[lit-ideas] Re: New Program in Psychoanalysis and Culture

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 1:24 AM, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> JW:
>
>> To make another metaphor, one that's intended as metaphor, not as
>> biologically determinative, maybe "Culture" (with a capital C) is like DNA.
>>
>
> Oh goody!!!  A metaphor fight!  Here's mine:  culture is a recipe for
> cooking-up a life.  "Cooking-up" is, of course a metaphor for dealing with
> the ingredients at hand.



Both DNA and cooking are excellent metaphors. Combined they remind me of
Claude Levi-Strauss's equation of culture and cooking in The Raw and the
Cooked, which explores the analogy the raw is to the cooked as nature is to
culture in the permutations and combinations that appear in North and South
American Indian mythology.

I once wrote a paper on offerings in Chinese religion that combined
Levi-Strauss' ideas with those of James Fernandes, who suggest in Persuasions
and Performances that culture be conceived as an n-dimensional space in
which metaphors push pronouns around. My thought was that raw versus cooked
and the other binary oppositions explored by Levi Strauss in the Mythologiques,
of which The Raw and the Cooked is only the first volume defined the space
of possibilities we call Culture with a capital "C" and cultures emerge
where groups of individuals find themselves located at similar locations in
the space.

This turned out to be an effective framework for exploring variations in
Chinese offerings, where differences like raw versus cooked, whole versus
cut up, animal versus vegetable, are associated with the different types of
spirits to whom offerings are made.

Please pardon the self-indulgence of these observations; John, Mike,
together you made this aging anthropologist's day.

John

-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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