The social sciences have contributed in various ways to the analysis of culture. We already mentioned psychology and anthropology, but the development of new disciplines of economics and sociology in the early twentieth century also left their mark on the concept of cultures. The emergence of the working class and a new social awareness in society in which the establishment no longer reigned supreme made researchers aware of the question of whether culture can be studied from the angle of the position of the (political) elite in relation to a multi-layered society. Workers, artisans, statesmen, and intellectuals, women, and social outcasts: all were part of economic business cycles, political discord, and religious changes. Seen in this way, the position of the individual has always been caught up in some kind of social network. When factory workers did not organise themselves into an active labour movement (something Marx had predicted), there had to be a social explanation for this.

Some cultural specialists considered this emphasis on utilitarianism — that is, the focus on the utility and practical materialism of social change — to be limited. Did people seek nothing more in life than wealth, power, and status? It turned out that seemingly fixed social categories — such as artisans, merchants, women, and slaves — varied depending on the place and time period. In short, a purely social explanation for changes in culture, with a strict focus on material evidence, gradually became less accepted. Since the 1980s, the research question has conclusively shifted to culture, and numerous studies have been conducted on symbols, rituals, language, and social practices. This paradigm shift, in which the status of language served as a starting point, made frequent use of anthropology. Because of the emphasis on language, this movement in the 1980s has also been called the linguistic turn, with strong roots in structuralism and post-structuralism (or ‘postmodernism’), for by its very nature, language involves structure.

Structuralism

The first thing to mention about the word ‘structure’ is that it does not necessarily indicate an activity. You may not necessarily be engaged in structuralist activity when you study the structure of a building to see if it has been built solidly.