguistics embraced not only phonetics but semantics, and describes the approach of the Prague school, and the dominant American school of linguistics (E. Sapir, L. Bloomfield) for the first half of the 20th century. Although Chomsky's approach to linguistics is in this broad sense structuralist, his opposition to the Bloomfield school lay in their concentration on surface structure at the expense of deep structure (see generative grammar).

In anthropology, the leading structuralist was Lévi-Strauss, whose Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) seeks to show how a wide variety of kinship and institutional arrangements can be referred back to basic structures of communication, thought of as fundamental patterns of the working of the mind, and from which the surface variety is generated. Other structuralist approaches to their respective subjects are found in the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and the Marxism of Althusser. See also post-structuralism.

A theoretical approach in sociology that views social structures as being of greater importance than human actions. It often involves searching for the social reality that lies below outward, superficial structures.

For the use of structuralism in biology, see Structuralism (biology)

Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored.

More accurately it could be described as an approach in academic disciplines in general that explores the relationships between fundamental principal elements in language, literature, and other fields upon which some higher mental, linguistic, social, or cultural "structures" and "structural networks" are built. Through these networks meaning is produced within a particular person, system, or culture. This meaning then frames and motivates the actions of individuals and groups. In its most recent manifestation, structuralism as a field of academic interest began around 1958 and peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

History

Structuralism appeared in academia for the first time in the 19th century and then reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most popular approaches in academic fields concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and society. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure concerning linguistics is generally considered to be a starting point of 20th century structuralism. The term "structuralism" itself appeared in the works of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement," which spurred the work of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas. Almost all members of this so-called movement denied that they were part of it. Structuralism is closely related to semiotics. Post-structuralism attempted to distinguish itself from the use of the structural method. Deconstruction was an attempt to break with structuralistic thought. Some intellectuals like Julia Kristeva, for example, took structuralism (and Russian formalism) for a starting point to later become prominent post-structuralists. Structuralism has had varying degrees of influence in the social sciences: a great deal in the field of sociology, but hardly any in economics.

Structuralism in psychology (19th century)

At the turn of the 19th century the founding father of experimental psychology William Wundt tried to confirm experimentally his hypothesis that conscious mental life can be broken down into fundamental elements, which then form more complex mental structures. In this part of the 19th century, researchers were making great advances in chemistry and physics by analysing complex compounds (molecules) in terms of their elements (atoms). These successes encouraged psychologists to look for the mental elements of which more complex experiences were composed. If the chemist made headway by analysing water into oxygen and hydrogen, perhaps the psychologist could make headway by considering a perception, e.g., the taste of lemonade, to be a "molecule" of conscious experience which can be analysed into elements of conscious experience: e.g., sweet, sour, cold, warm, bitter, and whatever else could be identified by trained introspection. A major believer was the psychologist Edward B. Titchener who was trained by Wundt and worked at Cornell University. Since the goal was to specify mental structures, Titchener used the word "structuralism" to describe this branch of psychology.^[1] Titchener's structuralism was quickly abandoned because its objects, conscious experiences, are not easily subjected to controlled experimentation in the same way that behavior is. Note that although early texts list Wundt as a structuralist, strictly speaking he was not. The term was coined by Titchener, and Titchener methods and conclusions were not the same as Wundt's. Both functional psychology and behaviorism were reactions to introspective structuralism.

Structuralism in linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure was the originator of the 20th century reappearance of structuralism, and evidence of this can be found in Course in General Linguistics, written by Saussure's colleagues after his death and based on student notes, where he focused not on the use of language (parole, or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and called his theory semiology. However, the discovery of the underlying system had to be done via examination of the parole (speech). As such, Structural Linguistics are actually an early form of corpus linguistics(quantification). This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between words and things in the world that they designate.

Key notions in Structural Linguistics are the notions of paradigm, syntagm and value, though these notions were not yet fully developed in De Saussure's thought. A structural paradigm is actually a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) which are possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (like a given sentence), which is 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 WWII. In America, 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 would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential.

