What is Structuralism?

Structuralism is a means of thinking that has strongly influenced areas of human inquiry including linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, sociology and others. It is based on the concept that there is some deeper meaning or structure beneath the surface of apparent everyday events. This meaning is part of a structure that is reproduced in more or less the same way for all people in all societies. Consequently, if the deeper structures can be uncovered and their shapes and natures mapped, then that will make it possible to understand the profound foundations of human nature, thought and society.

Early structuralism was greatly involved with the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was active in the field of anthropology and who is perhaps best known for the book Tristes Tropiques. In his work, Levi-Strauss tried to demonstrate that remote tribes in the Amazonian region demonstrated signs of deeper structures that are present in all known societies, even those with whom the Amazonian peoples had had no previous contact. In doing this, Levi-Strauss drew upon the psychoanalytical work of such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, who had also sought to identify ‘archetypes’ in the human mind which are widely prevalent. Hence, according to Freud, most men are united by the Oedipal desire to kill his father and take his place in bed with his mother. That so many of these structures could be named after well-known figures dating from the era of classical Greek tragedy indicated, it was thought, the widely-dispersed way in which discovery of these structures of human thought have occurred throughout history.

Another area of particular importance for the development of structuralism has been that of linguistics. Dating largely from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, structural linguistics attempts to identify the underlying rules of language and grammar and relate them to those of different peoples across different times. Saussure’ explorations led him to argue that ‘words’ or concepts were composed of two distinct elements: the signifier, which is the verbal part of a word (i.e. what it sounds like and how it is remembered in the mind) and the signified, which is the meaning of the word or concept in the mind and which may be spread across different societies.

Structuralism is an approach that unites people with apparently disparate or wholly antithetical methods of thinking. For example, both (some) religious people and Marxist-Leninists believe that there are deeper underlying meanings to events. However, they differ in identifying the nature of structures: for religious people, the structures represent God’s plan for humanity (or a variant of this depending on the particular religion concerned) while Marxists believe it is the nature of the economic system of capitalism and historical materialism which are responsible. If structuralism does occur in this way and has such a profound impact upon the ways in which people are able to behave, then it has important implications for the concepts of free will and freedom.