The French anthropologist, invoked once but structurally: near the close of the twentieth session Cameron reaches for an essay of Lévi-Strauss's (circa 1949–50, collected in Structural Anthropology) to name the shape of the series itself. Lévi-Strauss distinguishes the historian — who takes the extrinsic facts and gives them their intrinsic meaning — from the anthropologist, who takes the particular and gives it its universal meaning. Cameron maps the pair onto the dialogue: Bob is the historian reading Trump's intrinsic message, Cameron the anthropologist placing each particular "on the spectrum of possibilities." New to it — start with dialogue 20, the only session it appears in.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the methodological warrant for the whole dialogue — his historian-versus-anthropologist split lets Cameron name what he and Bob are each doing to the Trump material
Cameron borrows Lévi-Strauss's division of intellectual labor to license the series' two-handed method — one reader supplying intrinsic meaning, the other universal placement.
"But what Lévi-Strauss does is he differentiates between the task of the historian and the task of the anthropologist."
Cameron names the anthropologist's task — taking the particular and giving it its universal, "HCE" meaning along the spectrum of potentialities — as the operation he performs, in contrast to Bob the historian.
"Lévi-Strauss calls the anthropological view, and that is to take the particular, that is to say the extrinsic thing, and to give it its universal meaning."
Connections
The historian/anthropologist division becomes the model for the two-handed dialogue — Bob the historian, Cameron the anthropologist.