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Edited on Sun Jun-01-08 10:06 AM by HamdenRice
Now that would take a dissertation to explain, and these terms are so broad that in some contexts they have become meaningless.
But I was deeply influenced by structuralism/post-structuralism in anthropology and linguistics. One application in that area is that we are in a sense pre-programmed to see "binary oppositions" and express them in our culture even where they may not exist: black vs white, night vs day, male vs female, raw vs cooked, good vs evil and so on.
For example, there really is no such thing in our species as exclusive categories of "male and female" and yet it would be almost impossible to convince most people of that. By "no such thing" I mean that if we took a full football stadium of say 100,000 people and closed off all exits except two, and marked them "male" and "female" there is no single criteria by which we could sort every single person into "male" and "female": sexual preference (no, gays and lesbians); height, strength (no, some "women" are stronger/bigger than some "men"); sexual identity (no in a sample that big there would be at least a few trans people); genetalia (no, there would be at least a few hermaphrodites or people of ambiguous genetalia), and so on.
Even if you did genetic testing, at least some people in a sample that size would be XXY or XYY or XXX.
At this point, you might say that everyone who is not XX or XY with normal genetalia is basically a result of some mutation from the "norm"; but you can only conclude that they are mutations from the norm if you pre-assume the norm. That is how binary structural confines our thinking about things.
The same could be said of race (there is no genetic basis for the races, because there is genetic variation within races as well as between them).
It is our pre-existing "structural" "binary oppositions" that force us to put things in binary categories.
The question structuralism asks is: now that we know about structuralism, to what extent does our analytic power allow us to think beyond the structures we are predisposed to think within?
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