Patricia Marx 1, Claude Levi-Strauss 0
For a week early in my freshman year at Northwestern, 11 years ago, Claude Levi-Strauss was the bane of my existence. The class was art, "Introduction to Visual Culture," and I struggled. While I couldn't fully grasp the concept of negative space, I knew I was in it. And Claude? At one in the class, we watched an early film of Haitian voodoo dance. The film involved Levi-Strauss in some way. Whether he had made the film, done the research or danced his jeans off, I never understood.
Upon further review, Levi-Strauss > Katherine Dunham > Maya Deren.
But even still, after reading Patricia Marx's holiday shopping round-up in a recent New Yorker, the first thing I did was Google her mention of Squirrel Underpants. The second thing was post her take on mini gifts:
Claude Levi-Strauss believed that the appeal of a miniature has to do with its being a scaled-down replica, and therefore easier to grasp than the big, messy totality:
To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively diminished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative tranposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance
is part of what Levi-Strauss wrote, proving that his case applies to paragraphs, too.
Ha! Take that, Levi-Strauss. Shopping vs. anthropology takedown!
