The author convinces us that these humans know something of a world that is a whole system, internalized in patterns of thought that are externalized in the visual messages of patterns reproduced across generations, material objects crafted and displayed, each encoded in a system he would like to learn. And as the groups become smaller, poorer, and more precarious in their relationship to both nature and the dominant civilization, the question of identifying the code becomes more fascinating.

The journey into the wilderness of 1938 ends in the Euro-Brazilian frontier where the boom and bust of global rubber business has left the latex sap gatherers in a desperate economic condition. The “wild” hunters and gatherers he has visited are a well-balanced culture compared to these workers whose efforts cannot pay for their own supplies. The encounter of the Old and the New World seems to be destroying both. The author chooses to end with a description of a country dance where the local women presented themselves to the male latex tappers. He describes the couple’s dance steps from “another age” as well as their recital of rhymed couplets improvised between steps. Then one can almost see him turn to the audience, like the narrator of a play, and directly address the twentieth century French audience he has been entertaining with his stories of time spent in the jungle.

The second act is over and it is time to return to a world he had left at the beginning of the first act, a Europe about to be devastated by the Second World War.

Lévi-Strauss begins the third act of Tristes tropiques with a recollection of boredom: wandering across the arid Brazilian wilderness with no natives in sight. He confesses how his escape from the normal European world left him with “fleeting visions of the French countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced…” And rather than thinking about the mythological puzzles of Brazilian Indians or shamanistic chants, his head was filled with “the melody of ‘Chopin’s Étude No. 3, Opus 10,’” which, by a bitterly ironical twist of which I was well aware, now seemed to epitomize all I had left behind.” In a foreshadowing of the ahistorical conclusion he creates for his book, he describes the irony of Chopin rising up in his brain. Before he left France, his musical taste had become more modern — Debussy and Stravinsky are mentioned — but now this nineteenth century melody was all the more interesting because he knew what came after it, and could hear in his head the future and the past.

At which point he recounts how he did what many European writers, artists and composers were doing in the 1930s: trying to resolve the present by invoking the pre-Christian era of Roman classicism. He spends his days flipping over his ethnography notes and writing a play about Cinna confronting the Emperor Augustus on the blank parts of the paper. He tells us this attempt at sense-making through literature was a failure — he does not complete the play — but his synopsis of the incomplete text begins a series of meditations about returning to Europe. He writes about his failure to write and the impossible nature of anthropology.

He remembers appreciating the taste of the rum made in the old style in French Martinique, rather than the modern industrial rum produced in U.S. Puerto Rico. But what he is thinking about is his own transformation from a politically engaged Socialist, a role he played before going to Brazil, into a scientist engaged in analyzing but not modifying society. Above and beyond all the exquisite logic of his argument, it is metaphor that carries his ideas. It is the imperfection of the barrel aging in Martinique that creates its superior taste. “No society is perfect,” he asserts, and it is imperfection that is fundamental to the nature of societies. From that metaphor, he develops one of those binary classifications that were to become the signature of his later books. There are two kinds of societies: those that practice cannibalism and those that put people in prisons. The adherents of either one of these practices can see clearly that the adherents of the other are beyond the boundaries of civilization.

Then he is talking about what it means to become an anthropologist, a distinctly Western European invention. Perhaps it is not the greatness of understanding that allows us to rise above our superior civilization and compare it to others, he suggests. The dialectic opposite is the thought that Europe produces anthropologists “precisely because it is a prey to strong feelings of remorse, which forced it to compare its image with those of different societies in the hope that they would show the same defects or would help to explain how its own defects had developed within it.”^[24] And the burning flame of that remorse is located in that time when the Old World discovered the New World and chose not to learn from it, but to displace it. It is in this thought that the true sadness resides.