Structuralism and the Cultural System
The ambition to treat culture like a language — explaining myths, kinship, and customs by the deep systems of relations and oppositions that generate them.
Definition
Structuralism treats cultural phenomena as surface expressions of underlying systems of relations and binary oppositions; the cultural system is the network of differences that, like the rules of a language, generates the meanings of particular customs, myths, and artefacts.
Scope
This topic covers structuralism as a general method for analysing culture as a system, centred on Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and its account of myth and binary opposition, with attention to structuralist poetics. It does not cover the post-structuralist reaction, treated in its own topic.
Core questions
- Can the linguistic model explain non-linguistic culture?
- What work do binary oppositions do in myth and kinship?
- How do surface variations express a deeper structure?
Key theories
- Structural anthropology
- Lévi-Strauss analysed kinship and myth as systems governed by unconscious binary structures of the human mind, transposing the linguistic model onto culture.
- The structural study of myth
- He treated myths as transformations of a small set of underlying oppositions, such as raw and cooked, that mediate fundamental cultural contradictions.
History
Inspired by structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss recast anthropology around underlying mental structures in the late 1950s and 1960s, analysing kinship and the logic of myth. The method spread into literary and cultural study, where Culler's Structuralist Poetics codified its application, before drawing the post-structuralist critique.
Debates
- Universal structures versus history and agency
- Structuralism's search for timeless underlying structures was criticised for neglecting historical change and human agency, a charge central to post-structuralist and Marxist responses.
Key figures
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Jonathan Culler
- Roman Jakobson
Related topics
Seminal works
- levistrauss1963
- levistrauss1969
- culler1975
Frequently asked questions
- What is a binary opposition?
- A pair of contrasting terms, such as raw and cooked or nature and culture, that structuralists see as a basic building block through which cultures organise meaning.