The Elementary Structures of Kinship

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Summary: At root, kinship is exchange and exchange is culture
Review: In this large and very dense work on kinship, Claude Levi-Strauss advances a distinctive approach to the issues of kinship, one that focuses not on descent (the relation of children to parents) but on marriage ("alliance" in anthropological jargon), seen as the exchange of women between groups. In the 1950s and 1960s, Claude Levi-Strauss's work became an inspiration for a school of "Alliance Theorists" who challenged the British social anthropological world's then-dominant view that descent is primary and alliance a secondary means of reproducing the lineage. Yet Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship should be of interest to more than just anthropologists; as the Confucians recognized, kinship is the basic equipment of humanity and thus its mechanics are worth the attention of all those interested in understanding humanity.

Not that Levi-Strauss makes the task of a would-be reader easy, as he gives the reader little or no help in telling the forest from the trees. His most off-putting habit is to write his chapters like a detective story, in which he assembles a large number of odd features in Australian or Naga or Manchu kinship terms and practices as clues, then considers and discards several possible interpretations, and then only at the end of the chapter "solves" the case, informing the reader of the crucial concepts, terms, and arguments that make sense of the clues. By that time, I'd usually had forgotten the details of the clues and had to go back and review the chapter again.

Persistent readers will, however, find the ideas involved profound and important. I would strongly recommend that readers skims the conclusion to chapters first and particularly the conclusion to the large parts first, before heading on to the details. Nothing you do is going to make Levi-Strauss easy but for those interested in issues of the incest taboo and culture, how marriage choice structures societies, or in East Asian, Indian, Southeast Asian, or Australian kinship and social structure, this is an important book.