The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compile 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 analyzed 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. While this approach is now standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different forms.

Structuralism in anthropology and sociology

See the main articles at structural anthropology and structural functionalism

According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology, meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena and activities which serve as systems of signification. A structuralist studies 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 a culture. For example, an early and prominent practitioner of structuralism, anthropologist and ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship (the Alliance theory and the incest taboo), and food preparation (see also structural anthropology). In addition to these studies, he produced more linguistically-focused writings where he applied Saussure's distinction between langue and parole in his search for the fundamental mental structures of the human mind, arguing that the structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in us unconsciously. Levi-Strauss was inspired by information theory and mathematics.

Another concept was borrowed 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). Levi-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, 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 (1995) suggests that structuralism in anthropology was eventually abandoned 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 more 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 also embraced by such theorists as Victor Turner.

Structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics

Structuralism in mathematics is the study of what structures (mathematical objects) are, and how the ontology of these structures should be understood. This is a growing philosophy within mathematics that is not without its share of critics.

Paul Benacerraf's paper "What Numbers Could Not Be" (1965) is of seminal importance to mathematical structuralism in a perverse way: it inspired critique upon which the movement was born. Benacerraf addressed a notion in mathematics to treat mathematical statements at face value, in which case we are committed to an abstract, eternal realm of mathematical objects. Benacerraf's dilemma is how we come to know these objects if we do not stand in causal relation to them. These objects are considered causally inert to the world. Another problem raised by Benacerraf is the multiple set theories that exist by which reduction of elementary number theory to sets is possible. Deciding which set theory is true has not been feasible. Benacerraf concluded in 1965 that numbers are not objects, a conclusion responded to by Mark Balaguer with the introduction of full blooded Platonism (this is essentially the view that all logically possible mathematical objects do exist). With this full blooded Platonism, it does not matter which set-theoretic construction of mathematics is used, nor how we came to know of its existence, since any consistent mathematical theory necessarily exists and is a part of the greater platonic realm.

The answer to Benacerraf's negative claims is how structuralism became a viable philosophical program within mathematics. The structuralist responds to these negative claims that the essence of mathematical objects is relations that the objects bear with the structure.

Important contributions to structuralism in mathematics have been made by Nicolas Bourbaki, and also by the genetic epistemologist, Jean Piaget who, in collaboration with the mathematician, E.W. Beth, developed the notion of "mother structures" from which all mathematical formations are considered transformations.

Structuralism in literary theory and literary criticism

Main article: Semiotic literary criticism

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the 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.

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 "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and transformational grammar, posits both a deep and a surface structure. In Freudianism and Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and death instincts, and in Marx, the conflicts between classes that are rooted in the economic "base."

Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories and myths, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth. As in Freud and Marx, but in contrast to transformational grammar, these basic elements are meaning-bearing.

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.

The other branch of literary structuralism is semiotics, and it is based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.

Structuralism after World War II

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism like that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre was the dominant mood. Structuralism surged to prominence in France after WWII and particularly in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in France led it to spread across the globe. The social sciences (in particular, sociology) were particularly influenced.

Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way that human behavior is determined by various structures. The most important initial work on this score was Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volume Elementary Structures of Kinship. Lévi-Strauss had known Jakobson during their time together 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.

Blending Freud and De 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 defines himself as constructivist, considers structuralism as "a method and not a doctrin" because for him "there exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic"^[2]

Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how structures of epistemology, or episteme, shaped the way in which people imagined knowledge and knowing (though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement).

In much the same way, American historian of science Thomas Kuhn addressed the structural formations of science in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - its title alone evincing a stringent structuralist approach. Though less concerned with "episteme," Kuhn nonetheless remarked at how coteries of scientists operated under and applied a standard praxis of 'normal science,' deviating from a standard 'paradigm' only in instances of irreconcilable anomalies that question a significant body of their work.

