Download Structuralism

Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm positing that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a
larger, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive,
and feel. Alternately, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, Structuralism 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 culture".[1]
Structuralism originated in the early 1900s, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague,[2]
Moscow[2] and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early '60s, 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.[1]
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 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 and social
commentator Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes.[2] Though elements of
their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists have generally been referred to as poststructuralists.
In the 1970s, structuralism was criticised for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Despite this, many of structuralism's proponents, such as
Jacques 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.[3]
Overview
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, de Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts. [1]
1.
De 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.
2.
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".
3.
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.'" [4]
As summarized by philosopher John Searle,[5] de Saussure established that 'I understand the sentence "the cat is on the mat" the way I
do because I know how it would relate to an indefinite—indeed infinite—set of other sentences, "the dog is on the mat," "the cat is on
the couch," etc.'
The term "structuralism" itself appeared in the works of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. This gave rise, in France, to the
"structuralist movement", which spurred the work of such thinkers as Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the
structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas. Most members of this movement did not describe themselves as being a part of any such
movement. Structuralism is closely related to semiotics.
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 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".[6]
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. 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.
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."[7]
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".[8] 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.
According to feminist theorist, Alison Assiter, four ideas 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 coexistence rather than change. Fourth, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning
Structuralism 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 analyzed
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.[12]
Another concept utilised in structural anthropology came from the Prague school of linguistics, where Roman Jakobson and others
analyzed 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 hotcold, 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.
History & 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,
behavior, 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.[16
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 favoring 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. [17]
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. [18]
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 Ricoeur described as "a Kantianism without a transcendental subject".[19] 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." [20] 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.[21] Cornelius Castoriadis (1975)
criticized structuralism as failing to explain symbolic mediation in the social world;[22] 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.[23] 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[24] (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".[25]