1800's - 1960's

STRUCTURALISM

The idea underlining theme of Structuralist work is Organinsation, Systems, Structure... How things are fitted together, how are they different from one another?

Cultures and Societies are all over the world with different value systems. We have these structures in things we do, things we make, stories we tell.

Society has many material practises such as educational system, human rights, welfare, the law.

Claude Levi Straus (1908-2009) was an anthropoligist. He studied how human beings build relationships within different cultures. You would think that marriage, and kinship would be very different in different cultures by the way it materialises BUT fundamentally its the same... same relationship, and partnerships.
Its Different people, different ideas doing it all different ways but the merging of 2 people is essentially the same!

It all started with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). He studied Semiotics and Linguistics. He compared meaning and systems in languages... COMMUNICATION!!

He also said meaning came from the sequencing of the language. To make sence there must be order.

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) looked at underlying patterns and organisational systems in stories. He said that there were 31 aspects of story in Russian Folk Tales eg boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, etc.
He can reduce all these narrative instances down into simplified forms and shapes, which help to identify the genre of story.

Structuralism was echoed by the Modernist Art Movement!