The Kulturkreis (roughly, "culture circle" or "cultural field") school was a central idea of the early 20th-century German school of anthropology that sought to redirect the discipline away from the quest for an underlying, universal human nature toward a concern with the particular histories of individual societies. It was the notion of a culture complex as an entity that develops from a centre of origin and becomes diffused over large areas of the world.
58-514: The theory was developed by the German ethnologists Fritz Graebner , the founder of the Vienna School of Ethnology , and Wilhelm Schmidt . Frobenius was influenced by Richard Andree , and his own teacher Friedrich Ratzel . These scholars believed that a limited number of Kulturkreise developed at different times and in different places and that all cultures, ancient and modern, resulted from
116-522: A transcendental subject ." Anthropologist Adam Kuper (1973) argued that: 'Structuralism' came to have something of the momentum of a millennial movement and some of its adherents felt that they formed a secret society of the seeing in a world of the blind. Conversion was not just a matter of accepting a new paradigm. It was, almost, a question of salvation. Philip Noel Pettit (1975) called for an abandoning of "the positivist dream which Lévi-Strauss dreamed for semiology ," arguing that semiology
174-597: A fundamental structural basis for human culture. The Biogenetic Structuralism group for instance argued that some kind of structural foundation for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same system of brain structures. They proposed a kind of neuroanthropology which would lay the foundations for a more complete scientific account of cultural similarity and variation by requiring an integration of cultural anthropology and neuroscience —a program that theorists such as Victor Turner also embraced. In literary theory , structuralist criticism relates literary texts to
232-411: A giant step through his two pioneering works " Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis " (1897) and "The Origin of African Civilizations" (1898a), which cleared the way for a new scientific approach in ethnology." Arguing against the idea, then current, that "natural people" were remnants from the prehistoric era who could reveal the true nature of humanity, Kulturkreis scholars brought history back into
290-407: A larger structure, which may be a particular genre , a range of intertextual connections, a model of a universal narrative structure , or a system of recurrent patterns or motifs. The field of structuralist semiotics argues that there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Everything that
348-474: A new wave of predominantly French intellectuals/philosophers such as historian Michel Foucault , Jacques Derrida , Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser , and literary critic Roland Barthes . Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists eventually came to be referred to as post-structuralists . Many proponents of structuralism, such as Lacan , continue to influence continental philosophy and many of
406-562: A series of contrasts. Thus, in English, the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases ( minimal pairs ) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope—for instance, it makes clear the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English and other languages
464-465: A shared goal through the lens of social solidarity when he observed "Mexicanos" and "Anglo-Americans" come together on the same football team to defeat the school's rivals. However, he also continually applies a marxist lens and states that he," wanted to wow peers with a new cultural marxist theory of schooling." Some anthropological theorists, however, while finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's version of structuralism, did not turn away from
522-425: A structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then
580-495: A structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure." The structuralist mode of reasoning has since been applied in a range of fields, including anthropology , sociology , psychology , literary criticism , economics , and architecture . Along with Claude Lévi-Strauss , the most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include linguist Roman Jakobson and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan . The term structuralism
638-623: A system of relations. His linguistic approach was also a refutation of evolutionary linguistics . Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 20th century, mainly in France and the Russian Empire , in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague , Moscow , and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. As an intellectual movement, structuralism became the heir to existentialism . After World War II, an array of scholars in
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#1733092277906696-415: Is a class of linguistic units ( lexemes , morphemes , or even constructions ) that are possible in a certain position in a given syntagm , or linguistic environment (such as a given sentence). The different functional role of each of these members of the paradigm is called 'value' ( French : valeur ). In France, Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste continued Saussure's project, and members of
754-426: Is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism . Yifu Lin criticizes early structural economic systems and theories, discussing the failures of it. He writes: "The structuralism believes that
812-533: Is ambiguous, referring to different schools of thought in different contexts. As such, the movement in humanities and social sciences called structuralism relates to sociology . Emile Durkheim based his sociological concept on 'structure' and 'function', and from his work emerged the sociological approach of structural functionalism . Apart from Durkheim's use of the term structure , the semiological concept of Ferdinand de Saussure became fundamental for structuralism. Saussure conceived language and society as
