Introduction

In Paris, the structuralist age is nearly over. Nevertheless, structuralist assumptions continue to permeate French thinking, providing a basis for post-structuralism. Since World War II, French thought has gone through several phases. During the Resistance and immediately after the liberation, Marxism preoccupied the thinking of French intellectuals. Then, in a climate of growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union and communism, Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist humanism promised to allow for individual fulfillment in modern society. The advent of structuralism, for its followers at least, seemed to supply an honorable intellectual escape from confronting the limitations of both Marxism and existentialism. As early as 1933, N. S. Trubetzkoy had noted that structuralist pursuits characterized by a systematic universalism were common in chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics, as well as in linguistic studies. But Claude Lévi-Strauss conceived the methodology which would allow him to apply structuralism to anthropology only in the late 1940s.