Structuralism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Structuralism is a theoretical and methodological perspective, often combined with functionalism, and employed in the social sciences. At the foundation of the perspective is the assumption that society is a system with distinct parts interlinked and positions determined by the overall structure itself. Generally, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1959) is credited as the first structuralist, but the method and the perspective soon spread to sociology, anthropology, psychology, and then literature and even architecture.

Origins And Spread

In the social sciences, the theory began with the argument that meaning itself was structurally embedded in activities as diverse as preparing food to highly ritualized dances. That is, symbols themselves are organized into systems that permeate the actions, attitudes, and physical organization of a group. The goal would be to uncover the deep structural meanings of each symbol through ethnographic analysis, including such practices as objective observation, interview, and perhaps even participant observation. Thus, modes of behavior often taken for granted by those participating in them are actually indicative of latent structures that provide meanings unobtainable by the outsider.

Taking from the linguists, social scientists often have asserted the importance of binaries for organizing social life. Believing that the mind itself is dichotomized, innate distinctions between night-day or male-female manifest themselves in the actual ways humans divide their own world, the classifications they derive, the taboos the create, and the rituals they employ. Others, such as anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) have gone so far as to argue that certain ubiquitous features of human societies must be derived from sharing the same neuroanatomy. For instance, the color red signifying danger becomes embedded in the structure of society through stop signs and warning lights or signs.

Take for instance anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s work on kinship (1969).The question asked by many anthropologists is what function did kinship have for early hunter-gatherer groups; moreover, what was the structural meaning behind exogamous kinship systems. The answers to this question had been relatively diverse ranging from a method of preventing incest to the classic women-as-property claim. Levi-Strauss argued it was actually a deeply embedded practice signifying the groups who considered themselves kin, even if fictively. Labeling his theory alliance theory, he saw the bride exchange that was often not a direct, reciprocal exchange as a deeply embedded practice signifying relationships, obligations, and expectations between two or more groups of people that were otherwise tacit to both the participants and the surface observer.

In sociology, structuralism was pervasive among the functionalists coming from the Parsonsian school and, to a lesser extent Robert Merton. Talcott Parsons constructed a grand social theory that was meant to incorporate all social phenomena within its proper place in the larger social structure. Dividing the social world into four dominant structures—analogized in his famous fourfold box within a box—Parsons assumed that every society, once large enough, would divide up the four most important tasks by creating four discrete structural entities. One structure would serve to set and mobilize others to meet societal goals; one interacted with the environment and worked to adapt the society to changes in the environment; one sought to integrate the disparate social units into a socially stable whole; and the other created, perpetuated, and disseminated a cultural pattern that generated a degree of conformity across society. While a static fourfold construction ensued, Parsons did not imply that there were truly just four structures, but that social phenomena fell into one category or the other—the economy was typically the system uniting the society with the environment while the polity is typically the structure concerned with goal attainment. Niklas Luhmann, a student of Parsons, was perhaps the last great structuralist in the social sciences positing a theory that organized society into three systems: the social system, the organizational system, and the interaction system. Each system was linked through symbolic systems that coordinated the flow of input and output across boundaries.

Poststructuralism

Over the course of the past forty years, structuralism has been relegated to an increasingly minor role in most disciplines. On the one hand, it was never able to satisfyingly defend itself against the critique that it ignored social change and was ahistorical. Structuralism, by definition, examines the unchanging elements coordinating meaning for a group of people, not the dynamics that drive these elements to change or reconfigure them. On the other, structuralism became a victim of the sociocultural context of the 1960s and 1970s, when tumult, feelings of change, and strong agent based movements dominated the political, academic, and social scenes. Many aspiring social scientists and scholars in the humanities called into question the conservativism and determinism of structuralists, preferring new perspectives like poststructuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism. Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, argued that some structures were structured, while others were structuring—put another way, some structures were constraining while others were better understood as processes that meant outcomes were not already determined. Structuralists tend to be deterministic in their theories of action, which they see as tightly constrained by structures embedded within the actor through the process of socialization. Conversely, the 1960s brought a wave of agent-based sentiment that argued that humans were being oversocialized by structuralism and that, in fact, humans, human nature, and society were much more malleable than structuralists conceded.

Bibliography:

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood, 1986.
Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
Harris, Marvin. Cannibals and Kings:The Origins of Cultures. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by James H. Bell, John R. von Strumer, and Rodney Needhan. Boston: Beacon, 1969.
Structural Anthropology, vol. I–II. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems, translated by John Bednarz Jr. and Dirk Baecker. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984.
Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press, 1967.
Parsons,Talcott. The Social System. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951.
Parsons,Talcott, and Neil J. Smelser. Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory. New York: Free Press, 1956.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

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