Lévi-Strauss's Last Laugh—Encore, Encore: A Medley-essay in L'Entre-deux

For decades I devised commentaries on Lévi-Strauss attuned to the diverse arts his anthropology spans (Boon 1972, 1982, 1989, 1995). Prompted by polymath Kenneth Burke's "perspectives through incongruity," I also sidled so-called structuralism alongside alternative "isms" (Symbolism, Functionalism, Romanticism, etc.) and "anti-isms" (deconstruction, cultural interpretation, etc.)—(Boon 1973, 1982a, 1989, 1999). Lévi-Strauss once wove sympathetic recall of my angle on his corpus into "conversations" with Eribon (1988a, 1991b:181). The following piece, spiritedly belated, offers seriocomic reciprocation, with "increase." (Call it a return-gift, per Marcel Mauss). The interpretive aim remains: augmenting sensory registers of cross-cultural, trans-temporal meaning-and-not, arguably experienced as "embodied metaphor" (Lévi-Strauss 1981:658).