Structuralism

French social theorists working in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and (later) psychoanalysis throughout the early to mid-20th century theorized that language, culture, and the psyche were guided by a set of unseen underlying societal structures. Thus, structuralism, as a philosophy and methodology, was guided by an interest in uncovering the logic of those structures. By nature of their theories of the world, structuralists are antihumanistic and do not believe that human agency exists outside of broader structures such as capitalism. Instead, structuralism suggests that the social (and spatial) world is mediated by structures that manifest themselves in particular events “out there” in the world (e.g., capitalism structures relations between workers and factory owners).

Early work in the area of structural linguistics, particularly through the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, suggested that social scientists should focus on the interrelationships between words rather than treating each word or phrase as an independent object. In such a conceptualization, it is necessary to investigate the relationships between signs and symbols as signifying larger social structures, such as capitalism, patriarchy, and racism, through the emergence of hierarchized binaries of words and objects such as entrepreneur and worker, men and women, and white and black. This suggests not only that social scientists should be interested in the signs present in everyday life (e.g., magazine representations, the built environment) but also that it is necessary to interrogate the ideological presuppositions that mediate those signs and the relationships between signifiers (e.g., words, images) and the signified (e.g., abstract mental constructs). In so doing, it is possible to construct a set of generalizable laws about how those ideologies operate in structuring everyday social interactions and relations.

Structuralism first entered geography through the work of Marxist geographers and as part of a larger critique of spatial science that began to emerge during the 1970s. This critique included the work of humanistic geographers who were interested in challenging spatial science's limited understanding of human experience. Marxist geographers, working through structuralism, rejected this naive reading of human agency and instead focused their attention on unpacking the depths of the spatial economy or the social landscape. The work of David Harvey and Manuel Castells used differing readings of structuralism in their analysis of urbanization and cities more generally. Harvey argued that the structures of capitalism, and its contradictions, produced space and spatial relations in ways intended to maximize capitalist accumulation, whereas Castells drew from French Marxist Louis Althusser in suggesting that space and[Page 465] spatial relations were inherently social, that is, organized as part of particular modes of production. In both readings of structuralism, it is important to remember that structures are not natural phenomena; rather, they are made up of a complex of constitutive practices and events. Thus, the structures of capitalism are made up of the events of capitalist relations such as accumulation and tensions between capitalists and proletariats.

The import of structuralism, particularly structural Marxism, into geography provided an opportunity for geographers to further critique the empiricist project of spatial scientists. In that critique, some structuralist geographers suggested that ideology and language, and the organization of these social formations at different conjunctions of space–time, were critical components in the construction of the cultural landscape. This notion is epitomized in the work of Denis Cosgrove, whose interest in signs suggested important ways for geographers to study how the embeddedness of social formations in symbolic landscapes ensured that culture was reproduced in ways that benefited dominant ideologies (and social classes). Cosgrove's analysis tied into the work of other geographers interested in examining the role of symbols and language in the study of geographic landscapes. Indeed, it could be argued that these particular readings of structuralism in geography suggested alternative ways of conducting geographic studies and that this opened up the possibility that a plethora of images, such as landscape paintings, photography, and art, were legitimate areas of geographic inquiry, something in which feminist geographers became interested during the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, structuralist readings of the landscape suggest the important ways in which dominant ideologies function to naturalize power relations through the production of landscapes that hide as much as they reveal.

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