Shree Ganeshaaya Namah

Structuralism
 What is structuralism ?
Social life as a sign system
Sign is anything which determines
something else
Signs are codes which represent
underlying structures
All communication occurs through specific
cultural contexts
To understand structuralism better
We need to understand certain basics of
linguistics
A word is associated with several
meanings coming from certain cultural
contexts
Eg. Table what comes to your mind
when we say table ? What are the
characteristics that accompany tables ?
 Ok, what about mathematical tables,
statistical tables do they also have the
same properties that you have listed ?
What do we infer from these exercises ?
 So structuralism operates on this basic
premise that
Society is full of sign systems determining
meanings. First meanings are established
by people of specific cultures who inhabit
society.
This meaning is then carried forward
through history and then it takes varied
forms.
 That is how ideas get fixated and
structures get established in society.
Example
So, laws of communication are the laws of
culture
Culture can be studied through language
games in society.
Example
 Language has unconscious processes and
structures through which meanings are
sedimented.
 Structures in Society

Structures of Language Speech/ Discourse

Structure of Kinship Patterns of Marriage and Family Relations

Main assumptions of Structuralism
All patterns of human behaviour are
codes, with characteristics of language.
Human beings have an innate structuring
capacity which determines the limits within
which the structures of all types of social
phenomena can be formed.
Social reality can be described as binary
oppositions.
Structuralism is about structures
It is a treatise of structures in society
How are structures created by natural
laws, by natural course of development of
ideas (archeology of ideas and thought
processes) and from acts of construction
(out of experience)
 Structures contain in themselves a set of
elements, together with binary operations,
such that when it is applied to a pair of
elements of the set, the result returns an
element of the set.
Eg. Human beings- Men- women-
marriage- children- male- female- cycle
continues
 What in social science and social work, we
are concerned with are social structures.
What is social structure ?
Network of existing relations
Construction of a model in which recurrent
characteristics of a number of groups are
subsumed.
 Three ways of studying structures:
Webers ideal types based on developing
conceptual categories not found in reality
Hempels classificatory types here for a group
of objects for which an underlying structure is
sought, are classified according to their positions
on one or more dimensions of evaluation or
measurement and gathered together in a class
each class having a characteristic or a typical
structure.
 Structures of extreme types do not exist
empirically without there being present to
a greater or lesser extent, traces of some
quality which is seen as their opposite. Eg.
The concept of pure monopoly in
economics
 This has become the main subject of
deliberation of anthropologists who have
studied various societies.
 Mantra of structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussaure Father of
modern linguistics
The key principle of the structure of
language is that it forms a system that is
fundamentally one of contrasts,
distinctions and ultimately oppositions
since the elements of language never exist
in isolation but in relation to one another.
 Similarly society is also structured along
the line of contrasts, distinctions and
oppositions.
The work of Claude Levi Strauss
French anthropologist
Social structure systems formed by customs
and the unconscious structures underlying
institutions.
Social relations are the basic material from
which the models that constitute social structure
are built.
Structures are characterised by social relations
which are all ultimately reducible to binary
oppositions. High low, hot cold, men
women, right left, old young, abled-disabled
etc.