870-525: Is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences , that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do , think , perceive , and feel . Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn , structuralism is: "The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute
928-679: Is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different fields. Based on the Prague school concept, André Martinet in France, J. R. Firth in the UK and Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark developed their own versions of structural and functional linguistics. According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology , meaning
986-468: Is credited to Adam Franz Kollár (1718–1783) who used and defined it in his Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783. as: "the science of nations and peoples, or, that study of learned men in which they inquire into the origins, languages, customs, and institutions of various nations, and finally into the fatherland and ancient seats, in order to be able better to judge
1044-649: Is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas, or the imagination—the "third order." In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of " the Symbolic " is distinguished both from " the Real " and " the Imaginary ;" similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from
1102-433: Is expressed. Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp , Algirdas Julien Greimas , and Claude Lévi-Strauss in 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. There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye 's archetypal criticism , which
1160-612: Is not to be placed among the natural sciences . Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) criticized structuralism as failing to explain symbolic mediation in the social world; he viewed structuralism as a variation on the " logicist " theme, arguing that, contrary to what structuralists advocate, language—and symbolic systems in general—cannot be reduced to logical organizations on the basis of the binary logic of oppositions . Critical theorist Jürgen Habermas (1985) accused structuralists like Foucault of being positivists ; Foucault, while not an ordinary positivist per se, paradoxically uses
1218-410: Is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena, and activities that serve as systems of signification. A structuralist approach may study activities as diverse as food-preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within
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#17330922779061276-489: Is written seems to be governed by rules, or "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked. A potential problem for a structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive; as scholar Catherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference." An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has
1334-459: The Prague school of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted influential research. The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies in phonemics . Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague school examined how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analysed as
1392-529: The United States , and social anthropology in Great Britain . The distinction between the three terms is increasingly blurry. Ethnology has been considered an academic field since the late 18th century, especially in Europe and is sometimes conceived of as any comparative study of human groups. The 15th-century exploration of America by European explorers had an important role in formulating new notions of
1450-422: The ability of people to act . As the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (particularly the student uprisings of May 1968 ) began affecting academia, issues of power and political struggle moved to the center of public attention. In the 1980s, deconstruction —and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language rather than its logical structure—became popular. By the end of the century, structuralism
1508-407: The humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism , such as that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre , was the dominant European intellectual movement . Structuralism rose to prominence in France in
1566-500: The ideological forms in which those relations are understood. Although French theorist Louis Althusser is often associated with structural social analysis , which helped give rise to " structural Marxism ," such association was contested by Althusser himself in the Italian foreword to the second edition of Reading Capital . In this foreword Althusser states the following: Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from
1624-410: The 'structuralist' ideology…, despite the decisive intervention of categories foreign to 'structuralism'…, the terminology we employed was too close in many respects to the 'structuralist' terminology not to give rise to an ambiguity. With a very few exceptions…our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and judged, in homage to the current fashion, as 'structuralist'.… We believe that despite
1682-604: The American anthropological tradition. In Elementary Structures , he examined kinship systems from a structural point of view and demonstrated how apparently different social organizations were different permutations of a few basic kinship structures. In the late 1958, he published Structural Anthropology , a collection of essays outlining his program for structuralism. Blending Freud and Saussure, French (post)structuralist Jacques Lacan applied structuralism to psychoanalysis . Similarly, Jean Piaget applied structuralism to
1740-564: The Occident (the Western world ), such as the notion of the " Other ". This term was used in conjunction with "savages", which was either seen as a brutal barbarian, or alternatively, as the " noble savage ". Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist manner to barbary , a classic opposition constitutive of the even more commonly shared ethnocentrism . The progress of ethnology, for example with Claude Lévi-Strauss 's structural anthropology , led to
