During the 1940s and 1950s, the French philosophical scene was characterized by existentialism, mainly through Sartre, phenomenology, the return to Hegel and the philosophy of science, with Gastón Bachelard. But something changes in the 1960s when Sartre is oriented towards Marxism, a new fashion emerges, structuralism. Claude Levi Strauss starts this new movement in ethnology, followed by Lacan, in psychoanalysis, Luis Altuhusser in the study of Marxism and finally Miguel Foucault. It should be unattacked that Althusser and Foucault rejected the classification of their thinking within structuralism, and in rigor, only Levi Strauss carried out an explicit reflection on structuralism as a method. In any case, it is a departure from low historicist or subjectivist perspectives in an attempt to find a new direction for research.
It cannot be clearly said that structuralism is a school, but rather a methodological approach to human sciences, such as cultural anthropology, linguistics, history... however, the method has philosophical derivations of consideration.
Lévi-Strauss has defined the conditions that imply the concept of structure:
They imply the character of SYSTEM. This is that its elements are related in such a way that the modification of any of them implies a modification of all others.
Since every model belongs to a group of TRANSFORMAGS, each of them corresponds to a model of the same family, so that the set of these transformations constitutes a group of models.
The previously stated properties allow PREDIT, how the model will react if any of its elements are modified.
The model must be constructed in such a way that its FUNCTIONING can account for all the observed facts.
A structure, because it is not an observable empirical reality but a theoretical explanatory model constructed not as induction but as hypothesis. Thus, “structure” differs from “event”.
The structure does not consider the terms themselves but their relations, it is therefore a system of relations and transformations, regulated by an internal cohesion that is revealed in the study of their transformations.
Piaget has defined structures through three characteristics:
Totality: It is a system that has more properties than that of its isolated elements.
Transformations, has a dynamic balance
Self-regulation: the system is closed and self-preserved, because it is a system of self-regulated transformations.
The concept of structure, or its like, is, of course, predated its use by the French structuralists. It was present in mathematics through the notion of “group” and in logic, as “formalization”, and even in physics and biology. The equivalent in psychology can be found in the concept of gestalt (form), used by the School of Gestalt whose central objective was to overcome the theories of associationist theory. Lewin tralted the concept of gestalt to social psychology, Freud elaborates a structural model of the repressed unconscious (yo-it -super yo) and even Marxo, will use the concepts of infraestrctura and superstructure to establish the assumptions of historical materialism.
However, structuralism is especially inspired by the linguistics of Saussure who distinguished between “language” and “speech” considering language as a “sign system” independent of the use made of it by the individual and thus proposed the creation of a new science.
Thus, Lévi-Strauss believes that social phenomena offer the character of signs and that any society can be studied as a system of sinuses, and it can consider, for example, the rules of marriage and kinship systems as a kind of language, a set of operations aimed at securing between individuals and individuals. groups a certain type of communication. In other words, a society can be considered as a play of signs, language or communication, although at various levels: communication of women (prohibition of incest, exogamy), communication of goods or services, communication of messages. The method for your study will be to discover the structure or system of that game. Since, in any case, these are always social phenomena that can be considered as signs, the methodology may be the same as that used by structural linguistics.