Structuralism versus comparative functionalism; some comments

Some notes on Structuralism

The French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) started his exploration of the human mind because during his work he discovered that there were certain cases that could not be explained somatically. In order to understand psychiatrist patients, it was not enough to understand the human body, but also the condition in general. As that other doctor, Freud, had encountered the ...

Recent Trends in Archaeological Theory: Some Comments

 This paper selectively reviews some recent themes in archaeological theory:  a philosophical pragmatism, a turn to materiality, and understanding the past in the context of the present.  It concludes with some reflective comments on the author’s Archaeological Theory:  An Introduction, in advance of the third revised edition.

Structuralism, Reloaded

The attempt to institute a viable structuralist explanatory project in the social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology) has been beset, since its inception, with what some have considered to be insurmountable difficulties. Four such roadblocks deserve mention. 1) The first, I refer to as Piaget’s question [Piaget 1970, 113]: “how do [social] forms acquire structural organization?”...

Biogenetic Structuralism

Structuralism is a movement within the sciences of man holding that the order which we are able to observe in the world is isomorphic with the order that obtains in the observing mind. The correspondences that exist between world and mind are not generally apparent from inspection, but require scrutiny into the "deep structure" that underlies phenomena, a concept first propounded by Ferdinand D...

Some Comments on Qis3