In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss searches through the evidence and theories available to him for just such patterns. By the 1950s there was more new archeological and linguistic speculation about cultural migrations than there had been in the 1930s when he did his field work. Between his time in Brazil and his time in India, he had spent the war years living in New York, teaching and arguing with American anthropologists and the linguist Roman Jakobson. Now he was speculating about the connectedness of the cultures of the Americas before the coming of the Europeans, proposing a world less isolated than Americanists made it out to be. “It is as if American specialists were trying to impose on primitive America that absence of depth characteristic of the contemporary history of the New World.”^[18]

He wants to challenge the conventional wisdom of the time, in which the entire population of the Americas was viewed as a mysterious group of Others isolated from all the other Others of the planet. He wants to explain the similarities among American cultures in relation to other geo-regional cultures that might have had contact with American territory. He settles on South-East Asia – specifically Indonesia for reasons he never develops – and Scandinavia. He sees them forming “the trigonometrical points of the pre-Columbian history of the New World.”^[19] It is a startling proposal, characteristic of how he leaps towards ideas that challenge the assumptions of specialists.

He wants to challenge the conventional wisdom of the time, in which the entire population of the Americas was viewed as a mysterious group of Others isolated from all the other Others of the planet.

He does this in an ahistorical and matter-of-fact way, without recounting or analyzing the long tradition of disproven contact theories that have flourished in North America. He does not mention the Vineland Saga, tales of Celtic monks who sailed to the west, or theories of one group or another being descended from the lost Tribes of Israel. These were the ideas of Pre-Columbian contact that thrived in the nineteenth century. I thought immediately of Charles G. Leland and his treatment of Algonquin stories as aligned with, if not derived, from Scandinavian-Germanic traditions. Without the rigor of Lévi-Strauss’ logic, or the benefit of twentieth century archeology, Leland saw what he wanted to see. He saw Algonquin tales as more understandable if we recognized their similarities to European tales, which were understandable because, by definition, they were ours.

But are these isolated New World inhabitants similar to us, or are we, the descendants of a Europe cut off from the formative cultures of the Old World, similar to them? Lévi-Strauss turns the proposal around every elegantly: “We now have to correct a second mistake, which consists in assuming that America remained cut off from the world as a whole for twenty-thousand years, because it was separated from Western Europe. Everything would seem to suggest rather that the deep silence on the Atlantic side was offset by a buzz of activity all along the Pacific coasts.”^[20] We will understand the Americas to our West by seeing how they are related to Asia, and we, the French at another edge of the migration, are also related to the same cultural center far to the East.

Reading Tristes tropiques today as an adult who has spent a decade in France was not so different from reading it as an American college student in the 1960s. It still seems to be a report of the Earth written by someone from another planet. Unless you are also French, the long introduction to the author’s education is amusing – what student has not experienced their professor droning on about some intellectual subject and imagined a beet root with whiskers – but it does not make you think he is describing anyone’s home. The narrator, who tells us that travel books teach us nothing, seems to always be traveling through an alien world – the nearly empty steamships moving between the Mediterranean and the coast of Brazil, the markets or urban sprawl of São Paulo and the afternoon lecture halls of the French natural history museum. The Brazilian New World of the 1930s is populated by Lebanese merchants, Japanese farmers and an occasional French frontiersman. While our resident alien describes his house in São Paulo and writes affectionately of his students, the Brazil of Tristes tropiques is remarkably devoid of everyday Brazilians or visions of the dominant Euro-Portuguese culture.