Mathematics and Narrative continued
A search for Ursula in this journal yields a story…
“The main character is a slave woman who discovers new patterns in the mosaics.”
Other such stories: Plato’s Meno and Changing Woman —
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“Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within — Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat |
Philosophical postscript—
“That Lévi-Strauss should have been able to transmute the romantic passion of Tristes Tropiques into the hypermodern intellectualism of La Pensée Sauvage is surely a startling achievement. But there remain the questions one cannot help but ask. Is this transmutation science or alchemy? Is the ‘very simple transformation’ which produced a general theory out of a personal disappointment real or a sleight of hand? Is it a genuine demolition of the walls which seem to separate mind from mind by showing that the walls are surface structures only, or is it an elaborately disguised evasion necessitated by a failure to breach them when they were directly encountered? Is Lévi-Strauss writing, as he seems to be claiming in the confident pages of La Pensée Sauvage, a prolegomenon to all future anthropology? Or is he, like some uprooted neolithic intelligence cast away on a reservation, shuffling the debris of old traditions in a vain attempt to revivify a primitive faith whose moral beauty is still apparent but from which both relevance and credibility have long since departed?”
— Clifford Geertz, conclusion of “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss“