In Les Structures Elémentaires de la Parenté, the early opus magnum of French Structuralism, Lévi-Strauss tries to explain the systems of kinship and-marriage in their enormous diversity and their frequently bizarre institutions, by means of a single principle: the exchange.
Exchange is perceived to be the manifestation of fundamental structural constants of the human mind which may also be discerned in other subsystems of culture, most obviously in language. This book represents the first great result of the author's life-long research, dedicated to exploring this relationship, which also led him into the fields of the classification-systems of language and of mythology.