Marked by the experience of exile, this volume constitutes a biographical and at the same time historical testimony of the moment when Claude Lévi-Strauss, like a host of other Jewish artists and intellectuals, escapes as a refugee to New York. Written between 1941 and 1947, while he had not yet abandoned his political reflections, the seventeen chapters of this book constitute a reconstruction of the prehistory of structural anthropology.
These years in America also represent the period when Lévi-Strauss realizes the irreparable historical catastrophes: the mass extermination of the Native Americans and the genocide of the Jews in Europe. From the beginning of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology seems to be implicitly permeated by the memory and possibility of the Holocaust, which, however, he never names.
The idea of "meaning zero" is at the basis of the structure. Therefore, to speak of Structural Anthropology Zero means to return to the source of a thought that overturned our perception of the human. But this prehistory of Structural Anthropology One (1958) and Two (1973) also emphasizes the sense of tabula rasa that pervades their author at the end of the war and the whole project - shared with others - of restarting civilization on different foundations.