LEVI-STRAUSS THE STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST (1908-) "What will happen when our own civilization has transformed all other living civilizations into its own image?"

Lévi-Strauss asks us to imagine the response to the news that an unexplored planet would be within reach of Earth, within reach of our understanding:

"Such is how I view myself, a traveller, an archaeologist of space, trying in vain to restore the exotic".

("Tristes Tropiques" 44)

MAJOR WORKS

• "Elementary Structures of Kinship" (1949) - a study of a traditional anthropological subject undertaken in an untraditional manner. Here, he used a linguistic approach and includes an algebraic analysis of marriage patterns by André Weil.

• "Tristes Tropiques" - a travelogue memoir of his time in Brazil, where he undertook his only piece of field work.

• "Anthropologie Structurale" (1958) - an outline of his structural approach to anthropology (a rejection of the functional approach to the subject).

• "La Pensée Sauvage" (1962) - an analysis of the mentality of what he terms "cold societies" which had remained relatively unaffected by the western obsession with progress.

• "Mythologiques" (1964-72) - a four volume exploration of myths of a variety of cultures from which he tried to derive a common framework and meaningful generalisations without resorting to the "comparativist mania".