»The schema of the canoe journey, then, makes it possible to carry out two operations simultaneously: one, which is logical in character, totalizes oppositions at various levels and yields a total product consisting of a system of terms which, being opposed to each other, forms a new opposition. The other, which is semantic in character, totalizes in analogous fashion spatial registers (vertical and horizontal), temporal registers (journey and calendar), sociological registers (celibacy and marriage, endogamy and exogamy, kinship and war) and anatomical registers (mutilations and explosions, openings and closings, physiological deficiencies) and yields a global product. But here we encounter a problem which must be solved ...«

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1968

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