In Show Your Work, his terrific book on online presence,  Austin Kleon suggests, among many many other things, that a blogger might write about something from his or her “Cabinet of Curiosities” every once in a while.

I want to do a CofC entry every Monday if I can (because I won’t yet have much to say about my work for the week but I probably will have yet another curiosity to unfold).  So here goes CofC #1

I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss for reasons having to do with 7 Hard Problems.  He is a very important “structuralist” thinker from the mid-20th century, and structuralism was very important in forming my views.  Louis Althusser, whom I’ll be writing more about this week, was also a structuralist, although, as he would point out, a “materialist” one instead of an “idealist” one like Levi-Strauss.

What’s the difference between a materialist and an idealist, you say?  Materialists believe that objective reality is more important than our minds.  Idealists believe that our minds are more important than objective reality.  Extreme idealists believe that external reality is a figment of our imaginations.

Levi-Strauss wasn’t that bad, but he did believe that he could figure out universal laws of thought.  And his scheme for doing so was to investigate the myths of “primitive” peoples, mostly from South America (where he had done fieldwork as an anthropologist).

What I’m doing is slogging through “The Raw and the Cooked”, a Levi-Strauss production containing things like this (his opening sentence):

The aim of this book is to show how empirical categories — such as the categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc., which can only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular culture — can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions.

Aside from soliciting your sympathy for what a tough job I have, I’m pointing this out because of this grand objective: to illuminate universal laws of thought.

Another Levi-Strauss work, “Tristes Tropiques” (shown above) is much more accessible, and is essentially like Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle”, an aid to understanding the man and his quest behind the work.

Could you live a long and happy life without reading either of these Levi-Strauss books?  For sure.

But hopefully I’ve aroused your curiosity enough to go to the Levi-Strauss Wikipedia page and have a gander.

(BTW, not certain if he has any connection to the Levi Strauss of jeans fame whom we know a bit better…)