Lévi-Strauss went to Brazil to see the meeting of the Old and New World. That original fifteenth century moment is an idée fixe around which his senses and intellectual gymnastics dance like a moth around a candle flame. In the third act of his book, he states it this way:

What has happened in the intervening centuries is sad to contemplate, and seems to be the result of having chosen the wrong response to this confrontation. We might have chosen, five hundred years ago, to learn from the New World rather than to displace it. This realization generates a sadness that he skillfully builds in the reader’s mind. He leaves Europe slowly and elliptically by boat several times, ending with his account of the “last” journey of 1941. Fleeing a defeated France, he was an anthropologist on the run, transformed into an enemy of the state by a Jewish name, received as a traitor by the marginal authorities in the colonial French administration in the Caribbean. How blind and petty, how threatening civilization had become, and at the same time how powerless the authorities were to mask its decay. He recounts his trouble with Brazilian police who detain him for photographing the black children who follow him on the street. It was a time when it was against the law to publish images of Brazilians descended from African slaves. Our narrator moves through the jungle at night, along roads visible only to the animal he rides. He senses that he is approaching a settlement by the sound of dogs barking, and he is sheltered by an exploitation of natural resources – gold mining, rubber tapping – that has drawn a desperate human population into the jungle and then collapsed around them, leaving fragments of human poverty in its wake.

Back in the second act, in this theater of observation focused on the margins of cultural dispersal, the author describes four native cultures in the Mato Grosso plateau. In a series of scientific excursions, he visits these groups, each living in a fashion that is progressively closer to a “natural” state, the state he imagines existed before European contact. The anthropologist revels in these social agreements that, despite centuries of co-existence, maintain their non-European authenticity. The book starts over again – the narrator is human, his subjects are human, and he identifies with his subjects. We, of course, are reassured that we are the humans who read books in order to understand how humans live.

With small elements of material culture arrayed before him, Lévi-Strauss miraculously creates a portrait of the human mind. He creates a rather seamless transition from his personal rumination of surviving the onslaught and hazards of a high-class French education to discussing the elaborate tattoo patterns practiced by the Caduveo. He reproduces these images drawn on paper, and photographs of the same patterns drawn as they are meant to be, on women’s faces. He reproduces photographs, several of them remarkable for the spontaneity they capture, of the people he lived with. These human beings are naked by the author’s standards, and so their cultural clothing – necklace, arm band, belt, penis sheath – are all the more visible. They are playful and at ease with each other. A young woman reclines in the dust with the expression of a daydream on her face. In a photo captioned “The author’s best informant, in ceremonial dress,” the subject fixes the photographer with a stare of serious dignity. We are given a brief biography of this nameless man.