Structuralism is a thinking approach shared by psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and linguistics that seessociety and its culture formed by structures on which we base our customs, language, behavior, economy, among other factors.
In addition to the Human Sciences, Administration also starts to use structuralism as a method for the development of the so-called Management Sciences.
O structuralist method it is the analysis of social reality based on the construction of models that explain how relationships occur based on what they call structures.
Structure is an abstract system in which facts are not isolated and depend on each other to determine the whole. Economic exchanges depend on social ties, which in turn are determined by systems of distinction, and so on.
They are interrelated elements in which the strength of the structure is perceived and it is seen that not every fact can be understood by what is on display, that there are implicit elements. With this, structuralism believes that events are always related, with no isolated facts.
The structuralist school with the greatest worldwide reputation is French structuralism, represented by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It reached its peak in the 1960s, at a time when it was trying to counteract another prominent French philosophical thought, the structuralism of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The structuralist perspective emerged from linguistics, with Ferdinand de Saussure in the 1910s. It is the Swiss thinker who will create the basis for the development of two fields of investigation, structural linguistics and semiology (semiotics). It does not establish the use of the word structure, but part of systems formed by axes of meaning and signs linguistics that form the meanings and signifiers, disregarding the historical analysis of the varieties of languages or dialects.
From this theory, the structuralist method, developed by the Frenchman Claude Lévi-Strauss, is created. From participant observation in tribes, including in Brazil, the anthropologist realized the existence of rules and norms established between the social groups unconsciously, which formed the structures of kinship, language, customs and everything that involved the behavior in society. Lévi-Strauss used the same method of linguistics as applied to cultural studies and thus founded Structural Anthropology.
Structuralism and Functionalism
Psychology also has its own structuralist theory, created by the German Wilhelm Wundt, which considers the study of the structures of the mind as a way of understanding and treating behavior human. Edward Tithener was a disciple of Wundt and developed American structuralism in psychology.
Functionalism in psychology is opposed to structuralism. It studies the functions performed by the mind in order to direct behavior. It has an influence on the Darwinian theory of man's evolution and adaptation. Its greatest exponent is John Dewey.
In anthropology and sociology, functionalism is the perspective that the social function of events influences behavior in society more than structure. As if the facts were the conditioners, and not the system as structuralism understands.
Among the main names in functionalism in the Social Sciences are Émile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski. After him, the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown develops the so-called structural-functionalism, which discards pure historicity and simple actions in society, and that social organizations are functional to maintain the needs of the group and its structure.
Structuralism and Poststructuralism
Poststructuralism is a current of thought that emerges from criticisms directed at structuralism. Due to its contempt for historical conditions, structuralism has been condemned since its inception for applying a certain structural determinism.
In contemporary times, it is also understood that structuralists do not consider the agency of the individual within the structure, as if there was no chance to act by itself different from what is established by the system.
With such perspectives, poststructuralism emerges not as a counterpoint to structuralism, but as a deconstruction linked to postmodernism. For poststructuralists, reality is socially constructed and has a subjective form. This gives the subjects freedom of interpretation, and this deconstruction allows us to dissociate signifier from meaning.
The main poststructuralist thinkers are Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault himself.
