Mothers, Wombs and Serpents: Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s Female-Centric Theory of the Origins of Language
I’ve written a lot on this blog about the South Vietnamese philosopher Lương Kim Định. One thing I like about Kim Định is that he was aware of cutting-edge scholarship in the West in fields like structural anthropology. What is problematic about Kim Định is that he did not actually follow the ideas or purpose of structural anthropology in his writings.
Structural anthropology, as developed by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, was supposed to be a way to examine all of the societies of the world together. Lévi-Strauss believed that each society had an underlying structure that was largely similar to the underlying structures of other societies, and that we could identify these structures and then examine them together so that we could gain a better understanding of human societies in general.