“The notion that one must know history in order to understand the present has a certain justification when applied to the history of events, but not for the structural history of society. Rather, the opposite is the case: to examine the *constitution* of a particular social and economic structure, one has to be already familiar with the *completed* structure. Only then will one know what to look for in history.”

“The incompatibility here [between some anthropologies] rests with basic attitudes toward cultural others, which in turn rests on fundamentally different understandings of history. The one sees the Other as different and *separate,* a product of its own history and carrying its own hitoricity...The second sees the Other as different but *connected,* a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of "our" history and "their" history is impossible. In this view, there are no cultures-outside-of-history to be reconstructed, no culture without history, no culture or society "with its own structure and history" to which world-historical forces arrive.”

“The mature brain is a time capsule. History resides in its structure.”

“Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well, things happening one after another.”

“These men seem not to know that poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite.”

“The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.”