What Is Structuralism? - UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES - E-book - ePub

The study of a social phenomenon can be accessed from the social object or from the relationships between them, depending our approach on the theoretical postulates that we assume. We understand by SOCIAL PURPOSE not as an individual act but as the reiteration of those acts, considering them not as isolated events but as a whole, during a given period of time and in a given society. A SOCIAL FACT - to study it we consider it an object - consists of every way of acting, thinking and feeling that exerts external pressure on the individual; social facts are prior to and external to the individual and are expressed in norms, laws and institutions.
STRUCTURALISM is one of these theoretical postulates and focuses its attention on the relationships of social objects in order to specify how they affect the whole and the parts. Structuralism proposes to discover the principle - The "Universal" Of Human Behavior - which cannot be accessed through immediate empirical observation of behaviors. To address the issue, we have summarized the essentials of "Structuralism", by Estela Gurevich.