Du miel aux cendres

First edition, for which no copies on larger paper were produced.
A pleasing copy, with press clippings laid in.
Exceptional autograph presentation copy inscribed in English by Claude Lévi-Strauss to the anthropologist Raymond Firth.

Sir Raymond Firth (1901–2002), New Zealand-born ethnologist and Malinowski's successor as head of the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century British anthropology. Committed to empirical observation, Firth represented the functionalist tradition, setting himself apart from the universalising structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, his exact contemporary. A careful reader and courteous critic of his French colleague's theories — particularly on the question of totemism — Firth nonetheless drew on the theoretical boldness of that illustrious counterpart. He was, moreover, one of the very few British ethnologists to escape Lévi-Strauss's censure of the "conceptions naturalistes qui ont si longtemps imprégné l'école britannique" ("On manipulated sociological models", 1960). 

In inscribing this work in English to the leading representative of the opposing school, Lévi-Strauss was submitting his analysis of natural symbols to his most formidable critic on that very ground: a silent yet fascinating dialogue between the two great traditions of twentieth-century anthropology.