The “Paris School” and the “Structuralist Invasion” in North America

Abstract

This essay offers some broader contextualization on the role of “structuralism” in North America and its relationship to the works of scholars who have been broadly classified under the exonym “Paris School” including Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Nicole Loraux. As this essay makes clear, these scholars were doing far more than merely applying “structuralism” as a particularly fashionable intellectual method, which can now be dismissed. Rather, they were engaged, each in their own way, with the very problem of the relationship between meaning and history, a problem that is as pertinent today as it was when structuralism was first on the rise.

Keywords

• structuralism
• post-structuralism
• historical anthropology
• historicity
• diachrony
• anachrony