Structuralism

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In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, in addition to linguistics, structuralism is the general theory of culture together with methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. It working to uncover the structures that underlie all the matters that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is:

[T]he conception that phenomena of human life are not intelligible apart from through their interrelations. These relations make up a structure, and slow local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.

Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 20th century, mainly in France and the Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow, and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. As an intellectual movement, structuralism became the heir to existentialism. After World War II, an positioning of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's conviction for ownership in their respective fields. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the number one such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.

The structuralist mode of reasoning has since been applied in a range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics, and architecture. Along with Lévi-Strauss, the most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include linguist Roman Jakobson and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

By the behind 1960s, many of structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals/philosophers such(a) as historian Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and literary critic Roland Barthes. Though elements of their do necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists eventually came to be forwarded to as post-structuralists. many proponents of structuralism, such(a) as Lacan, remain to influence continental philosophy and many of the essential assumptions of some of structuralism's post-structuralist critics are a continuation of structuralist thinking.

In anthropology

According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology, meaning is present and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena, and activities that serve as systems of signification.

A structuralist approach may explore 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 settings by which meaning is submitted and reproduced within the culture. For example, Lévi-Strauss analysed 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 settings of the human mind, arguing that the structures that earn the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in people unconsciously. Lévi-Strauss took inspiration from mathematics.

Another concept used in structural anthropology came from the Prague school of linguistics, where Roman Jakobson and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain attaches e.g., voiceless vs. voiced. Lévi-Strauss covered this in his conceptualization 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.

A third influence came from Marcel Mauss 1872–1950, who had a thing that is caused or produced by something else on gift-exchange systems. Based on Mauss, for instance, Lévi-Strauss argued an alliance theory—that kinship systems are based on the exchange of women between groups—as opposed to the 'descent'-based theory described by Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes. While replacing Mauss at his Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair, the writings of Lévi-Strauss 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 supply 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 approximately 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 company and practice, a trend which Sherry Ortner has referred to as 'practice theory'.

One example is Douglas E. Foley's Learning Capitalist Culture 2010, in which he applied a mixture of structural and Marxist theories to his ethnographic fieldwork among high school students in Texas. Foley analyzed how theya shared goal through the lens of social solidarity when he observed "Mexicanos" and "Anglo-Americans" come together on the same football team to defeat the school's rivals.: 36–7  However, he also continually applies a marxist lens and states that he," wanted to wow peers with a new cultural marxist theory of schooling.": 176 

Some anthropological theorists, however, while finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's description of structuralism, did not changes away from a necessary structural basis for human culture. The Biogenetic Structuralism institution for spokesperson argued that some species of structural foundation for culture must exist because any humans inherit the same system of brain structures. They proposed a race of neuroanthropology which would lay the foundations for a more set up 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.