a method or approach used in anthropology, literary criticism, etc that seeks to analyse data in terms of the significance of underlying relationships and patterns of organization
Structuralism proposed that the products of the human mind (stories, myths, societies, for example) were the effect of structures that escaped our awareness. However diverse their surfaces, artefacts and even whole cultures were all ultimately reducible to a single structure, commonly understood as a binary opposition between antithetical values. In the 1960s structuralism was largely superseded by poststructuralism — Professor Catherine Belsey
structuralist noun and adj