Post Episode Conversations

How fitting and compelling, then – on a show available to anyone on the planet with an Internet connection – were Ceridwen’s comments at 38:40 where she spoke about the interconnectedness of all people on the planet, the undeniable rise of globalization – and yet, at the same time, our alienation from “everything,” by which I took her to mean, perhaps incorrectly, at least the roots, identities, and functions of our own cultures, never mind, for the moment, other peoples’.
I may not know much about anthropology but I know my Lévi-Strauss (well, sort of), and her comments brought to mind one of the things he wrote, presciently in 1978, which speaks to the loss of our individuality in modern industrial society, that “[w]e are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality." [Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture]