Media, Information and Technoculture 2200F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Ethnology, Ethnocentrism, Binary Opposition
30 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Always contained through the architecture of the work. Anthropology, literary studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology. Structuralism has had an enormous impact across a variety of fields: language as a term of differential meaning, language as a model through structuralist type approaches. Structuralists view social and cultural phenomena as bearing meaning and thus as signs: parts of differential systems, not as having them as systems of meaning. Kicking a ball between 2 posts has no intrinsic meaning. In the larger system of sports this has a meaning of scoring a goal . Only within the system of sports does this gesture have an impact and thus a meaning. Structure determines the position of every element. The structure is hidden or obscure most of the time, but it is the real thing beneath the surface: even if a structure is hidden, what really matters is beneath the surface. It is the most important even if it is hidden.
