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Structuralism was first and foremost a method of analysis that dominated French intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not a movement as such but rather a label for a mode of thinking and analysis common to a wide range of disciplines, from mathematics to literary criticism. Structuralism was seen to be applicable to all human social phenomena. The disparate collection of thinkers who are now placed, frequently incorrectly, under the rubric Structuralism do not form a coherent group. These often include the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980); the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982); the literary theorists Roland Barthes (1915-80), Tzvetan Todorov (1939-) and Gérard Genette (1930-); the social theorist Michel Foucault (1926-84); the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-90); and, of course, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The sources of Structuralism were very eclectic and its influence wide ranging, but it has now inextricably come to be associated with the work of a single figure, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss's structural methodology derives from Saussure's foundational distinction between langue and parole (see p. 37) or the distinction between a given system, such as language, and the individual expression or manifestation of that system, as in an individual's speech. Structuralists were not concerned with the meaning of individual signs but with describing the organization of the overall sign-system or 'structure'. Linguistics provided the model for this form of analysis, although the main objects of study for Structuralism were very often non-verbal sign systems; for example, Roland Barthes' study of fashion (1985 [1967]), or Lévi-Strauss's own analysis of kinship systems (1969 [1949]) and food preparation (1966). The basic premise of Structuralism was that all social activity constitutes a language insofar as it involves sign systems with their own intrinsic rules and grammar. Thus, we understand individual acts not in their own right but against a background of social relations from which they derive their meaning.