What is Structuralism?
How is structuralism still present in analysis today?
Is “neo-structuralism” an effective description?
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology (1963)
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Four Winnebago Myths” (1960)
-Sherry Ortner, Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? (1974)
-Saussure excerpts from Course of Linguistics
11 responses so far ↓
Josh AKA "Marky Mark" // March 5, 2009 at 6:03 pm |
Structuralism is a scientific way of taking a single thing and turning it into a complex combination of interacting pieces. Like a birthday party for example: Its a fun time for the kids. But it is also much more, because planning has to be made to work for both the children and the parents schedules, and a site must be obtained, cleaned and prepared for the party. Then you have to call the caterer, or grandma has to help in the kitchen, and then your parents have to fight about something, and consequently, you end up having to do 3/4 of the work for the party that they told you they would throw for you. Then your best friends either don’t show up, or they are extremely late and you have to spend like an hour with that kid that no one really likes but your parents thought he might be a good influence on you so they made you invite him, but all you really want is to see what present he got you because his parents are rich. Then mom gets pissed because attendance was low and she overcooked for original number that said they would show up, and the two twins Timmy and Tommy have just knocked over a lamp.
-structuralism.
Selena Farnesi // March 25, 2009 at 1:09 am |
Your example of structuralism seems ridiculously unstructured –
I’d say have the party in the summer and make it a pool party, no indoor mess to clean up and no worrying about how to keep the kids entertained. You can order pizza – kids love it, clean up is just lifting a trash can lid and throwing away some boxes, plus you’ll probably have leftovers!
The problem with your party is it’s too focused on all the nitpicky details. It misses the big picture, which of course is to have fun with friends – my party will be just as fun as your if not more (since yours sounds like it spiraled out of control leading its participants to a slow social death), and what’s more, I’m not going to short my life with some stress disorder because of it.
This same problem is paralleled in structuralism. Take for example Levi-Strauss’ “Linguistics and Anthropology.” He spends all this time trying to sort out the connection between culture and language, meticulously going through every possibility – the big picture? The two are connected. The end.
Jesscia Flippen // March 26, 2009 at 3:02 am |
If we were to select a painting for Structuralism, it would be George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” He applied Chevreul’s law to his work: adjacent objects not only cast reflections of their own color onto their neighbors but also create in them the effect of their complementary color. Impressionists knew this law, but Seurat was the first to apply it systematically. He calculated exactly which hues should be combined, and in what proportion to create the complementary color. The dots, in theory, would merge in the viewer’s eye to produce the missing colors, which would be brighter than the hues mixed on the palette. Unfortunately, the method didn’t work. The dots were large enough to remain seperate in the eye, producing a grainy effect. His figures were stiff; the scene solemn. It was very different from the work of earlier impressionists, who were able to convey movement with dashes of paint.
Like Seurat, Claude Levi-Strauss tried a rigourous method. What he intended was hard to percieve. Claude Levi Strauss wanted to move away from concreteness to something more abstract. By focusing so hard on the details, his picture became less and less like the lively scene he was trying to represent.
Jessica // March 26, 2009 at 3:21 am |
If we were to select a painting to repesent Structuralism, it would be Georges Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” He applied Chevereul’s law to his work: adjacent objects not only cast reflections of their own color onto their neighbors but also create in them the effect of their complementary color. Impressionists knew of Chevereul’s law, but Seurat was the first to apply it systematically. Seurat calculated exactly which hues should be combined, in what combination, to produce the complementary color. He used tiny dots of color in a technique later known as pointillism. The dots, in theory, would merge in the viewer’s eye, creating a brighter hue than those mixed on the palette. His work wasn’t successful. The dots he applied were large enough to remain seperate in the eye, giving his picture a grainy appearence. The island he painted was usually noisy,littered, and chaotic on Sundays. His rigourous technique made his figures look stiff; the scene solemn. Levi-Strauss also focused too hard on the details. It is difficult to see what he intended to communicate in his work. He often referred to longer books he had written in a shorthand that was hard to follow. He exchanged concreteness for something more abstract. As a result, his formal method wasn’t appreciated as much as the livelier paper written by his predecessor, Benjamin Whorf.
Joy // March 26, 2009 at 5:59 pm |
Structuralism is a movement that seems to arise in many fields of thought (psychology had a time of structuralist thinking, linguistics, anth obviously). I think the main idea is breaking phenomena down into component parts. It seems that people enjoy the whole of the phenomenon, but it is too confusing to understand, thus we take a reductionistic view and attempt to understand the whole through studying the smaller and simplistic parts of the phenomenon. For me, it is best understood when in juxtaposition with Functionalism, which looks at the mess and determines the end goal or function of the phenomenon. Both taken in isolation are weak. It is best to understand a phenomenon from both sides. Understanding the component parts is important, and understanding what emerges from the interaction of those parts is equally, if not more important.
Furthermore, I think Levi-Strauss was overly optimistic in drawing direct parallels between culture and language. His argument that they arise from the same substrate as the human mind, presupposes that ‘a mind’ even exists. However, let’s equate mind with brain, and still just because two things develop from a same starting point does not necessitate that the two will have analogous development or features. They may be similar, I think he is safe in saying that, but he at times goes to far, as any theorist does.
