ABSTRACT
Structuralism is in origin a French theoretical position, or, more accurately, a francophone (French language) one. The key figures were French, Belgian, and Swiss nationals, whose language was French. The theories and publications were mostly produced in Paris. It drew on intellectual traditions that were characteristically French, and although its key ideas were domesticated by a number of Anglophone scholars, its general flavor remains alien to many of the cherished assumptions of Anglo-American empirical social science. Indeed, Edith Kurzweil (l980:ix) makes the point that structuralism is the perfect example of how "an intellectual movement could be fashionable without being understood." Arguably, its influence lies less in precisely whether it was "understood" and more in how key ideas were used and
Structuralism has three intellectual roots: one in sociology/social anthropology, another in folklore, and the third in general linguistics. The sociological origins lie with one of the discipline's founding fathers, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), and his student and colleague Marcel Mauss (1872-1913). Durkheim and Mauss together published a study of thinking in pre literate societies called Primitive Classification in 1903 in French, and Mauss followed their line of thought in his essay The Gift published in 1925. These books were not well known in the English-speaking world until many years later. Translations appeared in 1963 and 1954, respectively. In Primitive Classification Durkheim and Mauss argued that cultures and cosmologies (belief systems) could be analyzed in terms of their basic systems of classification. Such classificatory principles, they argued further, also reflected fundamental social categories and divisions. Cultural categories thus impose particular, culture-specific, patterns and are themselves social in origin. Durkheim's emphasis on cultural classifications implies an important function for boundan'es, material and symbolic, between different domains (such as that between the "sacred" and the "profane").
