Levi-Strauss's journey to the Tropics.

Santiago, Silviano

Translated by Marcel de Lima

'All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession.'

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

As the first chapters of Tristes Tropiques unfold, Claude Levi-Strauss makes it clear to his reader that his journey to Brazil and, later on, his contact with its Indians were both products of chance. (1) 'A somewhat perverse whim on the part of [professor] George Dumas', (2) added to mundane circumstances of the French university milieu, at the time favoured cultural sponsor of the elite of the Latin American countries, led Levi-Strauss, then a young teacher at a provincial lycee, to take part in the cosmopolitan French university mission, whose aim was to strike at the provincialism implicit within the foundation and establishment of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of the University of Sao Paulo (USP).

Levi-Strauss explains: 'My career was decided one Sunday in the autumn of 1934, at nine o'clock in the morning, by a telephone call [...]. "Do you still want to study anthropology?"--"Most certainly."--"Then apply for a post as a teacher of sociology at the University of Sao Paulo. The suburbs are full of Indians, whom you can study at the weekends" (p. 55). In Europe, even educated people still held a distorted view of the demographic situation in the former American colonies and, in Brazil, where the Indians were no longer suburban, only a few tribes existed in distant unexplored areas.

Being 'a Sunday anthropologist' (p. 135) among the outskirts of the city of Sao Paulo--a pale copy of that city he had been 'falsely promised' by George Dumas's spokesman--would allow the scientist merely to map the new white colonists who had settled there around the time of the Abolition of Slavery. Syrians and Italians dominated. Among a ragged population he noted the blond hair and blue eyes that betrayed a Germanic origin. He caught sight of many Japanese who were in fact agricultural dwellers of the outskirts. Unlike the old colonizing sailors, these late colonizers of the country came, in most cases, from the most wretched strata of the European rural population and had been excluded from the advance of Western civilization by industrialization. They travelled to Brazil to make America. And they were making it. They were ambitious men on their first voyage. They did not regard the ship as their home, nor the sea as a mystery to be unveiled and conquered. They saw the new and distant land as an end in itself, that is, as a place of residence and labour, as a promise of quick enrichment.

In the poor suburbs, instead of the autochthonous Indians, the ethnographer found rather different travellers, the descendants of black slaves. Unlike his professors and contemporaries, still excited about the success of the Dakar-Djibouti cultural mission (1931-33), Levi-Strauss was not facing authentic Negroes. (3) He must have asked himself whether it would be worth using the term Negro in this part of the planet, where the Indians no longer dwelt around the towns and where there was a 'great racial diversity' that allowed mixtures of all sorts. It was not the focus of his interest, though it would be of greater interest to his fellow countryman, the sociologist Roger Bastide. (4)

Levi-Strauss is sensitive to the tricks that the passing of time in different regions of the planet play on the observer. Having a paradigmatic vision (5) of human history, whose theoretical backing is to be found in Linguistics as a basis for ethnographic studies, he interprets each particular culture that has been built or implanted on this or that geographic space. The cultural contrasts between the Old and the New Worlds, as well as other similar contrasts--achronological by nature and by definition, in the ethnographer's analysis--receive a fundamentally and consistently multidisciplinary treatment, wherein the confronting parts are placed side by side, analysed, compared and interpreted by experienced eyes. 'I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak at last with one and the same voice' (p. 69).

As a consequence of its inhabitants' transatlantic journeys, Europe had twice replicated itself in the tropics: the first time due to the Iberian colonization; the second time due to the diverse groups of immigrants from the Northern hemisphere who, starting in the nineteenth century, anchored there and felt solidarity with the prevailing project to build a nation. Twice, the native vigour and vitality of the indigenous peoples had been slighted; twice, the native vigour and vitality of the Europeans had failed to replenish itself. Confronting the two parallel processes of discontinuity caused and fomented by the transcontinental journey, the text breaks into a smile: 'Some mischievous spirit has defined America as a country which has moved from barbarism to decadence without enjoying any intermediary phase of civilization' (p. 118). This is the sentence the visiting professor employs to open his chapter 'Sao Paulo'.

Levi-Strauss is compelled to gently correct the ethnocentric critique within the received formula. He revises and updates the mischievous opinion: the towns of the New World 'pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old' (p. 118). America is not unaware of the European culture of which it is a product; what it does not know are the strong and stable values of maturity and that is the reason why its main cities are, paradoxically, decrepit adolescents. An ingenuous young Brazilian student had once remade, in reverse, the journey of the European professor. Shocked by the image of the Paris she beheld for the first time, she ran back into the master's arms and, sobbing, she told him that Paris had struck her as being 'dirty, with its buildings blackened'. Levi-Strauss concludes: 'Whiteness and cleanliness were the only criteria by which she could judge a town' (p. 118). It is a horizontal and naive vision of the Parisian city landscape, muses Levi-Strauss.

