Marked by the experience of exile, this volume serves as both a biographical and historical testimony to the moment when Claude Lévi-Strauss, along with a multitude of other Jewish artists and intellectuals, fled 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 represent a reconstruction of the prehistory of structural anthropology.

These years in America also constitute the period when Lévi-Strauss became aware of the irreparable historical destructions: 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 subtly permeated by the memory and possibility of the Holocaust, which, however, he never names.

The idea of the "zero signifier" is at the foundation of structuralism. Therefore, to speak of Structural Anthropology Zero means a 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 highlights the feeling of tabula rasa that governs the author at the end of the war and the entire endeavor - which he shares with others - of restarting civilization on different foundations.