STRUCTURALISM

The concept of structure in the study called structuralism, as in structural functionalism and the class and power theories, is theoretical and explanatory. Unlike those other studies, however, it is not descriptive. The concept here refers to the underlying, unconscious regularities of human expressions, which are not observable but explain what is observed.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, derived this concept from structural linguistics as developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Any language is structured in the sense that its elements are interrelated in nonarbitrary, regular, rule-bound ways; a competent speaker of the language largely follows these rules without being aware of doing so. The task of the theorist is to detect this underlying structure, including the rules of transformation that connect the structure to the various observed expressions.

According to Lévi-Strauss, this same method can be applied to social and cultural life in general. He constructed theories concerning the underlying structure of kinship systems, myths, and customs of cooking and eating. The structural method, in short, purports to detect the common structure of widely different social and cultural forms. The structure does not determine the concrete expressions; the variety of expressions it generates is potentially unlimited. The structures that generate the varieties of social and cultural forms ultimately reflect, according to Lévi-Strauss, basic characteristics of the human mind. Structuralism became an intellectual fashion in the 1960s in France, where such different writers as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser were also regarded as representatives of the new theoretical current. Structuralism in this wide sense, however, is not one coherent theoretical perspective. The Marxist structuralism of Althusser, for example, is far removed from Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism. The structural method, when applied by different scholars, appears to lead to different results. The criticisms launched against structural functionalism, class theories, and structuralism indicate that the concept of social structure is problematic. Yet the notion of social structure is not so easy to dispense with, because it expresses ideas of continuity, regularity, and inter relatedness in social life. Other terms are often used that

have similar, but not identical, meanings, such as social network, social figuration, or social system. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens has suggested the term "structuration" in order to express the view that social life is, to a certain extent, both dynamic and ordered.