I came to anthropology through my early fascination with modern Greece, rather than the other way round. The route was ethnographic and experiential; theory, though useful, was a means to an end. As a student, I nevertheless also felt the heady lures of theoretical formalism. Symbolic opposition pitted its claims of rigor and precision against the very different intellectual ascetism of strictly empirical approaches and considerations. But here lay a huge irony, one that I only slowly began to perceive: the very tension between empirical description and structured formalism was itself both a symbolic form and a pragmatic experience.

It gradually became apparent to me that, despite their alluring neatness, structuralist techniques were in practice the expressive paraphernalia of a symbolism that we shared with the people we studied. They were not so much misguided, as the fashionable overreaction against their use would have it, as grimly embedded in the objectivism that allowed Us to study Them. The fact that this was a symbolic opposition in its own right was ignored, or deemed irrelevant. After all, since structuralism (like its many predecessors) made claims to global explanatory capacities, it was obvious that we could, if we wanted, study ourselves. But this was usually regarded as trivial at best, pure narcissism in the less generous view; “reflexivity” - a very different concept - was not yet part of the day-to-day vocabulary.