Across the world, babies call mother Mama. As children, they grow into Mama’s language, myths, thought, feeling, society. They grow in her house. Each of these takes place imperfectly. Each of these offers an exemplar for a structuralism that aspires, through the particular, to map the universal. At stake in these structuralisms are questions of development, ontology, and proliferation.

We are now inevitably poststructuralist, attentive to the weaknesses and limits of structural definition. "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does" and populist utopianism are respective victories of function and agency against structure. The filing cabinets documenting the grand theories of global universals now seem if not empty then uninteresting. Yet the questions that undergird structuralism remain essential building blocks for critical thought. What is a given system and its capacities? Which of their differences constitute differences in genre, and which differences in form? By what mechanisms do systems (appear to) sustain themselves? Why do polities, families, practices, stories, words so often rhyme across place and time?

Over seven sessions, we will explore how this terrain is navigated by key structuralist thinkers. Throughout, we will keep attention to the questions that follow the meeting points of agency, norm, capacity and function: about ritual, the contestation of power and the mediation of change.