ABSTRACT
On February 10, 1971 Claude Lévi-Strauss sent a hand-written, hand-signed letter to David Schneider. It was in response to Schneider’s draft paper which he had sent to Lévi-Strauss in Paris. Thirteen days later, on February 23, David Schneider responded to observations made by Lévi-Strauss in a typed, hand-signed letter. A scan of both original letters is published in this book (see pages x–xi). I acquired a scan of the original letter in 2017 when the late Roy Wagner, who was active in kinship activity and in regular contact with Dwight Read and me, mentioned that it was in his possession. He subsequently emailed it to us, giving his permission for publication. I am publishing the letter here as a prelude to my brief account of a very controversial issue in kinship study. The controversy surrounds Schneider’s publication in 1968, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Schneider 1968), followed in 1984 by Critique of the Study of Kinship (Schneider 1984), and “What Is Kinship All About?” (Schneider 1972). This series of publications was generally considered a wide-ranging attack on the classical tradition of kinship.
