Antiquitopia

Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics (really a book that is a conflation of his students' notes of his lecture) spawned the movement we call "structuralism" (and, therefore, also "post-structuralism") that has been so influential in linguistics, anthropology, mythology, etc., has an interesting one-liner when talking about the fraught, ambiguous, and ultimately arbitrary relationship between language and writing: Writing is not a garment, but a disguise. His point is that often, particularly in French, a written word has absolutely no relationship to its phonetic representations--his example is the french oiseau ("bird") that does not have a single letter that corresponds to its pronunciation [wazo]. But I wonder if we can take this further a bit, and say that not just writing, but language is not a garment, but a disguise. By altering one's speech, one alters one's identity, others' perspective of you--rightly or w...

The very famous and highly influential anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, has just died at the ripe age of 100, just a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. Frankly, I had not realized that he had been still alive all this time. The AP has his obituary: November 3, 2009 French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at 100 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:22 p.m. ET PARIS (AP) -- Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100. The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing the concept of structuralism -- concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system. During ...