This is by no means the first attempt to link Levi-Strauss with Buddhist thought. It is my purpose to make it, however, the most thorough and least eccentric comparison to date. I want to set the record straight about the nature and significance of Buddhist parallels in the thought of Claude Levi-Strauss.

At first sight there seems to be little in common between Zionism and the national movements of the Third World, and more particularly of Africa. The diplomatic and economic links established by the State of Israel with the new states of the Black Continent were impressive partly because they looked as if they were created ex nihilo. The speed with which the Israelis entered the ‘African game’ in the sixties and the equal speed with which they found themselves ejected from it in the seventies tended to underline the superficiality of these links. There were, of course, interested rationalizations of this newly found ‘brotherhood’: the historico-mythological relations between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were stressed to give an historical dimension to a very new cooperation; the role of the Zionist and Messianic African churches and sects, and the possible latent influence of Jewish lore on certain African tribes, such as the Poeul or the Ashanti of Ghana, were dusted off and used in many ambassadorial speeches.

The study of patronage and of patron-client relations has come lately to the fore in anthropology, political science and sociology, and has exerted a great fascination for scholars in these spheres. From a topic of relatively marginal concern it has become a central one, closely connected to basic theoretical problems and controversies in all the social sciences.

The relationship of household and family organization to changes in the larger economy (e.g., commercialization, industrialization) has long fascinated and baffled scholars. Data that specifically link the household and/or family unit to economic change have proved elusive, and most studies do little more than note temporal crosscultural coincidences of demographic and residential characteristics with those of economic development. The means by which the household interacted with the economy, what the patterns of interaction were and how they were determined in a given time and place are significant questions which are seldom addressed. Even less accessible are the changes in the dynamics of household organization in conjunction with economic development in terms of informal economic and social exchanges and household and family formation.

The recent incursion of historians into the ‘history of the family’ raises a number of crucial problems from which anthropologists and sociologists seem to have shied away. Dealing with a topic new to the historical discipline, some of these historians have turned to anthropologists for theoretical inspiration. It will thus come as no surprise that what they have found and reproduced is the very conceptual discord so endemic in anthropological circles (see Laslett 1972 and Berkner 1975 for antithetical stances). This controversy, however, in one way represents only a minor aspect of the problem. Equally if not more important is the fact that the phenomena which fall under historical and sociological/anthropological investigation may not be the same after all. This is intrinsically related to their respective subject-matter and the type of evidence they have to rely upon.