Short answers, pulled from the story.
Structuralism is an intellectual approach holding that elements of human life have meaning only through their relationships to a broader system. As philosopher Simon Blackburn summarized it, the phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations, and behind surface variations there are constant laws of abstract structure.
Structuralism grew from multiple roots, but the most fundamental was the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure, which established that meaning arises from differences between signs rather than from any intrinsic connection between a word and what it names. The movement developed mainly in France and the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, and French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first scholar to popularize structuralism beyond linguistics after World War II.
Lévi-Strauss applied structural analysis to anthropology, most notably in his 1949 study The Elementary Structures of Kinship, where he argued that seemingly different kinship systems are permutations of a limited number of basic relations. His work gave rise to the term structuralism in the social sciences, and his writings became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s while he was replacing Marcel Mauss at his Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair.
Structuralism sought stable, underlying systems of relations that govern culture, language, and thought. Post-structuralism, associated with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, challenged structuralism's ahistorical tendencies and its underweighting of human agency, power, and political struggle. The post-structuralists emerged from within the structuralist tradition, particularly in the late 1960s in France.
Structural anthropology fell out of favour in the early 1980s. D'Andrade argued it made unverifiable assumptions about universal structures of the human mind. Pierre Bourdieu's criticisms shifted attention toward how human agency and practice change social structures, a trend Sherry Ortner labeled practice theory, and scholars such as Eric Wolf argued that political economy and colonialism should be at the forefront of anthropological inquiry.
The Prague school, including Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, developed phonemics as the clearest model of structural analysis, showing that sounds in a language gain identity through contrasts with other sounds rather than through intrinsic properties. This contrastive method, which explains for instance why Japanese speakers struggle to distinguish /r/ and /l/ in English, became the paradigmatic template that structuralists in anthropology, literary theory, and other fields repeatedly drew on.