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LEVI-STRAUSS_OPPOSITION_PARALLEL

                                             December 6, 2021

  Kawame Anthony Appiah,
  from "The Key to All Myths",           LEVI-STRAUSS
  on Claude Lévi-Strauss:





   "Lévi-Strauss had a gift for finding symmetries,
   homologies, and inversions wherever he looked."




    "Relations of substitution were dubbed 'paradigmatic';
    those of adjacency 'syntagmatic.'"

    "This model could be extended into other domains.
    Cap, bonnet, helmet, boater, trilby: their
    relation to one another is paradigmatic, while
    their relation to your head is syntagmatic."



   In Lévi-Strauss's 1964 work _The Raw and the Cooked_:

     "His analyses here would be the basis of an
     equilateral triangle, soon a staple of textbooks ... "


                Raw

                 .
                . .
               .   .
              .     .
             .       .
            . . . . . .

        Cooked        Rotten


     "Nature is to culture as raw is to cooked.
      Animals eat their food raw and are afraid of fire.
      Rotting is how nature transforms food: cooking
      is how culture transforms food."




      "Lévi-Strauss, proceeding with his 'logico-mathematical
      analysis,' presented the formula in which 'every myth
      (considered as the aggregate of all its variants)
      corresponds," namely

         F (a):F (b) ~= F (b):F   (y)
          s     y        s     a-1

      The equivalence, he said, signified that any term can be
      replaced by its opposite *a* with *a-1*; and that the
      'function value' and the 'term value' can be inverted."


               Subtracting one from a subscript
               to get it's "opposite" strikes me
               as very peculiar.

                  But then the different functions
                  with subscripts that appear as         This really does look
                  arguments for other functions...       like "cargo-cult"
                  that's kind-of baffling, too.          behavior-- aping the
                                                         forms of mathematics...
               There's no summation symbol in
               there, so if there's an "aggregate"
               here, I have trouble seeing where.





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