ABSTRACT
Among the works of Durkheim and his close collaborators, Primitive Classification (I deliberately use the English title rather than the French) is one of those that anglophone social anthropologists are most likely to read and even to own. But what do they make of it? Some of the students to whom I set the text find it almost entirely baffling, and it is indeed extremely rich. Now that it is so common for anthropologists to incorporate autobiography into their ethnography, perhaps I can do the same with a topic that belongs to anthropological theory and intellectual history.
