Brief introduction to structuralism:
Superfluous Genealogy:
British empricists:
John Locke. George Berkeley, David Hume

Knowledge of the world is immediate.

The mind is a blank slate at birth.

Our five senses are given.

The reality impresses itself upon our senses.
▼
Anglo-American intellectual traditions
Continental rationalists

Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant
(inspiration Plato)

Knowledge of the world is mediate.

It is mediated by innate ideas or structures.
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Structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure 1857-1913
Course in General Linguistics (1916)

Words names ideas not things!
Sign system
the linguistic sign is a two-sided entity
signifier (material aspect, the sign post/image/sound)
signified (mental concept)
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Dog
Signifiers "d", "o", "g" What do we hear?
The mental concept of dogness)
Saussure
studied
la langue (the system of signs, a system of difference between signs),
not la parole (the spoken word, individual acts of speech),
signs not diachronically
but synchronically
synchrony: signifiers (roughly, words)
versus
signifieds (corresponding mental images).
signifier analyzed formally.
Language can be seen as a system paradigmatic and Syntagmatic negative
relations of difference.
The
bear
eats
dog
smells its
moose
hits
honey.
master.
mate.
The horizontal substitutions are syntagmatic.
The vertical substitutions are paradigmatic.
Meaning is possible because one thing can signify another.
Language cannot be interfered by individuals.
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Once its established a sign cannot be changed by an individual.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
(b.1908)
Lacks a sustained period of time fieldwork
in 1935-39 taught in Sāo-Paolo in Brazil
has short periods of field trips among several peoples of Amazon region
was in USA during the WW2
His 1947 doctoral dissertation
The Elementary Structures of Kinship as a book (1949) was very influenced
kinship studies

Structuralism attempts to comprehend the general qualities of meaningful
systems.
A kinship system is meaningful as it is made up of relationships
(e.g. father is a father only in relationship to his children).
Meaningful systems as structure of contrasts helps to "deal with the flow of time".
Functionalists try to explain social phenomena by finding hidden utilitarian form.
Some forms of behaviour have no utility
Their utility is revealed only when they are related negatively to other social
phenomena in the same culture system (signifiers).
L-S searched for universals at the level of structure but truths are camouflaged at
the level of observable fact unless one knows how to decode those facts.
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
Define the phenomenon.

Construct the table of permutations

This table should be the object of analysis.

It shows the possible connections.

One relation is only one among other possible ones.

What we do is to create certain combinations now absolutely new ones.
What Saussure said "individuals cannot change the sign. We operate in the
already established system.
The linguistic units (parole) can be organized in newer ways
but
not the underlying basic structure (langue).
Implications in crude words:
Nothing is really new.
What individuals and societies as collectivities do
is to create certain combination.
therefore
As argued in La pensée sauvage
(not "The savage mind" but Thinking in the raw)
notions of primitive thinking/pre-logical thinking are problematic.
Primitive belongs to the "higher order" and vice versa.
Universal logic is applied to resolve the problems humanity faces in nature.
The classificatory categories of all people's are based on the recognition of
opposites, contrasts and similarities.
They reveal a mastery of the immediate sensory qualities of the world and
anintuitive capacity for detecting analogues within combinations of sounds,
colours, tastes, odors, and tactile qualities found in nature.
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Lévi-Straus History and Dialectic (The Savage Mind 1962)
Main argument:
"Historical knowledge has no claim to be opposed to other forms of knowledge as
a supremely privileged one" (263).
His issue with Sartre:
Sartre is ethnocentric because of his existentialism and
his definition of man (who is self experiencing and defined against an other).
'history is a discontinuous set composed of domains of history, each of which is
defined by a characteristic frequency and by a differential coding of before and
after' (259-260).
istory is always partial and serves a purpose
therefore
History is therefore never history, but 'history-for'.
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