ABSTRACT
Structuralism was highly popular in the 1960s and early 1970s, but owes its origins to the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure drew the distinction between langue and parole, that is between language as a system and individual utterances. Saussure’s concern was to understand the underlying system. Here it should be recognized that langue need not refer merely to literary systems. All cultural forms could be analysed by analogy with language, and could therefore be ‘read’. Structuralism proved highly popular in a range of disciplines, not least anthropology, where Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas and others based their research on patterns of kinship and so on.
