On the canonical formula of C. Levi-Strauss
Abstract
The anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss has formulated a theory of the structure of myths using a formalism borrowed from mathematics, which has been difficult to interpret, and is somewhat controversial. Nevertheless, LeviStrauss's old school chum Andre Weil took his work seriously, and in this note I propose an interpretation of LeviStrauss's `canonical formula' in terms of an anti-automorphism of the quaternion group of order eight.
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