In the chapter 'Do Dual Organisations Exist?' of his Structural Anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss takes up the case of a tribe of North American Indians, the Winnebago of the Great Lakes, who possess two different ways of mapping their village. One section of the tribe, let us call it "conservative", perceives the layout of the village as circular, with rings of huts successively arranged, in decreasing order of importance, around the moiety chief's central temple. The other section of the tribe, let us call it "radical", sees the social space of the village as split, with distinct clusters of huts separated by an invisible boundary. Where does the truth lie here? Although it is tempting simply to fly a helicopter over the village to ascertain its "objective" state, Levi-Strauss cautions against this. For him, neither factual evidence nor mere relativism, in which we say that reality depends upon which side of the village we come from, is sufficient. Rather, the "truth" of the village is this traumatic split in its social fabric, a split with which both plans, in their way, attempt to deal (the first by denying it altogether; the second by representing this division, which is precisely not an objective state of affairs realised by all). Both sides speak the "truth" of the situation, but only in a symptomatic, unconscious manner. In other words, they speak it by not speaking it. It is their dissimulation which is revealing. Levi-Strauss concludes: 'The study of so-called dual organisations discloses so many anomalies and contradictions in relation to extant theory that we should be well advised to reject the theory and to treat the apparent manifestations of duality as superficial distortions of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline