The View from Afar is a collection of essays and talks on various areas of anthropology: the nature of races; human universals; family, marriage, and kinship; linguistics; and beliefs, myths, and ritual. A number of essays address topics such as painting, liberty, education, and New York. Some of the ideas are fairly abstract, with an emphasis on a structuralist approach, but Lévi-Strauss uses his comprehensive knowledge of different myth systems to illustrate them and they always remain in contact with reality. The result isn't a bad introduction to the breadth of Lévi-Strauss's work.

July 1992

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