The current vogue for structuralism has been stimulated by a number of French thinkers who have begun to apply the methodology of structural linguistics to their various fields of study. Among these thinkers are the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the literary critic Roland Barthes, and the philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. The wide reception of Michel Foucoult's recent book, Les Mots et les Choses, has been responsible for raising this interest. The significance of structuralism is its aqpplicability as a methodology to a multitude of problems in the human sciences. Eliade's work presents a particular instance of the way in which structuralism may be applied to hermeneutic and philosophical problems.