1798-499: The United States, authors such as Marshall Sahlins and James Boon built on structuralism to provide their own analysis of human society. Structural anthropology fell out of favour in the early 1980s for a number of reasons. D'Andrade suggests that this was because it made unverifiable assumptions about the universal structures of the human mind. Authors such as Eric Wolf argued that political economy and colonialism should be at
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1856-402: The characteristics of different scenarios peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural , social , or sociocultural anthropology ). Compared to ethnography , the study of single groups through direct contact with the culture, ethnology takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures. The term ethnologia ( ethnology )
1914-467: The children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. Structuralist literary criticism argues that the "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
1972-543: The concept of human freedom and choice, focusing instead on the way that human experience and behaviour is determined by various structures. The most important initial work on this score was Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volume The Elementary Structures of Kinship . Lévi-Strauss had known Roman Jakobson during their time together at the New School in New York during WWII and was influenced by both Jakobson's structuralism, as well as
2030-483: The criticism of conceptions of a linear progress , or the pseudo-opposition between "societies with histories" and "societies without histories", judged too dependent on a limited view of history as constituted by accumulative growth. Lévi-Strauss often referred to Montaigne 's essay on cannibalism as an early example of ethnology. Lévi-Strauss aimed, through a structural method, at discovering universal invariants in human society, chief among which he believed to be
2088-411: The culture. For example, Lévi-Strauss analysed in the 1950s cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship (the alliance theory and the incest taboo ), and food preparation. In addition to these studies, he produced more linguistically-focused writings in which he applied Saussure's distinction between langue and parole in his search for the fundamental structures of the human mind, arguing that
2146-467: The diffusion of cultural complexes—functionally related groups of culture traits— from these cultural centers. Proponents of this school believed that the history of any culture could be reconstructed through the analysis of its culture complexes and the tracing of their origins to one or more of the Kulturkreise . "Building on the ideas of Andree, Ratzel, and his own teacher, H. Schurtz , Frobenius made
2204-558: The exchange of women between groups—as opposed to the ' descent'-based theory described by Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes . While replacing Mauss at his Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair, the writings of Lévi-Strauss became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s and gave rise to the term "structuralism" itself. In Britain, authors such as Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach were highly influenced by structuralism. Authors such as Maurice Godelier and Emmanuel Terray combined Marxism with structural anthropology in France. In
2262-452: The failure to develop advanced capital-intensive industries spontaneously in a developing country is due to market failures caused by various structural rigidities..." "According to neoliberalism, the main reason for the failure of developing countries to catch up with developed countries was too much state intervention in the market, causing misallocation of resources, rent seeking and so forth." Rather these failures are more so centered around
2320-551: The forefront of anthropology. More generally, criticisms of structuralism by Pierre Bourdieu led to a concern with how cultural and social structures were changed by human agency and practice, a trend which Sherry Ortner has referred to as ' practice theory '. One example is Douglas E. Foley's Learning Capitalist Culture (2010), in which he applied a mixture of structural and Marxist theories to his ethnographic fieldwork among high school students in Texas. Foley analyzed how they reach
2378-462: The formulation of cultural invariants , such as the incest taboo and culture change, and the formulation of generalizations about " human nature ", a concept which has been criticized since the 19th century by various philosophers ( Hegel , Marx , structuralism , etc.). In some parts of the world, ethnology has developed along independent paths of investigation and pedagogical doctrine, with cultural anthropology becoming dominant especially in
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2436-417: The fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's post-structuralist critics are a continuation of structuralist thinking. Russian functional linguist Roman Jakobson was a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory. Jakobson was a decisive influence on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss , by whose work
2494-810: The incest taboo. However, the claims of such cultural universalism have been criticized by various 19th- and 20th-century social thinkers, including Marx, Nietzsche , Foucault , Derrida , Althusser , and Deleuze . The French school of ethnology was particularly significant for the development of the discipline, since the early 1950s. Important figures in this movement have included Lévi-Strauss, Paul Rivet , Marcel Griaule , Germaine Dieterlen , and Jean Rouch . See: List of scholars of ethnology Structuralism 1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Structuralism
