Structuralism – Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss

1. Structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure
&
Claude levi-strauss

2. What is structuralism
• A school of literary theory which is inspired by semiotics and the
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure; emerged in France in during 1950s
• Structuralist believes in the existence of a fixed real world; universal truths
• A system in which each element in a group can only be understood by its
relation to other elements as part of a larger structure
• Sociologists make structure the main concern of their work, because they
believe in the possibility of establishing general statements about society;
about how the world as we experience it is formed by some underlying
structure.
• Relating Skelton to the whole

4. Two dominant approaches
in structuralism
• High structuralism and Low structuralism
• High structuralism- high in its aspirations and
makes grand claims about how cultural texts infer
meaning
• Low structuralism- is more practical and aims to be
more immediately useful

5. Ferdinand
de
Saussure
(1857-1913)
Swiss structuralist
Father of linguistics

6. • Revolutionised the study of language; earlier mostly
diachronic linguistics (the study of the evolution of a
language over time); Saussure- Synchronic linguistics
(the study of how a languages operates at a fixed point
in time)
• Credited with founding Semiotics (he called it
Semiology)
• Class notes compiled into the book Courses in General
Linguistics (1916)

7. Before Saussure
• The conceptual part of linguistic value is
determined solely by relations and differences with
other signs in the language
• Language was generally seen as a way to name
things
• The way these words fit in the context of each
language as a whole helps to define what we think
of when we see this picture

8. How is language made
• We need to figure out what the components in language are
• PAROLE: an individual verbal utterance or written word, phrase
or sentence (we can learn little from the individual words)
• LANGUE: The linguistic system as a whole (words become
meaningful with its relationship to langue of which it is a part)
• The language is inherently structural, determined by the
relationships and differences in the analysis of culture; we can
understand the meaning of individual cultural text Parole comes
to mean its observable relationship to other text in the broader
Langue of culture

9. Saussure’s definition of
language
• All language is made of signs
• Semiology: the study of signs; to understand
systematic regularities from which meaning is
derived
• By putting together signs, it is possible to create
complex messages
• Each has two parts: signifier and signified

10. Sign part 1: signifier
• The psychological imprint of the sound, the
impression it makes on our senses
• Example:thinking in your head
• AKA “sound image”
• How we think about a thing!

11. Part 2: signified
• The concept or essence of something
• What the signifier is referring to (the sound
“dog”refers to the concept of a dog)
• What we think!

12. • !

13. The nature of signs
• Arbitrary- meaning there is no natural connection
between signifier and signified- the letters t-r-e-e don’t
exactly paint a picture of majestic Banyan tree
• Culturally constructed
• Because signs are arbitrary they must be agreed on by a
group of people to be effective (ex:all English speakers)
• therefore, some languages have words for concepts that
don’t exist in other languages

14. • Rather than express our experience in an objective
manner instead shapes how we know the world
• The meaning we derive from cultural text heavily
reliant on the influence of the dominant structures
of thought of the society in which it is produced
• Structuralism failed to answer the question why
such structures exist in the society

15. Criticisms
• langue: complete system?
• Distinction: Syntagm & Paradigm
• Finite-state grammar

16. Two traditions of
structuralism
• American Structuralism- concentrated on developing abstract theorems to
explain social phenomena as integration and relies heavily on quantitative
computer based techniquesS
• French Structuralism- attempted to identify common conceptual schemes;
concerned with human thought and language
It is all about words (How fundamentally some recent ideas and words
about ideas and words have affected the way we understand ourselves)
The way we see and understand the world affects the way we act,
understanding social behaviour must involve understanding the laws of
language and the intellect
Claude Levi-Strauss

17. Claude Levi strauss
(1908-2009)
• French social anthropologist and
leading exponent of structuralism
• Analysis of cultural systems (Kinship
and mythical systems in terms of
structural relations among their
elements) in his major work
Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)
• According to him, there are patterns
common to all human thought, and
that these can be found in the myths
and classification structures of any
tribe or culture

18. • For Levi-Strauss, thought processes are what make
us human; we must “think” in some sense before
we can have any social life, therefore, the
conceptual theme underlying social life is
fundamental
• He tried to extract conceptual universals and
develop a method for analysing myth in these
terms

19. • This was also a theoretical perspective with important political
implications; it sets very strict limits to the malleability of
human beings and of human societies, it also denies the
possibility of a “new man”, made by a perfect society
• According to him, future man will share the same “deep”
mental structures as his predecessors, and therefore his society
will be similar as well
• Edmund Leach points out that, to a structuralist, history offers
images of past societies which were “structural
transformations” of those we know now-no better no worse

20. • For instance, his analysis of how all societies cook food, “define” food
as belonging to different categories and have categories which are
similar (“raw-cooked” triangle)
• Levi-Strauss looks for some underlying principle of organising our
thought which when it meets the real world, produces certain ways
of categorising food
• We introduce order into experience by dividing the continuum of
space and time into discontinuous segments-different things, different
events
• We see things in terms of binary opposites; good vs evil, man vs
woman, night vs day

21. In a nutshell..
• Strauss is best know for his culture and mind theory;
in this theory he showed that culture is a system
containing underlying structures that are common in
all societies regardless of any difference. Through his
search he found that patterns of structure such as
behaviour are in fact universal to all societies. Levi-
Strauss was very interested in the structural pattern
which gives the myth its meaning; through his
research and examination into myths he identified a
theory of binary oppositions.

22. In a nutshell..
• Strauss identified that the way we understand
certain words depends, not by the meaning of that
particular word, but by our understanding to the
difference between them

23. Criticism
• Many social scientists’ reaction to Levi-Strauss’
work has been one of skepticism
• We tend to categorise everything
• The study of the common elements and
underlying structure in the myths of different
societies

24. Activity
• Explain Saussurian definition of language
• Discuss the contributions of Claude Levi Strauss to
the study of social structure.
• Saussure saw language as a system of signs
constructed by convention. Please explain.
• Define signified and signifier
• Explain the theory of binary opposites.

25. References
• George Ritzer, Jeffrey N Stepnisky - Sociological
Theory-Sage Publications, Inc (2017)
• Wes W. Sharrock, John A. Hughes, Peter J. Martin -
Understanding Modern Sociology-Sage Publications
(2003)
• Wallace and Wolf (2006) Contemporary Sociological
Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition, Sixth
Edtn, University of London:Pearson.