Culture

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies

(This content has been aggregated from a source and author external to this site. Read up on the practice of linkblogging and my use of it here. Authors and publishers are welcome to contact me.)

January 13, 2010

In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”

As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Here are four pairs that, explicitly or implicitly, are important in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died a little over a week ago just shy of 101.

via Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies – NYTimes.com.

1 Tweet

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Leave a Comment

Additional comments powered by BackType