Volume 16, Number 1 · January 28, 1971
Mythical Inequalities
By Edmund R. Leach
The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca
by Anthony F.C. Wallace
Knopf, 384 pp., $8.95
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology
by Mary Douglas
Pantheon, 177 pp., $5.95
Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures
by G.S. Kirk
California, 299 pp., $7.95
In this year of Grace 1971 anthropology has the curious status of being both in fashion and on its last legs. The fashion stems from the revival of Rousseauism. As Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, our Protestant-ethic background leads us to suppose that in the opposition Culture-Nature it is Culture and technological gadgetry which wear the badge of progress and superiority—'Hell is the others.' But just now many of us are smitten with remorse and disgust and a renewed longing for the Arcadian dream. In Richard Brautigan's novel, Trout Fishing in America, the eponymous hero ends up being sold by the foot in a Cleveland wrecking yard, stacked among piles of toilets and dusty lumber—by implication 'Hell is ourselves.' The last legs part of the equation is more straightforward. Anthropology is the study of primitive society, but primitive society is ceasing to exist; as the late R. G. Collingwood put it, the destiny of anthropology is to become history or nothing.
Review, 3171 words
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