摘要：The point of departure of this paper is the intuition of a recurring hidden structure in L¨¦vi-Strauss'sworks and the realisation of a correlation between this structure and the rhetorical figure of chiasmus. Ipropose to follow the trace of this structure in L¨¦vi-Strauss's works and to try to understand itsunderlying significance. I will argue, in this connection, that the figure of chiasmus plays an importantrole in shaping L¨¦vi-Strauss's conception of the anthropologist's relationship to his object of study and,by extension, of what constitutes a specifically anthropological form of understanding. I will also showthat the figure of chiasmus provides a key to the poetics of ethnographic description.I should make clear from the start that I will not be concerned with chiasmus as a figure of speech orstyle as such, i.e. not as a rhetorical figure in the classical sense. Rather, I will be concerned withchiasmus as a pattern of thought, an organising schema, a structure that determines, from behind thescenes, the form and content of a number of L¨¦vi-Strauss's anthropological theories. To use thevocabulary of classical rhetoric, I will be concerned with chiasmic reversals not as a feature of elocutio,the part of rhetoric that studies the choice and arrangement of words (where chiasmus normallybelongs), but as a feature of dipositio, the arrangement of the parts of an argument, and above allinventio, the invention of subject matter and the logical arguments that give form to it
