ABSTRACT
Few anthropologists have acquired in their life-time the international fame and audience of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Since the end of World War II his ideas have taken hold throughout the human sciences. Although his work is not easily accessible to the uninitiated (Leach 1970), nor have all been convinced by his propositions-far from ithe has radically transformed the way anthropologists pose questions and define their object in central areas like *kinship, *classification and *mythology. In advocating an approach inspired by structural linguistics, his work has brought about an epistemological break with previous methods of analysis. We can thus refer to a period ‘before LéviStrauss’ and one ‘after Lévi-Strauss’.
