truepenny | today's trivia

One component of the origin for Le Guin's Ekumen:

My dissertation reading at the moment is Victor Turner's From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), and I'm bopping along watching him argue with other theories of symbolism (he doesn't care much for the semioticians), and hit this phrase:

... an honorable tradition of their predecessors, such as Durkheim and the Annee Sociologique school, and Kroeber, Redfield, and their successors, such as Professor Singer, who have examined cultural sub-systems in oikumenes (literally "inhabited worlds," used by Kroeber to indicate civilizational complexes, such as Christendom, Islam, Indic, and Chinese civilization, etc.) and Great Traditions.
(Turner 23-4)

Kroeber, of course, is what the K. in Ursula K. Le Guin stands for, and this Kroeber is her father, the noted anthropologist Theodore Kroeber. And oikumenes (from oikos, "house," the same root that gives us "economics") is etymologically the parent of Ekumen.

This almost makes it worthwhile to be reading performance theory at quarter after seven in the morning.