The Raw and the Cooked [SEP] series
The Raw and the Cooked
The Raw and the Cooked (1964) is the first volume from "Mythologiques", a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as "Le Cru et le Cuit". Although the book is part of a larger volume Lévi-Strauss writes that it may be appreciated on its own merits, he does not consider this first volume a beginning: "since it would have developed along similar lines if it had 
had
", he described folk tales of tribal South America as related to one another through a series of transformations—as one opposite in tales "here" changed into its opposite in tales "there." For example, as the title implies, raw becomes its opposite cooked. These particular opposites (raw/cooked) are symbolic of human culture itself, in which by means of thought and labour (economics), raw materials become clothes, food, weapons, art and ideas.
While Durkheim thought that taxonomies of