At the same time that French-inspired structuralism was making inroads into American intellectual life, social psychologists in the United States were developing an alternative way to examine structure. Convergences have been noted between Lévi-Strauss and other authors such as Evans-Pritchard and an earlier generation of Dutch anthropologists, both in the use of opposition and in an interest in meaning. The approach of structuralism came to philosophy from social science. For this reason, it is impossible to write about poststructuralism without first coming to some understanding of structuralism. Finally, structures do not have material form nor do they have the ability to act; they are not visible in the empirical realm but, inasmuch as they systematize the relations, and therefore the causal efficacy, of POEMs, they are presumed to operate. Authors: MENŠÍK Josef. When it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s French structuralism took two forms, both of them defining themselves against the individualism of existentialism. Structuralism offers a way to understand the binary codes and labeling that define insiders and outsiders which in turn encourages peace or motivates violence and conflict. sociological structuralism, symbolic structuralism, historical structuralism, and orthodox structuralism. R.E. However, it can be said that it was above all the anthropological work of Lévi-Strauss which was most responsible for making ‘structuralism’ both an intellectual fashion and almost a household word. From: International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), 2010, Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015. Three meanings of ‘structuralism’ will be distinguished, corresponding to different timescales: structuralism as a French intellectual movement of the 1960s, structuralism as a wider epistemological attitude and Lévi-Strauss' structuralism which is a link between the two. Following such a diagnosis, it was deemed imperative to gain a better understanding of the structures and processes shaping the Latin American economies and societies so as to be able to design more appropriate development policies. Major figures relevant to understanding structuralism are Marx, Durkheim, Saussure, Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, and Althusser. Such an enterprise required empirical investigations as well as new analytical categories and theories. But how does language work to transmit meanings from one person to another? The foundation of structuralism is the recognition of a social order of structures, symbolic orders, and unconscious representations of meaning in symbolic and imaginary systems. It has a place in a system of (mental) structures, and its development within the course of the individual's lifetime has a basis that is genetically determined. Structures are defined as the patterns and forms of social relations and combinations among a set of constituent social elements or component parts such as positions, units, levels, regions and locations, and social formations. Notwithstanding these, it is difficult to underestimate the impact of Levi-Strauss on contemporary cultural studies. The task of anthropology is to decode these cultural forms to reveal the principles through which the human mind operates. When one part of society is shifted, the whole structure shifts. Structuralism grew out of the desire to overcome Latin America’s underdevelopment. With this overarching paradigm culture and society came to be thought of as analogous to a text that could be decoded in terms of its constituent signs, symbols, codes, and myths. Cattell became an ambassador of the functional school, promoting applied psychology throughout America. Structural Functionalism In 1950s and 1960 Functionalism reigned as the dominant theoretical perspective in sociology. Structuralism aspired to be a scientific approach to language and social phenomena that, in conceiving of them as governed by autonomous law-governed structures, minimized consideration of social-historical context and individual as well as collective action. T he linguist Ferdinand de Saussure developed three concepts to help with the understanding of language and linguistics. Define structuralism and functionalism and the contributions of Wundt and James to the development of psychology; Psychology is a relatively young science with its experimental roots in the 19th century, compared, for example, to human physiology, which dates much earlier. Today these remain key research focii in the cultural studies area. For example, the studies of ECLA had to tread very carefully in their critiques of certain government policies such as the US. A grammar is a system that specifies the phonetic, syntactic, and semantic properties of an infinite class of potential sentences. Opposing the structural claims of Wundt and Titchener who studied conscious contents, the functionalists emphasized mental acts or processes as the proper subject of study in psychology. However, whether or not structuralism can be described as a ‘movement’ is a subject of some debate given the differences between the so-called ‘first generation structuralists’ (i.e., Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault). The structuralist approach did not, of course, appear in the 1950s/1960s out of a vacuum, somehow spontaneously appearing on the French intellectual scene. Philip Smith, Brad West, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), 2008. Social Science. Denotation refers to the manifest meaning of a sign or image, while connotation refers to the deeper (usually ideological) meanings that are also at work in the process of signification. One key idea is a distinction between the prespecified modules and modularization as a process. In the usual progression of history, the early 1900s saw a direct revolt against the dominant schools of structuralism and functionalism. 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. Freudian psychoanalysis, in particular the analyses of dreams, was rooted in structuralism. Since then, however, the approach fell out of favour in social science. In addition, functionalism allowed for the study of children, the mentally retarded and the insane and introduced increasing research in animal psychology. