Structuralism

Structuralism holds that cultural phenomena — language, myth, kinship, literature — can only be understood in terms of the underlying systems of relations and differences that generate them, not by examining individual elements in isolation. Saussure's linguistics established the key distinction between langue (the underlying system) and parole (individual utterance). Lévi-Strauss applied this to anthropology, analysing myths as permutations of binary oppositions. Structuralism transformed the human sciences in the mid-twentieth century and was the direct forebear of Post-Structuralism, which arose partly as a critique of its assumption that stable structures exist.