“When Claude Lévi-Strauss was a child, his father, Raymond Lévi-Strauss, a portraitist and genre painter whose works were exhibited in the Salons de Paris in the early part of the twentieth century, gave his son a Japanese etching. The young boy used it to adorn the bottom of a box. Later, when he was old enough to be given pocket-money, he would spend it on miniature items of furniture bought from a Parisian shop called The Pagoda. Little by little, he assembled, in his box, a miniature Japanese house.”
– Boris Weisman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology, and Aesthetics
“…the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions.”
– Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
– Robert Smithson, interview, 1969
Otohime 