In my last post I talked about how categories get confused when you put salt-and-pepper shakers representing food items on a table in the midst of real food items: categories like real and fake, hard and soft, edible and inedible, etc. Yet another such category, one that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss thought was culture-defining, isContinue reading “Le cru et le cuit”
Tag Archives: Claude Levi-Strauss
Binaries as Scriptive Things
Before I head onwards towards a consideration of the novelty aspects of shaker sets as scriptive things, I think there’s one other aspect of salt-and-pepper sets generally that needs to be considered: their implications as a coupled pair. The question here is not just, why salt and pepper, but also, why salt and pepper together?Continue reading “Binaries as Scriptive Things”