ABSTRACT
Several theorists have focused on cultural structures. In their eyes, cultures were not seen as homogeneous entities, as some other theorists seemed to suggest, but rather as complex formations. So-called structuralism had been heralded by one of the fathers of semiotics, the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure, who had completed his Indo-European studies in Leipzig and Berlin. Interestingly, the semiotic conceptualisations, which were then to influence cultural theories, were not published by him, but they were compiled posthumously from his lectures. Theorists such as Lévi-Strauss and Barthes took up this way of analysing and categorising, and applied it to cultural symbol systems and their largely automatic functions.
