See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ8l0Aa64-U&ab_channel=MichaelSugrue
Known through French thinkers Claude Lévi-Strauss or Piaget, methodological connection in social science to interpret human behaviour/controls under mathematical rules
The underlying intrinsic to the mind that this structure is universal, in a sense of our own existence.
Levi-Strauss reckoned that the way we think about things has been set in place already by cultural factors (mainly language) - so the individual is almost a base through which ‘society’ does its work. Think about it like this - language existed before we were, and will continue after we will be gone, but we think through it and it constrains our understanding.
Think of Levi-Strauss as making an argument about society. In all of human history, there have only ever been about nine ways we’ve come up with to actually THINK about society.
- Marx (Marxism) makes an argument that society is about economic structures, and all behavior is constrained by it.
- Durkheim (structuralism) makes an argument that society is about institutions trying to come into balance with each other, like the organs in a body.
Important
But Levi-Strauss (Linguistic Structuralism) is different from these two, because he came AFTER Freud. Freud was revolutionary, because he reckoned that the individual was important. Levi Strauss wanted to find a way to maintain that overall sense of some constraining SOCIETY while having the individual still be important.