Why Marry Her?: Society and Symbolic Structures

This collection of essays on the themes of social organization, kinship and religion provides an excellent guide for English-speaking scholars to the understanding of French structuralist thought. In his introduction Luc de Heusch, a distinguished Belgian anthropologist, recalls his first contact with colonial Africa in the Belgian Congo in 1953–4. In Part I, conscious of the difference between French anthropology and the British tradition, he pursues a friendly dialogue with Mary Douglas, ...