Structural Anthropology - CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS

I n a r e c e n t s t u d y , Jean Pouillon wrote a sentence w hich, w ith his permission, I shall cite at the beginning of this work, since it corresponds perfectly to all that I hoped to accomplish in the scientific realm, though often doubtful of having been successful: “ Lévi-Strauss is certainly not the first nor the only one to have emphasized the structural character of social phenomena, but his originality consists in taking that character seriously and in serenely deriving all the consequences from it.” * M y hopes would be fulfilled if this book could induce other readers to share this judgment. One will find here a collection of seventeen of some one hundred papers written during the past thirty years. A few have been lost; others can profitably remain in oblivion. Among those which seemed to me less unworthy of survival, I have made a choice, rejecting works of purely ethnographic and descriptive character, as • Jean Pouillon, “L ’Oeuvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Les Temps Modernes, X II (1956), 158.