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is: he belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. Indeed, there were high hopes that structuralism could provide a general framework – a solid common structural basis – for ‘rigorous’ and ‘serious’ work across all the human and social sciences. Cattell (1860–1944) augmented the practical aspect of functionalism in application to his work on reaction time and individual differences by initiating the mental test movement. Smith, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 2020. Within this conception, the underlying structure that allows communication to take place is called langue, while the actual practices by which communication takes place Saussure called parole. Through these studies Barthes argued that we have to distinguish denotation from connotation. It employs the nature of social interaction as patterned behaviour and uses it as a tool in all sociological analysis. In the twentieth century, however, ‘structuralism’ has been used to denote a European, largely French language, school of thought that applied methods and conceptions of order developed in structural linguistics to a wide variety of cultural and social phenomena. Structuralism is an intellectual tendency that seeks to understand and explain social reality in terms of social structures. Indeed, it was also Saussure who called for the development of a new science of the study of signs (a semiology) that would be applicable not only in the field of linguistics but also directly or indirectly applicable to all aspects of human cultures and social institutions as systems of signs. It is the cultural structuralist movement with which we are concerned here. In the strong or analytic sense identified by Piaget (1971), structuralism became a major influence particularly on two interrelated forms of media and communication research from the 1960s onward – qualitative textual studies and cultural studies. Structuralism developed the idea that the structure of mind (i.e., cognitive structure) is the result of evolutionary and genetically determined biological forces and that the products of human effort reflect the biological basis of structure. Structuralism was a twentieth-century approach in various social scientific disciplines (the ‘human sciences’) that promised to put them on a solid scientific basis. to the laws of natural science that govern language and are always and e verywhere . While Levi-Strauss and Lacan worked with esoteric ethnographic, theoretical, and clinical materials, Barthes pointed to the centrality of the middlebrow mass media and popular culture as myth-making engines for the contemporary world. In general, structuralism is synchronic and studies a particular structure and system in articial and ahistorical conditions. Input modules convert transduced sensory (visual or acoustic) input to a logical form over which the central processors work. The structuralist approach (across the human and social sciences) claimed a fundamental importance to the task of identifying and analyzing (implicit and hidden) ‘deep structures’ which – as with Bhaskar's realist philosophy – are theorized to underlie and generate (explicit and obvious) ‘surface’ or observable phenomenon. From this perspective Levi-Strauss observed that warfare in ‘primitive’ societies represented the breakdown of commerce, with the exchange of goods being the symbolic basis of social interaction and moral alliances. By langue Saussure meant a deep, more or less logical structure that could be explored systematically in terms of the processes through which signs were linked to concepts and opposed to one another in generating meanings. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), Modularity versus Interactive Processing, Psychology of, Learning Theories and Educational Paradigms, Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. At the same time, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan appropriated Saussure’s conceptual apparatus to retheorize the Freudian unconscious. The work of Saussure and subsequent structural linguists, such as Roman Jakobson, was to exert a decisive influence on the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. This is especially true for research on gender and the body that has developed from readings of French feminist theorists such as Irigary and Cixous, with researchers looking at the symbolic and textual ways in which women are positioned in relation to men. Importantly, Saussure stressed the arbitrary nature of the sign systems at work in language, pointing out that there was no necessary correspondence between an acoustic image and the concept it denoted. It also tends to approach its subject matter under the auspices of two different meta-theoretical perspectives on social reality: social structure as an empirical and historical reality, and social structure as a model or representation of reality. Structuralism in Social Science: Obsolete or Promising? Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. Since the 1970s, a third phase of structuralism has advanced general theories of social life that centre on how structures govern action. Structuralism is the intellectual movement and philosophical orientation often associated initially with the Western discourses of Levi-Strauss, Marx, and Althusser, for example, who claimed to analyze and explain invariant structures in and constitutive of nature, society, and the human psyche. Structuralism Structuralism is a mode of thinking and a method of analysis practiced in 20th-century social sciences and humanities; it focuses on recurring patterns of thought and behaviour – it seeks to analyse social relationships in terms of highly abstract relational structures. Structuralism represented a challenging critique, a radical break from previous philosophical traditions and theoretical methods/models (including those focused around beliefs in human intention, understanding, and consciousness such as phenomenology, humanism, and existentialism), with its rejection of metaphysics, its indifference to the human subject (including individual and collective action), and its interest in discontinuity rather than continuity and flux, or sociohistorical context. An input module is self-contained, informationally encapsulated, and computationally autonomous. R.H. Barnes, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001. Considered one of the founding sociologists and the founder of structuralism and functionalism. Structuralism is a philosophy and method that developed from insights in the field of linguistics in the mid-twentieth century to study the underlying patterns of social life. It was with these and other forms of structuralism that poststructuralism took issue. For Saussure, elements of language gain their currency according to the structure that they create and within which they are embedded. Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of the first psychology lab, is often associated with this school of thought despite the fact that it was his student, Edward B. Titchener, who first coined the term to describe this school of thought. This is why various languages can have different words (signifiers) for the same object (the signified). Titchener’s structuralism used analytical introspection as its primary method for most of its existence to reduce complex mental states to the simplest elemental mental processes that appear in consciousness. In the social sciences the structuralist mode of inquiry sought not simply to identify structures or relationships per se, but rather to look behind or beneath the visible and conscious designs (beliefs, ideas, behaviors) of active human subjects (surface manifestations) to expose or unearth how those designs are in fact outputs, effects, consequences, products generated by underlying causes, hidden mechanisms, or a limited number of “deep” structures that are universal to the human mind. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, an Informa Group Company, Post-structuralism in the social sciences. But Prebisch had the vision, enterprise, diplomatic skill, and intellectual clout to overcome as far as possible those limitations and to exploit the advantages afforded by an international organization belonging to the UN. The structuralist approach was invented and developed by several key thinkers—e.g., Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault—and many others across several disciplines. – cannot be understood in isolation, as somehow separate, but rather must be understood as positions within a structure or system of relations. Many of Saussure’s trademark conceptions were abandoned, however, during this phase. Part of understanding the relationship between poststructuralism and structuralism is highlighted in the prefix “post,” as opposed to “anti.” The former negates its suffix, but it does so relationally and in ways that carry structuralism with it—as in beyond rather than against. Heydebrand, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001. In a strict sense structuralism is the program which Lévi-Strauss, borrowing from structural linguistics, tried to introduce into anthropology. In a loose sense structuralism may refer to the works of those authors who deserve to be discussed when speaking about a style of approach which has manifest itself in different ways in different times and places, but which in the history of ideas generally can be traced back to certain writings of Durkheim and Mauss. In analyzing the relations among these elements, Saussure struck an analytic distinction between the “signified,” which is the mental construct, or idea, of a particular phenomenon, and the “signifier,” which takes the form of a distinguishable “mark,” such as a sound, inscription, or special body movement. Structuralism. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order. He further maintained that the purpose of consciousness must have some biological utility in order for its continued survival. So too was anthropologist, Levi-Strauss's search for the organizing principles of culture. Probably the most influential work by Roland Barthes in terms of its subsequent impact on the cultural studies area is his work on popular culture. The special working conditions at ECLA facilitated the emergence of structuralism with its broad regional and international vision. The literature associated with structuralism is complex and wide ranging, but in all its forms it holds that all manner of processes, objects, events, and meanings (let us call these POEMs for short), are taken to exist not as discrete entities, but as parts relationally embedded within, and constituted by, underlying wholes, or structures. Indeed, structuralism had a number of independent leaders who – while often addressing common concerns – were also quite different in their specific enquiries. Thus, structuralism is primarily relevant and important in contemporary human geography because of the traces it has left in the philosophical movements it spawned: namely, deconstruction and the other poststructuralisms that now command so much attention in human geography. Edward Titchener and Wilhelm Wundt were the pioneers of this approach though Wundt is considered to be the father of Structuralism. Structuralism became a highly influential strand of post-war French philosophy impacting – to varying degrees – a host of disciplines including (but not limited to) anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism and the sociology of literature, aesthetic theory, Marxism, mathematics, psychology, sociology, history, architecture, and human geography. James advocated that mental process be studied as such and not as static pieces of consciousness. For example, Barthes famously analyzed the violent spectacle of professional wrestling arguing that it vividly engaged with classical narrative themes of passion, suffering, and justice. Treating these institutions as being like language, Levi-Strauss argued that they could be interpreted as systems of signs arranged in patterns of binary opposition. Just as chess and courtship (both systems of signs) are built around certain rules of the game (the moves of the knight, the lingering glance), so all languages are founded upon abstract regulations that shape the ways in which they are played, or manifested in practice. It challenged the tenets of structuralism, which had previously held sway over the interpretation of language and texts in the humanities and the study of economies and cultures in the social … In addition, because signifiers are considered to exist within the realm of the symbolic, that is, as abstract representations that refer to real-world phenomena, the systems of communication within which they are embedded can be thought of as relatively autonomous from any real-world referent. Central to Lacan’s work was the exploration of the ways that the self was constructed in and through language and symbolism. For philosophers, structuralism usually simply means the 1950s–1970s, dominantly French, intellectual movement which arose out of de Saussure’s structural linguistics, and which applied struc- Chomsky's chief argument for the existence of such a language module concerned the learnibility of language. In a series of magazine articles subsequently collected as Mythologies, Barthes drew upon both Saussure and Marx in exploring the world of signs encapsulated in advertising images and everyday objects. Researchers tried to understand the basic elements of consciousness using a method known as introspection. That suggests two important assumptions by Durkheim: first, that various social institutions have functions that they fulfill in society, and second that society has a structure. From social point of view, the supporters of structuralism believe that the individuals are always guided by generally accepted social and cultural norms rather than by personal outlooks (Kumral 481). After the Second World War, it fostered roughly three phases of structural approaches to social phenomena. In so refocusing structural theory, however, the new structuralists have broken with the conception of structure that heretofore reigned in structural thought.