Structuralism
Structuralism assumes that cultural forms are based on common properties
of the human mind. The goal of Structuralism is to discover universal principles
of the human mind underlying each cultural trait and custom. This theoretical
school was almost single handedly established by Claude Levi-Strauss.
The theoretical basis of Structuralism came from linguistics. All of us
know how to use our languages even though we are not aware of the grammatical
and phonetic rules. The job of a linguist is to discover these unconscious
principles of languages. In the same fashion, the Structuralists tried
to design a systematic method to uncover this underlying structure of cultures.
Structuralism has been influential, especially in the analysis of kinship and marriage, and that of myth and symbolism. It also helped the emergence of contemporary theoretical schools, such as Symbolic Anthropology, Cognitive Anthropology, and Postmodernism. However, Structuralism has not been applied to other fields of anthropology. In order to claim that Structuralism constitutes a general science of communication and sociocultural behavior, it would be necessary to apply this approach to other areas, such as economic or political anthropology.
Sources:
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Kottak Conrad Phillip. 2000 Cultural Anthropology. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
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Seymour-Smith, Charlotte. 1986 Dictionary of Anthropology. Boston: G.K. Hall.
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Winthrop, Robert H. 1991 Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Greenwood Press.