Dare 2 b different

[barren_vision]

Would any one tell me about structuralism, impressionistic and impressionistic
techniques?

[PHARM]

structuralism

1:A method of analyzing phenomena, as in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, or literature, chiefly characterized by contrasting the elemental structures of the phenomena in a system of binary opposition.



Geographical dictionary:structuralism

An approach to, among other disciplines, human geography, which stresses the structures which underlie human behaviour. Fundamental themes include:

▪ the underlying elements of the structure remain more or less the same, but the relationships between them alter;
▪ things that appear ‘natural’ to us, like masculinity and femininity, are actually social constructs;
▪ individuals, too, are the product of relationships.

Thus, what individuals do may be what they are permitted to do by the overall circumstances—structures—in which they operate. These structures are the rules, conventions, and restraints upon which human behaviour is based. For example, within the structure of capitalism, the optimal location for an industry would be at the point of maximum profits. Within the structure of ‘green’ politics, the optimal site would be a site where environmental damage is least. The impact of structuralism on human geography was at its height in the 1970s.

Political dictionay:structuralism


In general terms, the doctrine that the structure of a system or organization is more important than the individual behaviour of its members. Structural inquiry has deep roots in Western thought and can be traced back to the work of Plato and Aristotle. Modern structuralism as a diverse movement-cum-epistemology began with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). In social and political theory, structuralism refers to the attempt to apply methods influenced by structural linguistics to social and political phenomena. Its distinctive methodological claim is that the individual units of any system have meaning only in terms of their relations to each other. Saussure, who did not use the term ‘structure’, preferring ‘system’, saw language as a system of signs to be analysed synchronically, that is, studied as a self-sufficient system at one point in time (rather than in historical development). The French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced Saussure's epistemology to social science, arguing that analysts should develop models to reveal the underlying structural mechanisms which order the surface phenomena of social life. Lévi-Strauss uncovered the ‘unconscious psychical structures’ which, he thought, underlay all human institutions. Within political science and international studies, structuralism has had an important influence. This is particularly evident in structuralist Marxism and in critical realist philosophies of social science which often claim that Marx's theory of exploitation is an example of an underlying causal mechanism at work in society.

In international relations, structuralism has two distinct senses. Latin American structuralism refers to influential doctrines developed by Prebisch and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Prebisch argued not only for national strategies of import-substituting industrialization but also for regional integration and international cooperation between exporters of primary products. These policies, and the analysis underlying them, became the official doctrine of the Third World through the activities of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), established in 1964 with Prebisch as founding chairman, and need to be carefully distinguished from the far less meliorative neo-Marxist ideas of the Latin American dependency school.

Secondly, structuralism may refer to the twist given to realist international relations theory by Kenneth Waltz. Instability and war were less the result of corrupt human nature or poorly constituted states than of changing distributions of power across states in an anarchical international system. Earlier realist explanations that had dwelt on the characteristics of individual states and their leaders were dismissed as reductionist. Debate between structuralists, often assisted by borrowings from microeconomic theories of imperfect competition, centred instead on which was likely to prove the more stable, a bipolar or a multipolar system.

— Peter Burnham/Charles Jones

Literacy dictionary:structuralism structuralism, a modern intellectual movement that analyses cultural phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus the abstract codes and conventions governing the social production of meanings. Building on the linguistic concept of the phoneme—a unit of meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features—structuralism argues that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly ‘relational’: that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system, especially in binary oppositions of paired opposites. Their meanings can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analysing its function within a self‐contained cultural code. Accordingly, structuralist analysis seeks the underlying system or langue that governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of interchangeable units ( paradigms) and sequences of such units in combination ( syntagms), thereby outlining a basic ‘ syntax’ of human culture.

Structuralism and its ‘science of signs’ (see semiotics) are derived chiefly from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and partly from Russian Formalism and the related narratology of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928). It flourished in France in the 1960s, following the widely discussed applications of structural analysis to mythology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss. In the study of literary works, structuralism is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature ‘expresses’ an author's meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘ text’ is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism is less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work. The structuralist tradition has been particularly strong in narratology, from Propp's analysis of narrative functions to Greimas' theory of actants. The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of structuralist literary analysis notably in his book S/Z (1970)—and is famed for his witty analyses of wrestling, striptease, and other phenomena in Mythologies (1957): some of his later writings, however, show a shift to post‐structuralism, in which the over‐confident ‘scientific’ pretensions of structuralism are abandoned. For more extended accounts of this enterprise, consult Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), and Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974).