Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ferdinand de Saussure published his Course in General Linguistics in 1916 after his death. This text established the foundation for structuralism by distinguishing between langue and parole.
Langue represents an idealized abstraction of language as a system while parole refers to language as it is actually used in daily life. Saussure argued that meaning arises from relationships between signs rather than intrinsic properties.
Claude Lévi-Strauss published The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. This volume applied linguistic models to kinship systems and mythology.
Claude Lévi-Strauss held that universal structures of the mind operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-cold or male-female. He took inspiration from mathematics to identify these structures within social organizations.
Structural anthropology fell out of favor in early 1980s due to unverifiable assumptions about universal mind structures. By the late 1960s many of structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from French intellectuals including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.