It is common knowledge that the contrastive opposition between nature and culture plays a crucial role in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss: he has used it in such a variety of contexts and for so many purposes, that for many it has come to embody one of the main characteristics of his way of thinking. It is also well known that Lévi-Strauss attributes to Rousseau the merit of having, in practice, founded the field of ethnology by inaugurating, in Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality, a strand of thinking on the possible links between nature and culture (Lévi-Strauss 1978b: 35). In other words, the problem of the tension between these two domains lies not only at the heart of structural anthropology, but is also what defines, according to its founder, the domain to which ethnology is dedicated and thanks to which it can claim a certain autonomy within the human sciences. However, the role attributed to this conceptual pair is not easily circumscribed in Lévi-Strauss's thought: it is at once an analytical tool, the philosophical stage upon which the story of our origins is played out and an antinomy that must be overcome. This conceptual pair is given a plurality of sometimes contradictory meanings, which account for its great productivity and the ensuing difficulties of interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the clarification of this question by means of what is at once a critique and a tribute, because progress can only be made on the path one has chosen thanks to the advances made by previous generations and, from this point of view, the twentieth century, in anthropology, will undoubtedly remain the century of Lévi-Strauss, since his thought, even if one rejects it, has stamped its mark on our conception of this science, its aim and its methods.