A dominant current in postwar French philosophy originating in the work of Raymond Barthes in literary theory, Jean Piaget in psychology, and Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology. It involves moving beneath the visible and conscious designs of social phenomena in order to reveal an essential logic which is supposed to bind these designs together into enduring, underlying structures.
the early school of psychology that sought to identify the components of the conscious mind. (9)
the view that behind the social and cultural realities we perceive, such as clothes or food fashions, kinship organization and even language itself, deep structures exist which, through combinations of their elements, produce the surface complexity of the relevant phenomena. Poststructuralism retains elements of structuralism (its interest in surface signs for example) but abandons the quest for deep structures.
An interdisciplinary intellectual movement, begun in the 1970s in France, focusing on detailed analyses of myths and other narrative works, based on the assumption that a discernible pattern could be found dictating the minutest interrelations of the parts of a text and connecting them meaningfully to the whole. Structuralists further assumed that such analyses provided insights into the dynamic structures of the mind, i.e., of cognition itself. Prominent structuralists include the linguist Ferdinand de Sausurre, the literary critic Roland Barthes, and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
An approach to psychology based on the idea that conscious experience can be broken down into its basic underlying components or elements. go to glossary index
an anthropological theory that there are unobservable social structures that generate observable social phenomena
A tradition within classical semiotics, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure, focusing on the structure of systems of related signs rather than the referents of individual signs. For structuralists, meaning is relational: signs take on meaning only by virtue of their relations to other signs within a system. Treating these sign systems as "languages", they analyze complex signs by breaking them down into smaller meaningful units and identifying the relationships among them. Their goal is to find underyling structures, hopefully in order to understand the conventions governing production and interpretation of signs within systems. Links: [S4B] structuralism.
An analytical approach characterized largely by a shift in focus from interpreting a text in order to unveil its hidden meaning to identifying and interrogating the ways in which meaning is brought into being structurally. Structuralism is a diverse approach encompassing numerous methodologies, connected by this concern with the ways in which the structure of any given text is implicated in the production of its meaning. Although it has been subject to intensive critique (focusing, for example, on its inability to take account of historical change), structuralism's once-radical rejection of the role of relationship and context in determining meaning has been enormously influential in many disciplines.
Approach that holds that all text must be considered as part of a system of language because it comprises codes, conventions and signs. Originating in the 1960s this approach has been superseded by post-structuralism.
A school of art or of art criticism that advocates and employs a method of analyzing phenomena chiefly by contrasting the elemental structures in a system of binary opposition.
an approach to religious studies in which one examines and analyzes the manner(s) in which religious consciousness and ritual practices are explicit reflections of the implicit values and assumptions by which a society or culture defines itself. The focus is not on what religion does for a group (instrumental), but rather on what religion says about a group (expressive).