Blending Marx and structuralism another French theorist Louis Althusser introduced his own brand of structural social analysis, giving rise to "structural Marxism". Other authors in France and abroad have since extended structural analysis to practically every discipline.

The definition of 'structuralism' also shifted as a result of its popularity. As its popularity as a movement waxed and waned, some authors considered themselves 'structuralists' only to later eschew the label.

The term has slightly different meanings in French and English. In the US, for instance, Derrida is considered the paradigm of post-structuralism while in France he is labeled a structuralist. Finally, some authors wrote in several different styles. Barthes, for instance, wrote some books which are clearly structuralist and others which clearly are not.

Reactions to structuralism

Today structuralism is less popular than approaches such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual 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. The ethnologist Robert Jaulin defined another ethnological method which clearly pitted itself against structuralism.

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 a historically important school of thought, but it was the movements it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, which commanded attention.

Notes

1. ^ Atkinson, R.L. (1990). Introduction to Psychology, 10th Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 
2. ^ Jean Piaget, Le structuralisme, ed. PUF, 1968

References

• D'Andrade, R. 1995. The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Beth, E.W., and Piaget, J. (1966) Mathematical Epistemology and Psychology. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
• Francois Dosse. History of Structuralism (two volumes). University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
• Kuper, A. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London: Routledge.
• Laughlin, Charles D. and Eugene G. d'Aquili (1974) Biogenetic Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Leach, E. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: Bell.
• Leach, E. 1966. Rethinking Anthropology. Northampton: Dickens.
• Levi-Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre and Spottis-woode.
• Caws, P. 2000 Structuralism: A Philosophy for the Human Sciences New York: Humanity Books

See also

• Alliance theory
• Post-structuralism
• Structuralist film theory

Philosophy
Topics	Portal · Category listings  |  Eastern philosophy · Western philosophy  |  History of philosophy (ancient • medieval • modern • contemporary)
Lists	Basic topics · Topic list · Philosophers · Philosophies · Glossary · Movements · More lists
Branches	Aesthetics · Ethics · Epistemology · Logic · Metaphysics · Political philosophy
Philosophy of	Action · Education · Economics · Geography · Information · History · Human nature · Humor · Language · Law · Literature · Mathematics · Mind · Music · Philosophy · Physics · Psychology · Religion · Science · Social science · Technology · War
Schools	Analytic philosophy · Aristotelianism · Continental Philosophy · Critical theory · Deconstructionism · Deontology · Dialectical materialism · Dualism · Empiricism · Epicureanism · Existentialism · Hegelianism · Hermeneutics · Humanism · Idealism · Kantianism · Logical Positivism · Marxism · Materialism · Monism · Neoplatonism · New Philosophers · Nihilism · Ordinary language · Phenomenology · Platonism · Positivism · Postmodernism · Poststructuralism · Pragmatism · Presocratic · Rationalism · Realism · Relativism · Scholasticism · Skepticism · Stoicism · Structuralism · Utilitarianism · Virtue ethics

Sub-fields & Approaches of Human Geography

Sub-fields: Cultural geography · Development geography · Economic geography · Historical geography · Language geography · Marketing geography · Military geography · Political geography · Population geography · Religion geography · Social geography · Strategic geography · Transportation geography · Time geography · Tourism geography · Urban geography Approaches: Behavioral geography · Critical geography · Cultural Theory · Feminist geography · Marxism · Modernism (Structuralism · Semiotics) · Postmodernism (Post-structuralism · Deconstruction)

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - strukturalisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
structuralisme

Français (French)
n. - structuralisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Strukturalismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - στρουκτουραλισμός, δομισμός

Italiano (Italian)
strutturalismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - estruturalismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
структурализм

Español (Spanish)
n. - estructuralismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - strukturalism

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
构造主义, 结构主义

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 構造主義, 結構主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 구조주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 構造主義

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) بنيويه, تركيبيه, بنيانيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮סטרוקטורליזם - התורה הגורסת שמבנה הדבר חשוב משימושו, בלשנות מבנית, פסיכולוגיה מבנית‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.