- What is structuralism?
- Characteristics of structuralism
- Representatives of structuralism
- Structuralism and functionalism
We explain what structuralism is, its characteristics and main representatives. Also, its relationship with functionalism.
What is structuralism?
Structuralism is a philosophical approach related to various Sciences Y disciplines, which proposes the analysis of an object or system as a complex whole of its interrelated parts. That is, and as its name indicates, it is proposed to identify the structures that make up the object of study, whatever it may be.
It is important to understand that structuralism is not a specific school of thought, such as Marxism or phenomenology, but it is a research approach, widely used in the social Sciences. During the second half of the twentieth century it became popular until it became the most common when it came to studying the language, the culture and the society.
The central postulate of structuralism is that the meaning of things is determined by their internal structure, that is, by the set of systems that operate within them and that can be studied separately.
In that sense, the novelty of this approach was not to introduce the idea of structure, which has been present in Western thought since its inception, but to use it to eliminate any central concept that orders reality, as it was the case with Platonic ideas. : the religion ordered the world around God and faith, for example.
The structuralist method of study can be used for many different fields of knowledge, ranging from psychology, the literature and the art, until math and the anthropology. In each of these fields of knowledge, a school of structuralist thought was created different from those of the others.
Characteristics of structuralism
Structuralism is characterized by the following:
- It states that everything is made up of structures, and that the way we organize them Humans, are what produces the meaning and meaning of things. It also proposes that the structures determine the position of the elements within the system, and that these structures, furthermore, underlie, are below the apparent.
- Therefore, the structuralist method is the one that starts in search of these invisible structures, to bring them to light and explain how the system within the object of study operates.
- Virtually any analysis that pursues the underlying structures of a human phenomenon can be called "structuralist".
- Structuralism was an extremely useful tool during the 20th century in the development of the social sciences.
- It engendered specific schools of thought within the linguistics, psychology, literature, anthropology, sociology, among other disciplines.
Representatives of structuralism
Two authors are considered central in the constitution of structuralism and therefore also serve as examples of the implementation of these concepts: the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 -2009).
- Ferdinand de Saussure became famous for his General linguistics course , a posthumous publication fruit of his years of teaching superior in Paris, and which laid the foundation stone for structural linguistics, which is how we know the first modern linguistics today. Central to it is the system that Saussure proposes for thinking about language, made up of the signified and the signifier, the two parts of every sign, inseparable, opposite and complementary.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, is much later, and became a central figure in his discipline in the mid-twentieth century, as the founder of structural anthropology, whose foundations were based on what was previously developed by Saussure and by the school of Russian formalism ( specifically, by Roman Jackobson). His thesis on the "elementary structures of kinship", the first successful attempt to apply structuralist thought to the anthropological field.
Structuralism and functionalism
Functionalism is a theoretical trend that emerged in 1930s England, and linked to the work of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). Its basic precept is the understanding of human society as an "organism".
As an organism, society is capable of starting the processes necessary to protect itself: dealing with conflicts and irregularities, governing social balance, giving its parts a role within the social system.
For that reason, it is known as structuralist functionalism, especially the later currents that British social anthropology developed, thanks to the research of Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, but also by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons.