ABSTRACT
It is perhaps not surprising that of all the human sciences it is anthropology that has been most concerned with the opposition between nature and culture; or that, within anthropology, that the opposition has most frequently been associated with the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss. For Levi-Strauss has, in a sense, made the opposition his own. And while he has at times sought to distance himself from it, to undermine it, he has been unable completely to dispense with it, and the opposition remains a central thread in his work. Jacques Derrida has pointed to this ambivalence in Levi-Strauss' writings towards the opposition, suggesting that it is an inevitable consequence of employing a set of concepts derived from a system of metaphysics that one is attempting to criticize.