Facing an urban landscape never before seen, his look, like a prospecting probe, became vertical and penetrating. Encountering Sao Paulo in 1935 or New York and Chicago in 1941, Levi-Strauss's astonishment was not caused by the novelty in front of him; it came, rather, from the 'premature ageing' (p. 119) in the works of American man. He was hardly surprised that the cities he visited did not have ten centuries of history, but he was surprised to find that some whole blocks, in an awful state of conservation, were just fifty years old. The American metropolises became sick precociously. The French ethnographer puts forward the old comparison rooted in colonialism: 'Certain European cities sink gently into a moribund torpor. Those of the New World live feverishly in the grip of a chronic disease; they are perpetually young, yet never healthy' (p. 119).

In the tropics the intellectual curiosity of the cultured citizens 'devoured manuals and works of vulgarization' (p. 126). French professors--reflects Levi-Strauss--would be very useful in South America as long as they had the talent 'to give an easily intelligible account of difficult problems, to the solution of which they themselves had made a small contribution' (p. 126). Latin America's affection for France, he concluded, depended on a 'secret connivance', founded less on the desire to produce than to consume, that is, on the propensity to favour the consumption of alien ideas by the peoples colonized by Europe. (6) The contrast between the French, wise, mature professionals, on the one hand, and the paulistas, ignorant and novelty-seeking dilettantes, on the other, soon becomes a showdown. The professors, who 'had been taught to respect only fully matured ideas', found themselves 'exposed to attacks by students who, while completely ignorant of the past, were always a few months ahead of us with the latest information' (p. 130).

Let us now take stock. Apparently, American civilization was ahead of European civilization. Apparently, the cities of Sao Paulo, New York, and Chicago were imposing, since in the fearful, timid eyes of the European traveller they gave an 'impression of enormous size' (p. 95). Apparently, Paris was a dirty city with blackened buildings. Apparently, the Sao Paulo students were ahead of their European professors, already mastering the new theories of knowledge and audaciously exhibiting them in front of their professors, who, in turn, bragged of the learning provided by intellectual maturity.

Tristes Tropiques is written to question this game of appearances. The abrupt and unseemly race into civilization undertaken by the New World--under the whip of both the Lusitanian colonizers and the immigrants--will have to be understood by the reader of Tristes Tropiques within the logical parameters established by the philosophical fable of Achilles (whom the Greeks considered the fastest of the Heroes) and the tortoise. It seems that Achilles must end up the winner, as he is the faster of the two. Nonetheless, should the tortoise be given an initial advantage--the fable states--Achilles would never be able to catch it, let alone beat it. Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay 'The perpetual race of Achilles and the tortoise', gives us a clear exposition of the 'glorious paradox': 'Achilles, symbol of speed, has to catch the tortoise, symbol of lethargy. Achilles can run ten times as fast as the tortoise but gives it a ten-metre start. Achilles runs these ten metres, the tortoise runs one; Achilles runs this metre, the tortoise runs a decimetre; Achilles runs this decimetre, the tortoise runs a centimetre; Achilles runs this centimetre, the tortoise one millimetre; Achilles the millimetre, the tortoise one-tenth of a millimetre, and so on indefinitely, so that Achilles may run forever without ever catching it'. (7) In the Physics (VI, 239b14), Aristotle likewise comments on Zeno's famous second argument on motion: 'The slowest runner will never be caught by the fastest runner, because the one behind has first to reach the point from which the one in front started, and so the slower one is bound always to be in front'. (8)

The confrontation between the two sides--between the old and the new, between the original and the copy, between the metropolitan and the colonized, between the slow and the fast, between the mature and the decrepit--can be interpreted wrongly by our feeling side and must be correctly interpreted, according to the ethnographer, by our rational side. By means of this parallel race, of this contention between the old and the new, in which the faster gives the slower an initial advantage that translates itself, at present, into maturity or 'advanced age', Levi-Strauss puts into question once again the apparent advance of material progress and recovers the concept of the immobility of motion. He does so in order to restate a paradoxically Eurocentric conception of modern history and social progress. The Old World is mature and slow, and the New World, obsolete and fast; the Old is ancient, and the New, decrepit. The one that is more remote in the spatial dimension is not necessarily the same in the temporal dimension, even though apparently it seems so.

A book that unfolds as a travel story, of the extraordinary journeys of a French ethnographer through many far-away lands, paradoxically presents itself from the very first chapter, from the first sentence even, as against the journey and against the experience of adventure on which it is going to draw. Here are the first words of Tristes Tropiques: 'I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions' (p. 15). Where are the vanity and pride of the disciplined and accomplished social scientist? Confounding expectations he confesses: 'I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me making a start'. To this lycee teacher, drawn by a chance morning phone call to undertake the great and wonderful transatlantic journey which would make him an internationally renowned ethnographer, the adventure has 'unavoidable drawbacks' and the dangerous life in the heart of the virgin forest, once experienced, presents itself as 'an imitation of military service' (p. 15).

