Structuralism
Explain Structuralism: Structuralism is a mode of knowledge of nature and
human life that is interested in relationships rather than individual objects
or, alternatively, where objects are defined by the set of relationships of
which they are part and not by the qualities possessed by them taken in
isolation. Claude Lévi-Strauss was the spokesperson for structuralism in
Anthropology, incorporating the work of many authors along the twentieth
century. Three meanings of ‘structuralism’ will be distinguished, corresponding
to different timescales: structuralism as a French intellectual movement of the
1960s, structuralism as a wider epistemological attitude and Lévi-Strauss' structuralism
which is a link between the two.
Explain Structuralism: In a strict sense structuralism is the program which
Lévi-Strauss, borrowing from structural linguistics, tried to introduce into
anthropology. In a loose sense structuralism may refer to the works of those
authors who deserve to be discussed when speaking about a style of approach
which has manifest itself in different ways in different times and places, but
which in the history of ideas generally can be traced back to certain writings
of Durkheim and Mauss. From linguistics Lévi-Strauss took the idea of the
phoneme, the notion of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign and the
realization that each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to
all the other terms. Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the ideas of opposition and
mediation beyond the familiar area of social structure to such topics as myth
and totemism. Convergences have been noted between Lévi-Strauss and other
authors such as Evans-Pritchard and an earlier generation of Dutch
anthropologists, both in the use of opposition and in an interest in meaning.
It may be concluded that structuralism is a technique or set of techniques
among others to be used when and if appropriate.
Structuralism is a philosophy and method that developed from
insights in the field of linguistics in the mid-twentieth century to study the
underlying patterns of social life. In the social sciences the structuralist
mode of inquiry sought not simply to identify structures or relationships per
se, but rather to look behind or beneath the visible and conscious designs
(beliefs, ideas, behaviors) of active human subjects (surface manifestations)
to expose or unearth how those designs are in fact outputs, effects,
consequences, products generated by underlying causes, hidden mechanisms, or a
limited number of ‘deep’ structures that are universal to the human mind;
structures which while not directly visible or knowable – with no grounding in
subjectivity – are nevertheless absolute, autonomous, and only accessible
theoretically through the techniques of a structuralist analysis. In other
words, any explanation of social life, of observed patterns, can only be found
in the general mechanisms, structures, schemas, or systems that are assumed to
underpin all observable events; these structures cannot be touched and measured
and are not directly observable in the events, phenomena, or patterns
themselves, but must be deduced from them to reveal deeper logics.
Structuralism, the structural, stands in contrast to a
reductionism because it holds that all forms of cultural expression – be they
the domains of art, architecture, cookery, dress, human self-perception,
kinship relations, language, literature, music, etc. – cannot be understood in
isolation, as somehow separate, but rather must be understood as positions
within a structure or system of relations. Indeed, structuralism is holistic
(anti-individualistic and anti-empiricist) because of its insistence that while
observable phenomena are present, they are also absent precisely because any
object's being is determined by its relationships, its relation to the whole
structure to which it belongs; a structure that while not apparent is present
in each of its observable parts. The structuralist approach (across the human
and social sciences) claimed a fundamental importance to the task of
identifying and analyzing (implicit and hidden) ‘deep structures’ which – as
with Bhaskar's realist philosophy – are theorized to underlie and generate
(explicit and obvious) ‘surface’ or observable phenomenon. While structuralism
resonates with the philosophy of realism in that it challenges the positions of
empiricism and positivism, it does not agree – as in realism – that there is a
knowable real world ‘out there’; for structuralism what is knowable is structures.
In other words, ‘structuralism’ is a term used in general to denote any kind of
analysis that is concerned with exposing structures and relations, with finding
orders rather than actions. More specifically and ambitiously however,
structuralism was promoted as a philosophy with a worldview (a Weltanschauung),
a universal understanding of reality and knowledge. Indeed, there were high
hopes that structuralism could provide a general framework – a solid common
structural basis – for ‘rigorous’ and ‘serious’ work across all the human and
social sciences. The hold of phenomenology and especially Jean-Paul Sartre's
existential Marxism in post-war France was the intellectual context from which
structuralism emerged as critique in the 1950s.
In the 1960s and 1970s structuralism came to replace
existentialism as the dominant intellectual movement and paradigm in France; an
acceptance that can also be attributed to a broader general optimism as to the
universality of science, with structuralism claiming to be a new science
(albeit one that offered a structural analysis rather than the causal analysis
common to the natural sciences). Structuralism represented a challenging
critique, a radical break from previous philosophical traditions and
theoretical methods/models (including those focused around beliefs in human
intention, understanding, and consciousness such as phenomenology, humanism,
and existentialism), with its rejection of metaphysics, its indifference to the
human subject (including individual and collective action), and its interest in
discontinuity rather than continuity and flux, or sociohistorical context. In
general, structuralism was a method that was applied extensively in the study
of language, society, art, and literature. However, whether or not
structuralism can be described as a ‘movement’ is a subject of some debate
given the differences between the so-called ‘first generation structuralists’
(i.e., Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault). Indeed structuralism has also
been described as an ideology, a debate, a method, a ‘creative activity’, and
an intellectual fad precisely because it was never consciously formed to be a
specific school of thought. Structuralism became a highly influential strand of
post-war French philosophy impacting – to varying degrees – a host of
disciplines including (but not limited to) anthropology, linguistics, literary
criticism and the sociology of literature, aesthetic theory, Marxism,
mathematics, psychology, sociology, history, architecture, and human geography.
The works of Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, Roland Barthes in
literary theory, Jean Piaget in psychology, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis,
Michel Foucault in philosophy, and Louis Althusser in Marxism were particularly
influential (and controversial) in their respective fields pioneering the new
approach in their respective disciplines and spawning a legion of followers.
Indeed, structuralism had a number of independent leaders who – while often
addressing common concerns – were also quite different in their specific
enquiries. However, it can be said that it was above all the anthropological
work of Lévi-Strauss which was most responsible for making ‘structuralism’ both
an intellectual fashion and almost a household word. The structuralist approach
did not, of course, appear in the 1950s/1960s out of a vacuum, somehow
spontaneously appearing on the French intellectual scene. Indeed, many of the
themes of structuralism had precursors, earlier antecedents, in the works of
Bachelard, Bakhtin, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Freud, Marx, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty,
etc. In fact, the basic idea of structuralism can be traced back at least as
far as 1725, to the writings of Giambattista Vico, and in many ways owes a debt
to the core continental tradition of rationalist philosophy that was advanced
by René Descarte, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant.
However, the true intellectual source of modern structuralism (even though the
term postdates him) was the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913). For while the works of structuralism differ considerably by
author, Saussure provided the core lexicon – the technical vocabulary with
terms such as semiology, la langue, parole, anti-essentialism, signified,
signifier, arbitrary sign, synchronic, diachronic, paradigmatic, syntagmatic,
etc. – common to many (but not all) structuralists (and post-structuralists).
Indeed, it was also Saussure who called for the development of a new science of
the study of signs (a semiology) that would be applicable not only in the field
of linguistics but also directly or indirectly applicable to all aspects of
human cultures and social institutions as systems of signs.
For PDF and Handwritten
WhatsApp 8130208920
0 comments:
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.