The final sentences of the book end with images meant to embody constructed meaning: the beauty we sense in our visual perception of a mineral, our olfactory perception of a flower, the mental projection we make when exchanging visual contact with another animal. But rather than these images, I found two sentences a few paragraphs before to be the best conclusion to the book. It made me think of Stephan Daedelus on the beach, closing his eyes and wondering if the world will still be there when he opens them again.

In the centuries when Western Europeans first set out in ships to Africa, Asia and the Americas, they began to create places to display the things they brought back, the cabinet of curiosity, where the exotic objects from around the world – animal, vegetable and mineral, produced by nature or foreign cultures – to demonstrate a grasp of the world. This became the natural history museum, where objects from the environments of the world were presented in a classified organization, along with the artifacts of distant human cultures. This branched into the anthropology museum where the evolution of man was recorded and pre-history was joined to the activities of modern anthropology. In parallel, the objects collected by explorers, colonists, and commercial traders from around the world became the collections of our museums of foreign cultures.

As the twenty-first century began, the French government created the Musée du Quai Branly by selectively absorbing the highlights of French ethnography collections into what its creators proposed would be a new kind of museum. The result is different from previous anthropology museums, but it is not new. It is a French art museum, in much the same way that the Musée Guimet, the national collection of art from Asia, is a French art museum.

The building, designed by Jean Nouvel, resembles a set of interlocking cubes, colorful and opaque, hoisted on legs standing over a grassy marsh. The garden looks even better at night when plastic sticks glow among the marsh grass and throw colorful patterns onto the belly of museum beast above. When I approach it from the street or walk beneath it, I often think of the drawings of the Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki. His castles fly through the air held up by airships, or stand up on steam-powered legs and walk across the landscape. I imagine this monstrosity slowly walking over to the quai, lowering itself into the Seine and drifting out to sea, where it would continue to drift around the planet, returning its contents to their native place, leaving one of its cubes at each place it touches land.

The objects in the Quai Branly were collected by adventurers, soldiers, administrators, scientists, missionaries and art dealers. Regardless of their provenance or original purpose, each object is presented as “non-Western art.” It is here that Lévi-Strauss’ 100th birthday was celebrated. It is here that his name and words have become part of the permanent exhibition.

Having missed the celebration, I went looking for what remained. I enter the building by walking up a ramp that pierces the cubes near its center. At this juncture, the permanent exhibition area opens into view and I am standing at the beginning and the end of the path that leads in a circle organized by geographic zones. If I turn to the right, as an arrow on the floor suggests, I will enter Oceania and continue to Australasia, Asia, and Africa. But I want to see the Americas and they are right in front of me. I have been here before, but this time I look at the orientation guide and realize that I have been looking at the museum in reverse order. The Americas, where I always start, is the end of the collection.