Edmund Leach’s Lévi-Strauss is a compact route into Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology without pretending the difficult bits aren’t difficult. Truly.

Leach works thematically rather than chronologically, moving through Lévi-Strauss’s ideas about symbols, myth, kinship and the underlying structures through which cultures organise meaning. Leach was a major anthropologist and an occasionally combative reader of structuralism, so the book keeps testing the machinery as it describes it. Language, binary opposition, myth and social organisation are treated as systems of relation rather than collections of isolated facts — the basic structuralist wager in unusually manageable form.

First published in 1970, this 1996 fourth edition was revised and updated by anthropologist James Laidlaw, with a new introduction, revised notes and a guide to further reading. It remains a very good small-book entrance into both Lévi-Strauss and twentieth-century structuralist thought.

Edition & condition: Fontana Press, London, 1996. Fourth edition, revised and updated by James Laidlaw. Paperback. Light shelf wear and some age spotting; clean and sound overall. Very good condition.