Scrutinizes the questions of conceptualization, method and history in the fields of kinship, social anthropology and structuralism. It puts forward a radical revision of the conventional approaches and criteria.

This volume is concerned with the fundamental topics of social anthropology: kinship & marriage, approached from a variety of viewpoints. The wide range of subjects covered includes: incest, epistemology, linguistics, prescriptive alliance & methodology.

Masks are found world-wide in connection with seasonal festivals, rites of passage, and curative ceremonies. They provide a means of investigating the paradoxical problems that appearances pose in the experience of transitional states. In this far-reaching work, A. David Napier studies mask iconography and the role played by masks in the realization of change. The masks of preclassical Greecein particular those of the Satyr and the Gorgonprovide his starting point. A comparison of Greek to Eastern and especially Indian models follows, and the book concludes with an examination of the...

Professor Levi-Strauss's first major work, Les Structures elementaires de la Parente, has acquired a classic reputation since its original publication in 1949; and it has become the constant focus of academic debate about central theoretical concerns in social anthropology. It is, however, a long and difficult book for many students to read in French, and its arguments have consequently become known, even among professional anthropologists, largely through critical analysis. It was republished in a revised French edition in 1967 with a new foreword by the author, and it is this text...

-Levi-Strauss continues his assault on the myth of the primitice as savage by turning to the phenomena of totemism an totoemix classification ... to show, contrary to this myth, that primitive thought rests upon a rich and complex conceptual structure.- - Commentary

BY G. W. LOCHER Some years ago, in a discussion of the modern concept of structure, Levi-Strauss contended that the extraordinarily widespread employment of the term "structure" since 1930 reflected a rediscovery of the concept and the term rather than the continuation of a prior usage. This assertion may be correct in general, but it does not apply to the N ether lands, at least nOlI: so far as the concept of structure is concerned. The transmission of the concept in that country can in fact be quite easily traced. It began in 1917 with the publication by van Ossenbruggen of a study of the...

Hans Scharer was born at Wadenswil (near Zurich), Switzerland, in 1904. After his school years, he was trained for (Protestant) mis sionary work at the Missionshaus in BiHe. For seven years, 1932-1939, he lived among the Ngaju in southern Borneo; first with the Ngaju speaking people of the Katingan river area, later, for a shorter period. with those living along the Barito. He was granted European leave in 1939, and spent the years 1939-1944 studying Ethnology (as it then was called) under Professor J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong at Leiden University. He went home to Switzerland in 1944, but...

This volume scrutinizes the questions of conceptualization, method and history in the fields of kinship, social anthropology and structuralism. It puts forward a radical revision of the conventional approaches and criteria. Exploring analysis and method in the disparity between relative age and kinship categories as means of social classification, the book makes theoretical readjustments, largely inspired by the precepts of Wittgenstein.
Originally published in 1971.