Structuralist Theories in Environment - Behavior - Design Research

Structuralist theories and methods have gained momentum since the late 19th century, largely owing to the exchange theory of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, the linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson at the Prague school of structural linguistics, and the contribution of Ferdinand de Saussure. Nonetheless, structural explanation became an integral part of analytical approaches in the social sciences only in the second half of this century, largely as a result of the contributions of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, and the Marxism of Louis Althusser. Today, there are published studies in fields including archaeology (Clarke, 1977; Hodder, 1982), architecture (Eco, 1972, 1973, 1976; Glassie, 1975; LUchinger, 1981), linguistics (Macksey & Donato, 1972; Sturrock, 1979), social anthropology (Leach, 1976; Levi-Strauss, 1968), and urban sociology (Castells, 1977, 1978). This complex range of contributions cannot be considered a unified set that suggests a shared perspective and a linear development of structure theory and method. For example, although the interpretation of Levi-Strauss owes much to Mauss and Jakobson (Badcock, 1975; Chiari, 1975), the advocates of structural Marxism reject the overriding importance which his cognitive structuralism attributes to symbolic dimensions and a synchronic perspective.