FOR THE PAST DECADE and a half, Claude Lévi-
Strauss has been the most influential anthropological theorist in
France. He has attracted a large following in Europe and evoked
wide interest in the United States. Standing in the mainstream of
the French sociological school, he has carried Durkheim's and
Mauss's theories to a totally new level of conceptualization.

This book, first published in France in 1958, is a collection of
papers, written between 1944 and 1957, which constitute what
Lévi-Strauss regards as his most representative work. More than
any of his other writings, Structural Anthropology offers a com-
prehensive view of Lévi-Strauss's theories.

Each of these papers is a self-contained whole in which he ap-
plies the structural method to particular problems and data. Lévi
Strauss is primarily concerned with universals, that is, basic social
and mental processes of which cultural institutions are the concrete
external projections or manifestations. Anthropology should be a

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