Lévi-Strauss's book is like a Chinese puzzle box in which a number of bits of wood of seemingly random and eccentric shape can with ingenuity and patience be fitted together to form a perfect cube. Turn the whole thing upside down; the total shape is the same but the combination seems quite different. I have now read La pensée sauvage from beginning to end at least three times and on each occasion I have obtained a very different impression of how it all fits together. It all depends on what you take to be the leading theme. In this essay I am writing with the prejudices of an English social anthropologist and it could be that, from the author's point of view, I have altogether missed the point. The considerable section of the final chapter which is taken up with a commentary upon Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique is cettainly quite outside my comprehension.