Claude Lévi-Strauss is an unassimilable French intellectual phenomenon. The magic and veracity of his structural approach to social anthropology lie as much in the inimitable rhetoric of his style as in his analysis of mythic data. Rhetoric in this context is essentially a mode of apprehending reality. It is this which makes the writings of Lévi-Strauss so perplexing for Anglo-Saxon readers, with their bias towards a meticulous empiricism of analysis of factual and mythic data. In this symposium, arranged round the work of Lévi-Strauss, the contributors go a long way towards demonstrating what is the nature of this difficulty confronting one regarding Lévi-Strauss's researches. As Dr Leach, the editor, points out: 'If this book provides illumination it will be because of the light it throws upon the assumptions and attitudes of particular British social anthropologists rather than because of any consistent analysis of