2552-492: The nations and peoples in their own times." Kollár's interest in linguistic and cultural diversity was aroused by the situation in his native multi-ethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary and his roots among its Slovaks , and by the shifts that began to emerge after the gradual retreat of the Ottoman Empire in the more distant Balkans . Among the goals of ethnology have been the reconstruction of human history , and
2610-514: The same Vienna Kulturkreis scholars as Fürer-Haimendorf , and indeed, Kluckhohn spent a year in Vienna while Fürer-Haimendorf was there. This article relating to anthropology is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Ethnologists Ethnology (from the Ancient Greek : ἔθνος , ethnos meaning ' nation ') is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes
2668-452: The same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their deaths. Structuralist readings focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions. If
2726-401: The so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism is considered to be Lévi-Strauss , Lacan , Barthes , and Michel Foucault . The origins of structuralism are connected with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief, Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts. Structuralism rejected
2784-448: The structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in people unconsciously. Lévi-Strauss took inspiration from mathematics . Another concept used in structural anthropology came from the Prague school of linguistics , where Roman Jakobson and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features (e.g., voiceless vs. voiced). Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of
2842-410: The study of psychology , though in a different way. Piaget, who would better define himself as constructivist , considered structuralism as "a method and not a doctrine," because, for him, "there exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic." Proponents of structuralism argue that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure that is modelled on language and
2900-431: The study of allegedly timeless peoples. They relied on diffusionist principles, believing that similarities among cultures could be shown to be the result of cultural influence, rather than the result of a universal human nature, and that circles of interaction among various peoples could and should be delineated by the professional anthropologist. In America, Clyde Kluckhohn of Harvard was known to have been influenced by
2958-417: The superstructure consists of hard infrastructure and institutions. This results in an explanation of how the base impacts the superstructure which then determines transaction costs . Structuralism is less popular today than other approaches, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction . Structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical and for favouring deterministic structural forces over
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#17330922779063016-560: The term structuralism first appeared in reference to social sciences . Lévi-Strauss' work in turn gave rise to the structuralist movement in France , also called French structuralism, influencing the thinking of other writers, most of whom disavowed themselves as being a part of this movement. This included such writers as Louis Althusser and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan , as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas . Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to literature . Accordingly,
3074-461: The terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the 'structuralist' ideology. In a later development, feminist theorist Alison Assiter enumerated four ideas common to the various forms of structuralism: In Ferdinand de Saussure 's Course in General Linguistics , the analysis focuses not on the use of language ( parole , 'speech'), but rather on
3132-541: The underlying system of language ( langue ). This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically . Saussure argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts: This differed from previous approaches that focused on the relationship between words and the things in the world that they designate. Although not fully developed by Saussure, other key notions in structural linguistics can be found in structural "idealism." A structural idealism
3190-404: The universal structures of the mind, which he held to operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women. A third influence came from Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), who had written on gift-exchange systems. Based on Mauss, for instance, Lévi-Strauss argued an alliance theory —that kinship systems are based on
3248-554: The unlikelihood of such quick development of these advanced industries within developing countries. New structural economics is an economic development strategy developed by World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin . The strategy combines ideas from both neoclassical economics and structural economics. NSE studies two parts: the base and the superstructure . A base is a combination of forces and relations of production, consisting of, but not limited to, industry and technology, while
3306-403: The wake of existentialism, particularly in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in France led to its spread across the globe. By the early 1960s, structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. By the late 1960s, many of structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from
3364-463: Was seen as a historically important school of thought , but the movements that it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, commanded attention. Several social theorists and academics have strongly criticized structuralism or even dismissed it. French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricœur (1969) criticized Lévi-Strauss for overstepping the limits of validity of the structuralist approach, ending up in what Ricœur described as "a Kantianism without
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