A few more notes on culture

Structuralism
It's why I can't fly and have no free will.

Why I can't fly
Physics.

Why I have no free will
Because if I did, I'd fly. And maybe choose to be invisible.
Or, to put it another way, if men had free will, there'd be no need for Viagra.

So what?
Structural constraints are real and meaningful. Structure is heuristically convenient and fruitful in examining trends.

Not every map needs to be the size of the area it describes. Why? We are essentially and intensely narrative creatures; one of our fundamental epistemological approaches is to narrate the data we encounter. So the question is not, "Which narrative is true?" but, "Which narrative is useful?" Is a complete ethnography of "lived individual culture" nothing more than a life-size map? If so, is it a goal worth fighting for? Or can we accept that our ability to navigate does not depend on the map's depiction of individual features but its accuracy as a symbolic, structural representation of a shared and real space?

It should concern us that the emphasis of scholarship on "lived individual culture" or experience mirrors the economics/marketing trend of individually targeted advertising and the increasing production of goods and services consciously aimed at micro-masses/individuals. To jump to a conclusion that the Academy and the Market are necessarily in conscious collusion is probably to give the Academy too much credit, but is also to engage in a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (That one's for you, Dad.) In other words, it's to apply a logic of cause-effect to something that may simply be coincidence. (So's that.)