structuralist

Structuralist refers to a person who adheres to structuralism, a school of thought that examines how elements of human culture relate within larger systems. Structuralists study how language, myth, kinship, literature, and social practices are organized by underlying structures rather than by isolated events. They emphasize relations among elements and seek to identify universal patterns within a culture or text.

Origins and scope: Structuralism arose in the early 20th century from Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas about langue and parole and the relational nature of signs. It spread to anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss, to semiotics and literary theory with Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Algirdas Julien Greimas, and to philosophy with Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault.

Methods and claims: Structuralists analyze systems of relations and codes that govern phenomena. In linguistics, they study underlying grammar and the system of signs; in anthropology they analyze kinship, myth, and rites as transmissions of universal structures or logics; in literary theory they interpret narratives as structures of genre, plot, and discourse.

Criticism and legacy: Early structuralism faced criticism for determinism and overemphasis on structures at the expense of human agency. It was largely supplanted in some disciplines by post-structuralism and interpretive approaches that stress ambiguity, context, and discourse. Nevertheless, structuralist methods and insights about systems of relations have had lasting influence, shaping fields such as semiotics, narratology, and cognitive science.