Study Notes: These notes are largely cribbed from other sources. Most sources are referenced at the bottom of the page.
In sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure." (Simon Blackburn).
Structuralism distinguished itself from the diachronic methodology of Marxist thought and Hegelian dialectics through an insistence upon synchronicity. It examines the structural and inter-structural relations of a given situation all at once. It is not concerned with its evolution over time. This synchronic methodology was seen as more "scientific" and amounted to a challenge to the historical form of explanation.
Structural linguistics
In his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure focused on the underlying system of language (langue), rather than particular instances of language (parole, or talk).
Saussure's structural linguistics propounded several concepts:
1. The "sign" is composed of an abstract concept or idea (the "signified") and the perceived sound/visual image (the "signifier").
2. Different languages have different words to refer to the same objects or concepts. There is no natural relationship between a signifier (e.g. the word "dog") and the signified (e.g. the mental concept of the actual animal).
3. Rather than regarding language as a transparent mirror of nature (Rorty, 1979), where words simply and clearly represent objects or concepts, signs gain their meaning from their contrast to other signs, so that dog means not cat or not horse, sacred means not profane. "In language, there are only differences without positive terms."
Saussure's work influenced many linguists, including Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, members of the Prague School of linguistics.
Jakobson and Trubetzkoy sought to examine how sounds or phonemes were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of their contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrasts makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating between /r/ and /l/ in English is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese.
Structural anthropology
Claude Lévi-Strauss drew on the lessons of structural linguistics for his structural anthropology:
- First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure;
- second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms;
- third, it introduces the concept of system ...;
- finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws .... (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 33)
In structural anthropology, cultures are analyzed in terms of the structural relations among their elements. These structures arise from underlying laws of the human mind that "structure" how we perceive the world.
In his work on kinship, Levi-Strauss showed that elements of culture are not intelligible in isolation but only in relation to other elements.
At the time, it was generally understood that families, comprised of parents and children, formed the basic building block of larger society. Levi-Strauss argued that no human family could exist if there were not first a society. The formation of a given family depends on the existence of other families who supply the new husband and wife according to mutually agreed upon rules of marriage. "It is not the families (isolated terms) which are truly ‘elementary,’ but, rather, the relations between those terms [families]." There, he sounds just like Saussure talking about signs.
In a similar fashion, Lévi-Strauss attempted to explain how fantastical and arbitrary tales were often similar across cultures. Lévi-Strauss proposed that universal laws (langue) govern mythical thought. He developed the concept of the mytheme, a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are constructed. "If one wants to establish a parallel between structural linguistics and the structural analysis of myths, the correspondence is established, not between mytheme and word but between mytheme and phoneme.
Other structuralists
Roland Barthes is often viewed as a transitional figure between structuralism and post-structuralism. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes examined cultural materials to show how bourgeois society asserts its values through them. He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations.
Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were "second-order signs," or "connotations." A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However, the bourgeoisie relate it to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo.
In “The Death of the Author”, Barthes argues that a literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. An author's intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Barthes saw the notion of the author as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. But Barthes points out that the unknowable state of the author’s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the ‘knowable text’ acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture.
Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Lacan became initiated into the structuralism of Saussure and others. He attempted to apply structural principles to Freudian psychoanalysis, arguing that “the unconscious is structured like a language”.
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