But of greater relevance was structuralism’s immediate accessibility to intellectuals and non-specialists. As explicated by Lévi-Strauss’s admirers in cognate disciplines, structuralism was not even a representational theory: the social codes, or ‘signs’, that it described related not to any particular people or places or events but merely to other signs, in a closed system. It was thus not subject to empirical testing or disproof—there was no sense in which structuralism could ever be demonstrated to be wrong—and the iconoclastic ambition of its assertions, allied to this impermeability to
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