Structuralism

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Structuralism is an approach that grew to become one of the most widely used methods of analyzing language, culture, philosophy of mathematics, and society in the second half of the 20th century. 'Structuralism', however, does not refer to a clearly defined 'school' of authors, although the work of Ferdinand de Saussure is generally considered a starting point. Structuralism is best seen as a general approach with many different variations. As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are complex.

Put in general terms, structuralism seeks to explore the inter-relationships (the "structures") through which meaning is produced within a culture. A secondary use of structuralism has recently been seen in the philosophy of mathematics. According to structural theory, meaning within a culture is produced and reproduced 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, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship, and food preparation (see also structural anthropology).

When used to examine literature, a structuralist critic will examine the underlying relation of elements (the 'structure') in, say, a story, rather than focusing on its content. A basic example are the similarities between West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet. Even though the two plays occur in different times and places, a structuralist would argue that they are the same story because they have a similar structure - in both cases, a girl and a boy fall in love (or, as we might say, are +LOVE) despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other, a conflict that is resolved by their death. Consider now the story of two friendly families (+LOVE) that make an arranged marriage between their children despite the fact that they hate each other (-LOVE), and that the children resolve this conflict by committing suicide to escape the marriage. A structuralist would argue this second story is an 'inversion' of the first, because the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. In sum, a structuralist would thus argue that the 'meaning' of a story lies in uncovering this structure rather than, say, discovering the intention of the author who wrote it.

Contents

1 Saussure's Course

2 Structuralism in linguistics

3 Structuralism in anthropology

4 Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics

5 Structuralism after the War

6 Reactions to structuralism

7 See also

8 References

9 External links

Saussure's Course

Ferdinand de Saussure is generally seen as the originator of structuralism, specifically in his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics. Although Saussure was, like his contemporaries, interested in historical linguistics, in the Course he developed a more general theory of semiology. This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present ('synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'). He thus focused not on the use of language (parole, or talk) but the underlying system of language (langue) of which any particular utterance was an expression. 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 to language which focused on the relationship between words and the things in the world they designated. By focusing on the internal constitution of signs rather than focusing on their relationship to objects in the world, Saussure made the anatomy and structure of language something that could be analyzed and studied.

Structuralism in linguistics

Saussure's Course influenced many linguists in the period between WWI and WWII. In America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Scandinavia. 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 words 'pat' and 'bat' are different because the /p/ and /b/ sounds contrast. The difference between them is that the vocal chords vibrate while saying a /b/ while they do not when saying a /p/. Thus in English there is a contrast between voiced and non-voiced consonants. Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating between /r/ and /l/ in English is due to the fact that these two 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

See the main article at structural anthropology

Structural anthropology was first developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s. Lévi-Strauss 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. 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 conceptualisation 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. In addition to these more linguistically-focused writings, Levi-Strauss was influenced in advances in information theory and mathematics. 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.

Lévi-Strauss writing proved to be immensely popular in the 1960s and 1970s. 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 America, authors such as Marshall Sahlins and James Boon build on structuralism to provide their own analysis of human society. Structural anthropology fell out of favour in the early 1980s due to a number of reasons. D'Andrade (1995) suggests that structuralism in anthropology was eventually abandoned because it made unverifyable 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 anthropolgy. 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'.

Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics

Structuralism in mathematics is the study of what structures say a mathematical object is, 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.

In 1965, Paul Benacerraf wrote a paper entitled: "What Numbers Could Not Be." This paper is a seminal paper on mathematical structuralism in an odd sort of way: it started the movement by the response it generated. Benacerraf addressed a notion in mathematics to treat mathematical statements at face value, in which case we are committed to a world of an abstract, eternal realm of mathematical objects. Bernacerraf's dilemma is how do 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 Bernacerraf 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.

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. Structures are exemplified in abstract systems in terms of the relations that hold true for that system.

Structuralism after the War

After WWII, and particularly in the 1960s, Structuralism surged to prominence in France and it was structuralism's initial popularity in this country which led it to spread across the globe.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism such as that practiced by Jean-Paul Sartre was the dominant mood. Structuralism rejected existentialism's notion of radical human freedom and focused instead on the way that human behavior is determined by cultural, social, and psychological 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. Jacques Lacan (and, in a different way, Jean Piaget) applied structuralism to the study of psychology, blending Freud and Saussure. Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how structures of epistemology, or epistemes shaped how people imagined knowledge and knowing (though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement). Louis Althusser combined Marxism and structuralism to create his own brand of social analysis. 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. Additionally, 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 are clearly not.

Reactions to structuralism

Today structuralism has been superseded by 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 the academy, 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 a historically important school of thought, but it was the movements it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, which commanded attention.

References

D'Andrade, R. 1995. The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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.
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.