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What intellectual "attitude," critical and apologetic, suits situations of showbiz? How might this vast arena of human endeavor be approached ethnographically and comparatively? What, perforce, does "the show business" mean-not just here and now (America since P. T. Barnum) but elsewhere and earlier: across cultures and eras, continually transformed and translated. Should anthropological modes of interpretation, philosophically inclined, address showbiz situations? What would distinguish such studies from, say, the anthropology of tourism?

Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. Richard Fardon. ed. New York: Routledge, 1995. 233 pp.

The enormous secondary literature which relates Levi-Strauss' comparative studies to different schools of thought has failed sufficiently to emphasize the major discontinuity within his own work. This paper characterizes the basic methodological differences in his approaches to “kinship” and to “myth.” It then suggests how, by concentrating on the kinship/myth distinction, we might constructively refine various structuralist concepts, such as distinctive feature analysis and the logical foundations of the “elementary” kinship structures. Only by concentrating on the few inconsistencies in Levi-Strauss' remarkably coherent corpus of work can an adequate critique of his theories of comparison be commenced.