In 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure published his Course in General Linguistics 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. 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. A sign consists of a signifier and a signified element. The signifier is the sound pattern or visual image. The signified is the abstract concept or idea behind the word. He stated that in language there are only differences without positive terms. This approach rejected evolutionary linguistics which focused on historical development over time. Instead, Saussure examined how elements relate synchronically in the present moment. His work influenced the Prague school of linguistics led by Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy. They analyzed phonemes through contrasts like /p/ versus /b/ in English words such as pat and bat.
Rise Of French Anthropology
Claude Lévi-Strauss published The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. This volume applied linguistic models to kinship systems and mythology. Lévi-Strauss had known Roman Jakobson during their time together at the New School in New York during World War II. He demonstrated how different social organizations were permutations of basic kinship structures. In late 1958 he released Structural Anthropology outlining his program for structuralism. His work became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Lévi-Strauss took inspiration from mathematics to identify universal structures of the mind. He held these structures operate based on pairs of binary oppositions. Examples include hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable versus tabooed women. Marcel Mauss wrote about gift-exchange systems which influenced Lévi-Strauss alliance theory. This theory argued that kinship systems are based on the exchange of women between groups. It opposed descent-based theories described by Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes. Authors like Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach in Britain were highly influenced by this approach. Marshall Sahlins and James Boon built on structuralism in the United States.