In this lucide guide to the often abstruse works of Claude Levi-Strauss, Edmund Leach synthesizes the thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest anthropologists and provides a thoughtful introduction to the theory and practice of structuralism. Leach organizes his work not by chronology but by theme, exploring three important topics in Levi-Strauss's work: human beings and their symbols, the structure of myth, and kinship theory. Written concisely and with great care and penetration, this brief book is both a fine introduction for the uninitiated reader of Levi-Strauss and a critical...

Designed to provoke controversy, the papers in this volume concentrate on two main themes: the study of myth and totemism. Starting with an English translation of La Geste d'Asdiwal, which is widely considered to be the most brilliant of all of Levi-Strauss's shorter expositions of his technique of myth analysis, the volume also contains criticism of this essay. The second part of the volume discusses how far Levi-Strauss's treatment of totemism as a system of category formation can be correlated with the facts that an ethnographer encounters in the field. First published in 1967.