The notion of journey as source and inspiration for getting to know new lands and new peoples has to be revised and even denied since the fissure, the forking of ways established by it on the planetary space, shows itself as the way to be followed by the waste-products of the West. This is constantly being hurled in the face of the rest of mankind, as we read in Tristes Tropiques: 'The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind' (p. 43). Levi-Strauss asks: 'What else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?' He concludes: 'Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world [...] demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe' (p. 43). The tropics, or any other modern Western by-products, are necessarily sad. Not due to their own nature, nor because of the native culture of their inhabitants, but rather because of the perverse way in which they were colonized by the Western world or by its historical taskmasters.

In the seesaw of the journey and of the ensuing colonization of the tropics, as long as the Western world is given an initial advantage, an original advantage that is, the tortoise beats Achilles, as the following examples show.

In the Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s, when Levi-Strauss leaves the centre of the city and enters the more peaceful streets, he is suddenly back in his homeland. He is in Nice or Biarritz, but--please note--at the time of Napoleon III. The younger and faster recedes in space so that the older and slower can step forward in time, and get ahead. Our cosmopolitan traveller comments: 'Through visiting my first English University with a campus surrounded by Neo-Gothic buildings at Dacca in Western Bengal, I now look upon Oxford as a kind of India that has succeeded in controlling the mad, the mildew, and the ever-encroaching vegetation' (p. 41. My emphasis). Is Levi-Strauss not saying the same about the French campus at the University of Sao Paulo? The advanced European campus is, in the tropics, a campus secured in space and lost in time, which hence can only be recovered by means of the true chronology.

Glimpsing the new landscapes, the traveller's eye is caught less by the exotic (the vegetation, the customs, the costumes and so on) than the old-fashioned: 'The tropics are less exotic than out of date' (p. 106). The substitution of the exotic by the obsolete is a question, as we have stressed, of a return to the ethnocentrism from which the ethnographer wanted, and needed, to be released. This particular and ambiguous form of ethnocentrism, which we here classify as Levi-Straussian, is based on a fundamental notion of purity. On the one hand, this purity is a sort of initial advantage that the colony, at the ethnographer's hands, always gives to the metropolis; on the other hand--and here appears the new element from which derives the ambiguity of the ethnocentric issue in Levi-Strauss--this purity is also the value which the non-westerner ought not to have conceded in the process of being colonized by the West. Each culture of the planet remains in its own corner, jealous of what it is and represents. Yet, the journey lays bare the principle of cultural plurality. Why are there so many cultures in the world instead of a single one?

In the ethical trial of multiple cultures in social, political, and economical litigation, there emerges unequivocally the obedience to another fundamental notion in the world of Tristes Tropiques, that of the original distance between different civilizations. All of the many cultures on the planet, including the Western, should have preserved themselves by distance, but instead they did not remain separate. They drew together, touched each other, and communicated intimately. The distance between the diverse areas of the planet should have been maintained--and here I apologize for the pun--come hell or high water. The journey, as hyphen, as place in between, has destroyed and still destroys the distance between peoples as it corrupts them. To Levi-Strauss the journey is the most righteous pretext for violence. The contact between different cultures, however idealized, is contagious; it is the transmission and dissemination of the Western virus into a foreign body.

Nevertheless, a stroke of fate guided Levi-Strauss's steps to the transatlantic journey and to the career of a Sociology professor in Brazil. It guided them also to ethnography and the domestic journey inside Brazil. During a greater part of his stay in the tropics he constantly had to face a situation, which, once transposed into his book, as we saw, gave rise to revulsion and shame. As he grounds his contentious view of different societies in an ethnographic system that is itself grounded in the concepts of purity and distance, of intangibility, the traveller Levi-Strauss must now return, this time positively, to the root theme of the repudiation of the journey, so as to effect some subtle changes to it. The empirical journey ends up subtracting from the journey as an absolute concept the inevitability of the ethnographer's close association with his professional experience and with different peoples in other lands.

