ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a language inspired by mathematics to model the relationality present in the object. It focuses on the aspect of art as action and the generative capacity of given object – as a concretisation of code – to drive forward the stylistic virtuosity of objects in their distributed sets. The chapter explores the difference between Melanesian and Amerindian ideas of transformation and their articulation via objects, and expands the framework from the artefactual domain out to include the society as an art-like phenomenon within this model. Levi-Strauss brought into anthropology methods that are rigorous without being quantitative. Those methods are classically found in mathematics, specifically in the study of topology in which the structural stability of form and a formulaic understanding of the concept of relation is foregrounded. The idea of the counterpart of the visible world in another invisible one underpins the understanding of conception, pregnancy, and birth in ways that foregrounds the mediatory role of design.
