Approaches to the study of personhood in the early Mycenaean era

Extract

In the brief space allotted for a comment, with respect to the theoretical discussion I will say only that I find the argument insufficiently developed and would rather that Voutsaki had paid closer attention to Dornan's useful critique of Bourdieu and Giddens and the uses to which their sociological theories have been put by archaeologists (Dornan 2002). As a proponent of adding moral philosophy to the archaeological arsenal of theory, Voutsaki might also have dwelt on Walzer's powerful argument about the interrelationship between ‘thin’ minimizing and ‘thick’ maximalizing moralities, since they disabuse us of the restraints of our local and universal ideologies and help us understand how individual actors and the groups of which they are a part are constrained by a plurality of moral decisions. My thoughts here, however, will focus on the case study, since that is the area of my own primary interest and expertise.