British Anthropologist - Claude Lévi-Strauss   pt2

Lévi-Strauss generally provided too little ethnographical evidence, and if he did, he seemed to select this ethnographical evidence to fit his theories. (Ibid:87,90,98,117) A consequence of this is that the contrary is difficult to demonstrate, and therefore Lévi-Strauss’s theories can not be critically tested. (Ibid:50,117)

Kinship was the first object that Lévi-Strauss regarded receptive to the structural approach, and this is the field where the influence of Mauss was most perceptible.

Lévi-Strauss came to the conclusion that reciprocity was the key for understanding kinship. He went as far as to say that marriage was the primary exchange system and that the system of exchanges of women formed the basis for the organization of all societies with any ideology of unilineal descent. (Ibid:104) A central position in his theory about kinship was occupied by the incest taboo, which provided certain prohibitions and in ‘simple’ kinship systems also a positive marriage rule as to who one can/cannot/should marry.

In the case of the latter he drew an additional distinction between generalized and restricted exchange, and created a third ‘bastard form’: delayed reciprocity, which is basically a generalized exchange system where the next rather than the same generation returns a woman. Lévi-Strauss identified the problem that generalized exchange was speculative and led to differences between groups in terms of their ‘richness in wives’ despite its egalitarian and integrative nature, an idea that Leach agreed with. (Kuper 1996:162-164)