BEFORE Claude Lévi-Strauss revolutionised the discipline ... Generations of students considered him the father of structuralism—the theory of underlying order in everything.

It is based on four or five leading names, such as Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, Boas and the recently deceased Claude Lévi-Strauss ... “This is the Lévi-Strauss rejection, Parisian style: structuralism ...

“Any evidence, however dubious,” Leach complained, “is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data runs counter to the theory, Lévi-Strauss ...