Like the papers reproduced as Chapters 1 and 5, this essay was written as a contribution to a Festschrift, but for one that never came to fruition. I had published a study of one aspect of the work of Claude Levi-Strauss in which I had tried to subject his writings on kinship to close textual scrutiny (Barnes 1971m: 101–75). Othercommentators had, so it seemed to me, been greatly inspired by his work but had selected from it valuable and stimulating ideas rather than analysed the corpus as a whole. He had become a cult figure, a trend I could understand but which I deplored. I thought that it would be salutary to contrast his work with that of two other writers on kinship, Murdock and Fortes, whose frameworks of analysis were very different from his. Almost all aficionados of Levi-Strauss found my study insufferable; one reviewer asked plaintively why the study of kinship should be so dull {TLS 1971).

An invitation to contribute to a Festschrift for Levi-Strauss gave me the opportunity to present a paper in which I was free to choose whatever ideas I liked from his writings, without bothering too much about how they fitted, or failed to fit, with other parts of his work. […]