Zero structural anthropology

Structural Anthropology Zero features previously unpublished texts by renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The articles collected here served as the foundation for the structural anthropology that Lévi-Strauss would develop throughout his career.

Marked by the experience of exile, Structural Anthropology Zero testifies to a moment both biographical and historical in which—like many European Jewish artists and scholars—Claude Lévi-Strauss took refuge in New York. Written between 1941 and 1947, when he had not yet abandoned his political reflections, the book's seventeen chapters reconstruct a prehistory of structural anthropology.

It is now clear that the publication of Structural Anthropology constituted a crucial step in the dissemination and expansion of structuralism. Structural Anthropology highlighted the extremely innovative nature of the reflection and theoretical ambition of a project based on highly precise ethnographic data, open to both other disciplines (linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, etc.) and English-language works. This Structural Anthropology Zero presents important, little-known texts, mostly initially published in English and in various journals—texts that for many have become somewhat inaccessible.

The idea of " zero signifier " is at the very foundation of structuralism. To speak of zero structural anthropology is, therefore, to return to the source of a thought that has disrupted our conception of the human. But this prehistory of structural anthropology one and two also underscores the sense of a blank slate that inspired its author and the project—shared with others—of a civilizational restart on new foundations.

The anthropologist's years on American soil were also those of growing awareness of irremediable historical catastrophes: the extermination of the American Indians and the genocide of the Jews. From the 1950s onward, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology seems duly shaped by the memory and possibility of the Holocaust, which is never named.

In addition to the intrinsic interest they arouse, these seventeen articles – chosen, edited, and prefaced by Vincent Debaene, professor at the University of Geneva – allow us to discover the founding questions and the first working hypotheses of this man who is one of the most renowned intellectuals of the 20th century.