Structuralism

Structuralism is a general approach in various academic disciplines that seeks to explore the inter-relationships between some fundamental elements, upon which higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc "structures" are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture.

Structuralism after World War II

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism like that practiced 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.

Related Topics:
Existentialism - Jean-Paul Sartre - WWII

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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.

Related Topics:
Claude Lévi-Strauss - WWII - Anthropological - Kinship

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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.

Related Topics:
Roland Barthes - Jacques Derrida - Literature

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Blending Freud and De Saussure, the infamous French (post)structuralist Jacques Lacan and, in a different way, Jean Piaget, applied structuralism to the study of psychoanalysis and psychology each respectively.

Related Topics:
Jacques Lacan - Jean Piaget - Psychoanalysis - Psychology

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

Related Topics:
Michel Foucault - History of science - Epistemology - Episteme

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

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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.

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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.

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