What is Structuralism?

Structuralism, the study of consciousness. It is a concept of how the human mind see things and allocated them into different categories, just like when a person thinks what is right and what is wrong, or what is this, and what is not that. However, different people have different ideas on categorizing things.


There is one thing that sets the model of Structuralism, that is the binary opposition. Binary opposition is a pair of opposites. For example, black and white, tall and short. But what makes a tall person 'tall'? must a tall person has the height of a NBA player? and is having a height of a dwarf or midget considered short?


Different country have different views because of their culture is different. A tall person in Malaysia would be categorized as a average height person in America because of our gene differences.

Few days ago I stumbled upon an interesting option when registering something on www.deviantart.com. When selecting the sex/gender. Like most websites it only gives us two options, which is male and female, because male is the opposite of female, and vice versa.


However, the option here lets us choose male, female, and other. Is something in between female and male. This would be very surprising if it was few decades ago. But due to the advancement in technology and medical field, there are now transexuals. They fall in the grey zone of binary opposition as they are not completely male and female, but they are something in between.