ABSTRACT
The term structuralism is generally applied to the work of a diverse group of French intellectuals working in the 1950s and 60s. Drawing on modern philosophy and the human sciences that arose in the 19th and early 20th centuries-linguistics and anthropology-and to a lesser extent on the hard sciences and mathematics, structuralism’s influence continued long after its formal existence as a coherent movement. In the most general sense, structuralism was the search for the most elementary and universal patterns underlying cultural reality-patterns and structures that form the basis of social life in its most fundamental expressions: language, economy, science, and so forth. Less doctrine than method, the basic tenets of structuralism were adapted to virtually every discipline in the academy. Simply stated, these tenets were, first, individual phenomena (utterances, rituals, the formation of social institutions) only have significance when considered as part of a larger system; second, the huge variety of isolated phenomena that are discernible within the world or a given system are specific permutations of a very few general principles; and third, the structure or conceptual model constructed to chart these general principles (and the meaning of their individual manifestations) is just that-a conceptual model or structure that by definition cannot be empirically verified.
