Claude dit:
The greater our knowledge, the more obscure the overall scheme. The dimensions multiply, and the growth of axes of reference beyond a certain point paralyzes intuitive methods: it becomes impossible to visualize a system when its representation requires a continuum of more than three or four dimensions. But the day may come when all the available documentation on Australian tribes is transferred to punched cards and with the help of a computer their entire techno-economic, social and religious structures can be shown to be like a vast group of transformations.
The Savage Mind, p. 89
5 Comments
→
To which I say: Bah! Hrafbug!
The ‘punch card computing’ moments are among my favorite.
‘The old database’ as one of my linguistics instructors used to say. I wonder how far Lévi-Strauss took this project, and whether anyone has pursued it with MS Access or FileMaker Pro?
Guys, get your math straight. If L-S vision were brought to a computer near you, it wouldn’t look anything like HRAF or be easy to do in Access or Filemaker. What would it look like? Imagine a multidimensional manifold that reveals different aspects when rotated on one or more dimensions. For a sense of what this might look like, check out
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html
garrett lisi is so totally levi-strauss’s lovechild.