structuralists

Structuralists are scholars associated with structuralism, an intellectual movement that treats cultural phenomena as systems of relations and rules rather than as isolated events. Structuralists seek to reveal the underlying structures that generate meaning in language, literature, myth, society, and other domains, arguing that meanings arise from differences within a larger system.

In linguistics, the approach begins with Ferdinand de Saussure, who proposed that language is a system of signs—comprising signifier and signified—whose meaning is generated by their differences within the structure of langue rather than by reference to external reality alone. In anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss applied structural analysis to kinship, myth, and social organization, treating cultural products as expressions of universal cognitive structures and often using binary oppositions to explain variation across societies.

In literary theory and semiotics, structuralists analyze how texts function within systems of signs, codes, and conventions. Figures such as Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson extended structural methods to narratives, genres, and communication, focusing on how meaning is produced by structures rather than by author intention.

Philosophical and political strands include Jacques Lacan, who recast psychoanalysis in terms of linguistic structures; Louis Althusser, whose structural Marxism examined the structures that reproduce ideology; and Michel Foucault, whose archaeology and geneaology examined the historical conditions that enable knowledge and power to emerge.

Structurally oriented thought gained prominence in the mid-20th century, especially in France, and waned with the rise of post-structuralism in the 1960s–1980s. Its legacy endures in fields such as semiotics, narratology, and discourse analysis, though it is often balanced with critiques of determinism and neglect of historical agency.