ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author demonstrates his proximity to a certain Structuralist way of thinking about systems—social, natural, and mathematical—that is no longer "fashionable" and, accordingly, has been exposed to a barrage of criticism. He shows that Bourdieu's Structuralist anthropology is far less rigid and deterministic than is usually supposed. Bourdieu is a materialist who has failed to take into account the fundamental hermeneutic insight that even the most material aspects of social life are inherently meaningful, rendered possible only by wider cultural understandings. Bourdieu sees the task of sociology as an attempt to uncover the structures of social world and the underlying mechanisms that ensure their reproduction and/or transformation. Instead, Omar Lizardo traces Bourdieu's fundamental concepts of habitus and the doxic back to their sources in Piaget's version of genetic structuralism. Accordingly, a reflexive sociology must reject both a one-sided mechanical structuralism and a teleological individuali.
