What’s in a Name

“The act of naming belongs to a continuum in which there is an imperceptible passage from the act of signifying to that of pointing.”

Why is a dog “Fido” but a bird “Peter”? In this brilliant short text, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows that the way we name animals reveals a hidden structure of thought. What looks trivial turns out to be a system: classification, metaphor, and how we place ourselves in the world, everything is at play.