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turn attended Lévi-Strauss's talks on kinship. It was with Jakobson's
encouragement that Lévi-Strauss started the work that would
become
Elementary Structures of Kinship
.
17
What Lévi-Strauss found
particularly interesting was Jakobson's use of Saussure's ideas in a
different discipline. In the
s, along with Nicolai Trubetzskoy,
Wilém Mathesius, and others, Jakobson had founded the Linguis-
tic Circle of Prague, dedicated to the study of poetic language using
the structuralist paradigm of Saussure. Lévi-Strauss realized that
such an approach would be fruitful for anthropology. By studying
structure separate from content in the manner of Saussure's linguis-
tics, anthropology could become both scientifically rigorous and
avoid the racism prevalent in pre-war anthropology, which was
dominated by the natural sciences.
The influence of Lévi-Strauss's rethinking of anthropology was
immense. It seemed to offer new frameworks of thinking that
avoided, among other things, the compromised phenomenological
approach of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was quickly adopted and adapted
by those working in other disciplines, in particular psychoanalysis,
by Jacques Lacan; cultural and literary analysis, by Roland Barthes;
political theory, by Louis Althusser and history, by Michel Foucault
(though he always strenuously denied being a Structuralist). Other
inflections of Structuralism were developed by the psychologist
Jean Piaget, who retained an interest in the development of ideas,
and thus rejected the concentration on synchronic structures that
characterized the Saussurean model. Structuralism emerged in a
very different context to Cybernetics, General Systems Theory,
Molecular Biology, Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory.
The latter were largely the product of Britain and the United States,
and reflected current techno-scientific concerns. Structuralism was
both a Continental European development and one that took
place largely within the social sciences. Furthermore it inherited
much of the anti-humanist approach that animated Marxism and
Freudian psychoanalysis, two of its forebears. The other information
1920
