Tristes tropiques does not pitch structural anthropology, but the author uses the structural method to disarm the reader’s mind with parallels that reflect and refract thought in several directions simultaneously. If Lévi-Strauss had died at the age of fifty rather than living past a hundred, we would still have the seeds of each idea he later proposed in this book. In the center are chapters about living with the Bororo and these chapters contain a new focus, as if the description of his education in France and his years teaching in São Paulo were the Joycean dream he was about to awake from.

He sees the Bororo living in a cultural harmony consisting of a physical arrangement of buildings, social relationships and metaphysical beliefs. He draws a diagram of the village, bifurcated by kinship boundaries that are related to both cardinal directions and the flow of the river. In the center of the circle is the men’s house. This abstract geometry is the harmony of the world. The most overt piece of structuralism in the book is his observation of this village:

Note that the Bororo world is not described as primitive or fragile. It is described as “too complex” to survive being disturbed. He is also deeply impressed by what he witnesses inside the men’s house. As the center for cultural exchange, it embodies an easy mixture of sacred and profane activities. Lévi-Strauss describes his own relationship to French society in subtle and delicate ways. He omits any mention of his own family relationships. Nowhere in the book does he mention his parents, nor does he refer to Dina Dreyfus, his first wife who accompanied him during his fieldwork in Brazil. But as I reread his description of how the sacred and profane mixed in the Bororo men’s house, I noticed an exception to this rule, an ironic and bitter reflection on his own childhood.

The passage that begins with this sentence is the only direct reference to his family anywhere in the book. It tells us that at the age of eight or ten, our hero is already convinced that his own religion is meaningless. Early in the book, he tells us he left France in 1941 when “I already felt myself to be potential fodder for the concentration camp.”^[13] At that point in history, he was a Jew by descent, not by conviction. The secular Jew fleeing Vichy France had long before confronted the religion he did not believe in during the national trauma of The Great War. He was not just any secular Jew. He was the grandson of a rabbi. And not just any rabbi. His grandfather was the rabbi of the very wealthy city of Versailles.