"What is it that makes us human beings? That was the great question that Darwin posed and Freud, Durkheim, and the rest of the class of 1913 tried to answer with reference to the Australian Aborigines.
"Claude Levi-Strauss took up the challenge issued by his eminent predecessors. His answer was that reciprocity (reciprocite) was the key to humanity and civilisation.
"...This was not an entirely new idea. But no one argued the case of reciprocity with more tenacity and rhetorical imagination than Levi-Strauss. Nor did anyone else have his pretensions.
"Levi-Strauss does not study relationships between people and groups of people, but models resembling economists' ideal models of market functions. Like many economists, Levi-Strauss and his adherents believe the study of models offers knowledge of deeper, truer reality of experience, which is all to often contaminated by specific circumstances. 'To reach reality one has first to reject experience.'"
Sven Linqvist, Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land
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