Reflection: The Structures You Swim In

Prompts to consider

• Lévi-Strauss argues that binary oppositions organize human thought across all cultures. Try to catch yourself using binary oppositions in your thinking today: natural/artificial, serious/trivial, authentic/fake, sophisticated/simple, traditional/modern. For each one you notice: is this opposition a discovery about how the world is, or a way of organizing experience that could be otherwise? What alternative ways of carving up the same territory might exist? And what does the opposition do in your life, what kind of thinking or behavior does it enable or disable?
• The bricoleur builds with what is to hand, producing something whose structure is partly determined by the properties of the available materials. Think about your own intellectual and creative development. How much of your current thinking is the work of a bricoleur, built from the specific materials you happened to encounter, in the order you encountered them? And how much have you been an engineer, starting from abstract principles and finding materials to match? What would it mean to be more deliberately bricoleurish in your thinking?
• Lévi-Strauss argues that myths mediate contradictions: they do not solve fundamental contradictions in human experience but provide narrative and structural means of holding both poles in tension. Think of a fundamental tension or contradiction in your own life or your culture that you have never resolved but somehow continue to live with. What are the personal myths, stories, or frameworks you use to hold that contradiction without it tearing you apart? Are they doing the same kind of work Lévi-Strauss describes? And would it be better to resolve the contradiction, or is living with mediated tension itself a form of wisdom?