Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

5.3 The attraction of structuralism 
We have met the term “structuralism” several times in the above pages, especially with 
reference to the equivalence paradigm. We now take some time to explain what the term 
means, and why it was so important in the twentieth century.
At its simplest level, structuralism means that instead of studying things in 
themselves, as one might do under the influence of positivism, we study the 
relations 
(“structures”) between things
. The trick is that, while the things are visible to 
everyone, the relations are hidden. Structuralism thus invites us to discover the secret 
logics that lie somewhere beneath the surface of cultural products. In retrospect, it offers 
the same appeal as did Marx when discovering the relations of production at the base of 
the way societies work, or Freud revealing the principles of the unconscious mind. For 
most structuralists of the first half of the twentieth century, the structures are really 
there, within our languages and cultures; structures do not come from the subjectivity of 
the individual researcher. Structuralism invites us to reveal objective verifiable truths, 
reachable through patient discovery procedures. It offers a 
scientific approach to 
culture
(as in Russian Formalism). That was and remains a very appealing and 
powerful invitation, extended to anyone in search of knowledge.
Examples of these underlying structures can be found in many of the approaches 
that see languages as “world views.” One instance would be 
Saussure
’s example of the 
way English 
sheep
and French 
mouton
enter into different structures within their 
language systems. We have seen how this idea initially created problems for the 
equivalence paradigm, which had to argue that translation was nevertheless somehow 
possible. For the descriptive paradigm, however, structuralism was something to learn 
from, not to oppose. Rather than ask if 
sheep
could really translate 
mouton
, the initial 
task in this paradigm was to describe the way historical translators effectively resolved 
the problem.
Structuralism enters the descriptive story in much the same suitcases as Russian 
Formalism, and more particularly through the Prague 
Cercle
(which was indeed in 
touch with the legacy of Saussure). As we have mentioned above, the