And from that opening sentence, Lévi-Strauss contrasts the “arid” synagogue in the city created by Louis XIV with the “casual” men’s hut of the Bororo village in the Mato Grosso of Brazil.

The negativity of this statement is characteristic of the profound alienation found throughout Tristes tropiques. This negativity may be peculiarly French, and some of its tone was completely lost in the Russell translation. For example, Russell translates: “Only my grandfather’s silent prayer before each meal reminded us children that our lives were governed by a higher order of things.”^[15] The Weightman translation carries the more negative flavor of the French original: “Apart from my grandfather’s silent prayer at the beginning of each meal, we children had no means of knowing that we were living under the aegis of a superior order, but for the fact that a scroll of printed paper fixed to the dining-room wall proclaimed the motto: ‘Chew your food well for the good of your digestion.’”^[16]

As I reread Tristes tropiques, I was struck by the depth of Lévi-Strauss’ alienation from the French culture he sprung from and returned to. He left it by chance, a phone call that changed his life and gave a young high school teacher a chance to become an ethnographer in Brazil. The Mato Grosso wilderness was a New World in flux, a mixture of all the forces defining the modern world. It was also a place devoid of French domination, intellectual or political. The lack of domination did not preclude the presence of French influence, and Lévi-Strauss notes it repeatedly. In Brazil, he had the advantages of a White Man without a colonial burden. It was a world in which he perceived a profound harmony, unlike what all his Anglo-American or Brazilian colleagues perceived before him.

Lévi-Strauss proposes that the Americas should be understood as a single cultural complex. He does not say a single civilization.

In the midst of his description of the tribal bands he visited, Lévi-Strauss proposes that the Americas should be understood as a single cultural complex. He does not say a single civilization. He is deducing millenniums of inter- and intra-tribal contact and population movement, the rise and fall of centralized states in the precarious narrative that was Pre-Columbian history being struck on many sides by new archeological data. He makes this proposal in a chapter called “The Lost World.” He begins by telling about his longest and last field expedition in Brazil, starting with a description of purchased beads and thread in the district around the Carrefour Réaumur Sébastopol “an area of Paris as unknown to me as the Amazon.” ^[17] This was the wholesale cloth and notions district, and is still today a part of Paris filled with wholesale shops dealing in jewelry materials, notions and accessories, as well as uncut cloth and leather. He launches into a justification of his plan to visit a cross-section of the surviving Brazilian culture groups, and from there into his hypothesis that all the cultures of South, Central and North America share a common system of mythological thought. Arguing this hypothesis would take up much of the second fifty years of his life.

I was drawn to read this chapter again by the reproductions of Hopewell designs he reproduced to illustrate his hypothesis. In the late 1970s I had the task of gathering information about the publishing program at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. I was working for the university administration and the purpose of the investigation was to contain, if not to halt, a publishing program that someone in the administration thought was a waste of money.

I was sent to interview a Mr. Philip Phillips, who was the author, as well as underwriter, of a particularly elaborate multi-volume work, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma. The volumes reproduced tracings of the designs found on large conch shells carved by a pre-contact native group known as the Hopewell culture. The books were in a very large format, rather like the Audubon folios of bird engravings produced in the nineteenth century, and the multi-volume set cost hundreds of dollars. Mr. Phillips lived in a lovely house in Harvard, Massachusetts, a wealthy rural community west of Boston. The British professor who had taken over as director of the Peabody Museum was an archeologist who specialized in a region that had been politically closed to European and American archeologists by the recent Iranian Islamic Revolution. Perhaps he was trying to get his revenge by attacking the New World. He scoffed at how his predecessor, the Americanist who sponsored the publication, was treating these shell fragments scratched up by pre-historic Indians as if they were “the Elgin Marbles.” Elgin Marbles sounded more valuable than conch shells from Oklahoma. It was to be another decade before I saw the pieces of Greek relief sculpture on the walls of the British Museum and heard the story of how these trophies had been removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin. Mr. Phillips was a very wealthy alumni, I was told, so one must be tactful. He was the Phillips of Phillips Milk of Magnesia and his wife was Niagara Power and Light. This third volume was to be his last. The academic world was and still is a treacherous place for minds that seek large patterns.