Kathryne J // March 26, 2009 at 8:08 pm |
In many ways, culture is very much like language. Smaller pieces on their own do not make much sense, but when you string them together, add a few patterns, maybe even laws and you’ve got something complex. Not only is it complex, but it is a product of man’s enormous cognitive ability unlike any other creature. But are we really cognitively different? We still think in terms of survival and what things benefit us.
It takes a lot to argue that culture is placed on the foundation of man’s great mind. In Sherry Ortner’s essay, she suggests that culture is literally from man’s mind. Women represent nature and all things instinctual, reproductive and means for survival. On the other hand, men, having nothing to do with carrying children, have all this free time on their hands and made up something cool: culture. I really don’t know about all of that. Men may not have to physically be pregnant, but trust me, they are just as involved with the reproductive process. Men battle and represent nature just as much as women. But that’s just me.
Felicia // March 26, 2009 at 8:28 pm |
Structuralism is “a theory that argues that the organization of culture and society can be related to some universal features of the workings of the human mind.” Levi-Strauss hoped that by breaking down the symbols in culture this universal message of the human mind would be reveled. For example, read this poem. [I got this idea online, thank you John Phillips.]
The Sick Rose
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Roses become sick, just like people. Every living thing on this earth can and eventually will become sick because of some germ, bacteria, virus, bug bite, human bite, whatever. Because we all agree that every living becomes sick or infected at some point, we might agree that sickness can be created by whatever whether it be a germ or by something spiritually evil it just depends on that cultures beliefs. How something becomes sick comes out of some pre-existing system, thus structural analysis aims to find out that system of thought, which would then perhaps revel this universal feature about sickness.
Inconditus alio // March 26, 2009 at 10:27 pm |
Structuralism…is it putting many things into ultimately goal of the mind, culture, body, and psyche? I think that a universal overall theory of the human being is kind of thinking the same way in every culture in every kind of ecosystem, with every kind of government, with every kind of people. I say Bull…ShAt. Most people won’t admit it but they have similar goals, house, wife/partner, kids/dogs, and yard. Does every person have these goals? ….no. Structure is a good goal for a building…not people, we do not adhere to boxes… well some of us do but most of us don’t think about it long enough to be categorized…or at least we hope not to be. The human brain is not linked by concept, kinship, thought processes, etc… Every one of us is unique! I hope that someday there will be a consensus on whom we are, or what we are doing that advocates a strong point, but until then we are slaves to our thinking, and acting…so do right and watch the fruits of your labor…or do wrong and collect the tax payers money for your F#*@-ups!
Verdugo // March 26, 2009 at 11:57 pm |
The most interesting thing that Strauss implies about how culture and linguistics are related is the idea that in both there are rules underneath common precipitin. In other words both language and culture operate with guidelines that are implicit to the user. For example in the English language all words follow a set of rules of sounds that make it possible to distinguish between words that sound English and words that can’t be English. We know what words sound like English and what words sound foreign. These Rules can’t be found in any grammar book, or dictionary, but they exist. Structuralism seeks to find these rules, only not in language but in culture. In other words structuralism seeks to find the implicit rules well all follow. The way that it dos this, like in linguistics, is by breaking down aspects of culture (sometimes myth) into smaller parts.
The problem that I can see with this approach is one that doesn’t seem to apply to linguistics. Because sounds are less abstract then cultural values, breaking words up into their component phonemes seems more scientific. Culture on the other hand is for a large part abstract. So braking it up into smaller parts in order to find their relationships and rules seems harder to prove and or replicate.
brandi // March 27, 2009 at 12:41 am |
Structuralism is the patterning of symbols. Strauss was interested in finding this pattern but was not interested in the symbols themselves. He was “concerned with the patterning of elements, the way cultural elements relate to one another to form the overall system”. Strauss believed in a dialectic thought process like day-night or left-right but applied it to kinships. One specific part was that “the first and most important distinctions that a human makes is between self and others”. This is still true today because people continue to identify themselves as being part of one group rather than another group like democrate versus republican.
Merrily Mccarthy // March 27, 2009 at 7:32 am |
Better a little off the clock that never being able to tell the time! but time just another symbol relative to our schedules that we need to justify our existence. If we had not clocks, nor numbers we would have no names to identify objects and we would be afloat like a bird in the sky still attempting to name the white fluff that periodically gets rain on our feathers.
If I were a lone cavedweller staring up at my dinner flying off into the late evening dying sunlight I would possibly see tree branches etched dark against the pale of the sky and in my dim witted mind I would construct lines of etching and then I might run into my cave and reflect the lines upon the walls and put sounds to them, not because I was teaching others of my tribe, but because I would be defending and fighting off others who wished to also draw lines over my lines. In English of the new, how far off is “fight and write” well they do ryhme. Now that may be stretching existence of sound but then …all things may be possible in some way or the other.
The intial connection between a sighted object, and a scratched object that represents the object and a sound that communicates the object to others of the surrounding group does exist. We do the same thing. If we do the same thing in a rudimentary form in modern society, it has possibly never changed throughout time, existence and human awareness. this has formed and is the basis of social and cultural awareness in every given society, whether sophisticated or primitive. This is the structure that carries forward from the unseen to the seen. This is my contribution to the discussion on the subject of structuralism.
Then in a new forward note we have Mullooly’s unique style and presentation of consciousness shattering presentations that will awake and inspire even the most dull of the dullards.
Structuralism as it appears in todays world