An intellectual approach very common to STEM people, which I'll caricature as thinking "you can't go wrong with a node-and-arrow diagram." It's so pervasive it's hard to think there's any *other* way to think.
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an example
Lévi-Strauss and Kinship gives a typical example of structuralist analysis, complete with a neat diagram.
a definition
Claude Lévi-Strauss credited linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy with writing down the four basic moves of structuralist analysis:
1. Conscious behavior (such as producing sentences) is supported by (or driven by) unconscious structures. More important than actually studying a language’s grammar is studying the underlying structures that control which grammatical rules you absolutely *will* find in a language, which rules *might* be found, and which definitely *won’t* be found.
2. What matters is relationships between entities, not properties of the entities themselves. The father’s character doesn’t matter in Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship; what matters is his relationship to his wife and his son.
3. The purpose of the work is to tease out the underlying structure. That’s a little circular: “structuralism is about structure.” So I’ll say what it means is that you should describe all the relevant relationships *and* how the relationships relate to each other. In the case of Lévi-Strauss, that means you discover rules of the form “if these two lines are labeled with a + sign, these other two lines have to be labeled with a - sign.” He was looking at relationships between relationships.
4. The theory must explain *multiple* real-world examples. Trobriand culture is matrilineal, and Tonga culture is patrilineal; Lévi-Strauss’s rules work for both.
Another attitude of structuralism that I think is worth calling out I’ll put crudely as “causality stops at the structure.” Lévi-Strauss is content to say if the father’s relationship to the son is cold, the relationship between the son and the matrilineal uncle must be warm. But why? *Why* do they have to be opposite? Why does the mother’s brother count and not the father’s brother? These questions are out of scope.