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least on the face of it. The intervening essays, however, constitute an attempt to elucidate some of the connections between them. "On Cognized Models" is centrally concerned with the relationship between the "meaningful," which is culturally constructed, and the "lawful," which is naturally constituted. "Adaptive Structure and Its Disorders" represents an attempt to elucidate structural features of systems in which meaningful and material processes are ordered, to discuss the relationship of those structural features to adaptation, and to argue that maladaptation can be regarded as structural anomaly, or disorderings of such structures. The last essay, "Sanctity and Lies in Evolution," brings themes developed in "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual" to bear upon questions of adaptation and evolution raised earlier in the volume. Although the collection as a whole moves in a certain direction and although this movement is roughly chronological, it should be clear that I have not, in developing the interests expressed in the later essays, disavowed the concerns of the earlier ones. In my view the incapacities of the ecological approach developed in the first and second essays are not so much a product of flaws as of limitations- There is, simply, a great deal that cannot be explained or interpreted by reference to ecological principles. It was, in fact, a profound sense of the inability of any ecological formulation to account for the meanings inherent in ritual's structure that led me to the mode of formal analysis that operates in "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual." But limitations, after all, are not themselves errors nor do they produce errors unless they are ignored or overridden, and to say that an approach is limited is not to distinguish it from any other systematic attempt to enlarge understanding, except in particulars. If no particular form of interpretation or explanation can provide all of the understanding we may hope for, and if the limitations of each are different, we must consider the possibility that relationships between or among at least some differing modes are complementary rather than alternative or competitive This issue is approached in the last sections of "Ecology, Adaptation, and the Ills of Functionalism."

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To acknowledge all those who have influenced these essays or who have in one way or another made it possible for me to write them would include most of the people to whom I have ever spoken. Moreover, to express gratitude to each of those from whom I have learned things reflected in the pages that follow might also seem to inflate claims of significance for what I take to be a modest and tentative work. My appreciation to those from whom I have learned is no less deep and real for remaining general in its expression. It is proper, however, to thank the institutions that have supported

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