1. Overview
   1. theory that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure
   2. uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel
   3. the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations
      1. relations constitute a structure
   4. there are constant laws of abstract culture
   5. aussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts
      1. distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life)
         1. "sign" was composed of both a signified, an abstract concept or idea, and a "signifier", the perceived sound/visual image
      2. there is no intrinsic reason why a specific sign is used to express a given signifier
         1. arbitrary
      3. Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs
   6. a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order"
   7. "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary"
2. Background
   1. Ferdinand de Saussure
   2. early 1900s
      1. Europe
         1. Prague,[2] Moscow[2] and Copenhagen schools of linguistics
   3. Claude Lévi-Strauss
   4. linguist Roman Jakobson
   5. psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
   6. initially presumed to be the heir apparent to existentialism
   7. 1960's came under attack by
      1. philosopher and historian Michel Foucault
      2. philosopher and social commentator Jacques Derrida
      3. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser
      4. literary critic Roland Barthes
      5. post-structuralists
   8. Alison Assiter
      1. four ideas that she says are common to the various forms of structuralism
         1. a structure determines the position of each element of a whole
         2. every system has a structure
         3. structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change
         4. structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning
3. in linguistics
   1. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
   2. analysis focuses not on the use of language
      1. "parole", or speech
   3. rather on the underlying system of language
      1. "langue"
   4. how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically
   5. linguistic signs were composed of two parts
      1. signifier
         1. "sound pattern" of a word
            1. in mental projection
            2. or in actual speeche
      2. signified
         1. concept or meaning of the word
   6. paradigm, syntagm, and value
   7. structural "idealism" is a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) that are possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (such as a given sentence), which is called the "syntagm"
   8. functional role of each of these members of the paradigm
      1. "value"
   9. thinkers
      1. Leonard Bloomfield
      2. Louis Hjelmslev
      3. Alf Sommerfelt
      4. Antoine Meillet
      5. Émile Benveniste
      6. Roman Jakobson
      7. Nikolai Trubetzkoy
   10. Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher.
   11. Prague school structuralism
       1. phonemics
       2. Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague school sought to examine how they were related
       3. analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts
       4. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different fields
4. in anthropology
   1. meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena and activities that serve as systems of signification
   2. discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within the culture
   3. distinction between langue and parole in his search for the fundamental structures of the human mind,
   4. the structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in people unconsciously
   5. Lévi-Strauss
   6. analyzed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features (such as voiceless vs. voiced)
   7. universal structures of the mind
      1. operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women
   8. Marcel Mauss
      1. gift-exchange systems
   9. kinship systems are based on the exchange of women between groups (a position known as 'alliance theory'
   10. opposed to the 'descent'-based theory
       1. Edward Evans-Pritchard
       2. Meyer Fortes
   11. fell out of favour in the early 1980s
       1. made unverifiable assumptions about the universal structures of the human mind
   12. Biogenetic Structuralism group
       1. argued that some kind of structural foundation for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same system of brain structures
       2. proposed a kind of Neuroanthropology
5. in literary theory and criticism
   1. relates literary texts to a larger structure
      1. particular genre
      2. range of intertextual connections
      3. model of a universal narrative structure
      4. system of recurrent patterns or motifs
   2. everything that is written seems to be governed by specific rules
      1. "grammar of literature"
         1. one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked
   3. danger:
      1. can be highly reductive
         1. "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference."
   4. how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions
   5. multiple texts, there must be some way in which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system
   6. "literary banter of a text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed
   7. Vladimir Propp
   8. Algirdas Julien Greimas
   9. Claude Lévi-Strauss
   10. seeking out basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more recently, anecdotes which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth
   11. Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism
   12. affinity with New Criticism
6. general criticisms
   1. less popular today than other approaches, such as
      1. post-structuralism
      2. deconstruction
         1. emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language rather than its crystalline logical structure
   2. criticized for being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act
   3. Cornelius Castoriadis
      1. failing to explain symbolic mediation in the social world
      2. symbolic systems in general—cannot be reduced to logical organizations on the basis of the binary logic of oppositions
   4. Anthony Giddens
      1. dismisses the structuralist view that the reproduction of social systems is merely "a mechanical outcome