ABSTRACT
In the memoirs of his field work in Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the moment when alternative realities became a thing of the past. 1 At the end of his travels in the Amazon basin, and after working among native peoples already in contact with the outside world, he got word of an “unknown” tribe living “still savage” in the upland jungles:
There is no more thrilling prospect for the anthropologist than that of being the first white man to visit a particular native community.… I was about to relive the experience of the early travellers and, through it, that crucial moment in modem thought when, thanks to the great voyages of discovery, a human community which believed itself to be complete and in its final form, suddenly learned, as if through the effect of a counter-revelation, that it was not alone, that it was part of a greater whole, and that, in order to achieve self-knowledge, it must first of all contemplate its unrecognizable image in this mirror, of which a fragment, forgotten by the centuries, was now about to cast, for me alone, its first and last reflection. 2