The first difference reveals itself in reflections on the modern transatlantic journey and historical time. Levi-Strauss asks: 'At what period would the study of the Brazilian savages have afforded the purest satisfaction, and reveal them in their least adulterated state?' (p. 50) In the eighteenth century, on the voyage with Bougainville, author of Journey Around the World? Or in the sixteenth century, beside our familiar Jean de Lery and Andre Thevet? The question is not rhetorical, although it is that too. In its epistemological responsibility it serves, as we have emphasized, to pose alternatives for a more productive ethnographical work, and also for the clarification of a scientific dilemma that is peculiar to the scientist. Levi-Strauss answers his own question under the guise of a dichotomy and then enunciates the dilemma. If the return to the past helps to 'save a custom, gain a ceremony, or share in another belief', the advance in time can bring 'lines of inquiry' (p. 51) worthy of enriching the reflection. It is a matter of a game of chequers and of its reverse, a game in which the loser wins. A game on the board where the savages live is lost, but a reflection on paper is won. A reflection on paper is lost, but a game on the board of the savages is won. Does the one who loses most win, or does the one who wins most lose? Here at last is the dilemma made explicit: 'The less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity' (p. 51). The understanding of the cultural diversity is in direct proportion to the corruption of the cultures involved.

As we have been emphasizing indirectly, the hybrid is the most terrible of monsters in the ghostly world of Tristes Tropiques. And in order to keep our grasp of such a world we need to move on to the second subtle distinction elaborated in the book. The ethnographer was plagued by the tic about which Michel Foucault tells us in his History of Madness. Contrary to what the partisans of analysis as a heuristic system think, whenever the Western thinker divides (partage) a whole he aims to effect a rejection (rejet) of one of the parts--in order to establish a hierarchy between the parts, or so that the rejected part may be repressed in the linguistic fabric. In the historical world reported by the ethnographer there are journeys and journeys. The 'real journeys' are mixed up with the intrepid journeys of the Age of Discovery, 'when it was still possible [for the sailor] to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted, and spoilt' (p. 50). The ethnographer yearns: 'Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished' (p. 43). Nonetheless, even at that time, when the pure was reached and touched by the pure, already they found they were both contaminated forever. But there are other journeys, more false, and also more recent, of which the following is an example: 'From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travellers' tales' (p. 44). The spectacle of these moral spices succeeded the sensual experience of new and different perfumes and flavours, that is, 'platitudes and commonplaces seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations' (p. 16). There is always a moral arithmetic set up a priori to account for the mutual effects of loss.

Hence the conclusion that the empirical differences suggested by the experience of the transatlantic and domestic journeys are raised by the ethnographer in order to immediately reaffirm, incongruously and with much ado, not only the absolute concept of the journey but also the theme of its repudiation. We wonder that Jacques Derrida, on first reading chapter XXVIII of Tristes Tropiques, 'A Writing Lesson', should find these 'very fine pages, calculated to amaze'. (9) If the Latin poets, as Ernst-Robert Curtius teaches us, used to compare the composition of a work to a sea voyage, we can also compare reading to a journey. Derrida could only think that those pages are calculated to amaze because he had, perhaps, lost the bearing of the book, which is the journey, in order to give in wholly to following the course of his own obsession, the statute of writing [ecriture] in Western philosophy.

As he gets to the chapter 'A Writing Lesson', after the other journey we had been invited on from the very opening sentence, the reader of Tristes Tropiques should not be surprised at the predictability of the reported facts and the reflections made there by the ethnographer. This is a much-trailed chapter as we read on in the book, only in a less exemplary way. The chapter 'A Writing Lesson' is already embedded in the question the reader poses to the book: how come this tireless and extraordinary traveller hates the journey? It is already embedded in the question put at the time when the journeys through the Brazilian interior start: how come this traveller who hates travelling so much is going to supplement the transatlantic journey with domestic ones? Could the reader, through his own critical expertise, not foresee what might await him in many of the chapters? Must not the critique of the sailor-colonizer and of the sailor-evangelist, in Tristes Tropiques, be mirrored in the critique of the traveller-ethnographer? Do not the three of them, as well as belonging to the West, not have the journey as their common activity? Can any one of them be better than the others, when it is they, all three, who most freely surmount the distance between different cultures, defiling them?

Jacques Derrida rightly observes that the three travellers (colonizer, missionary, and ethnographer) are participants in the 'anthropological war', that is, 'the essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures, even when that communication is not practised under the banner of colonial or missionary oppression'. (10) The difference is that where Derrida speaks of communication, Levi-Strauss underlines the opposite, the 'intact'. He speaks of distance and separation; he warns about closeness and contagion, always qualifying the latter pejoratively. In other words, he speaks of the violence of those who transgress the limits established by cultural purity. And moreover, of the violence against themselves of those who allow these established limits to be transgressed.

There is authenticity in the loneliness of the ethnographer and in utopian intersubjective relations, but of what kind? The last words of Tristes Tropiques, in their enchantment and serenity, redeem the hatred, the revulsion and the shame of the first sentences of the book. The ethnographer speaks of the human experience before nature, which expresses itself through inexpressible feelings. Hence the descriptive style of the sentences and the absence of the other: 'The contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelled at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and spiritual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one sometimes exchanges with a cat' (p. 544). Just like the chance appearance of language, so too the journey was considered, from the very first pages of the book, as the product of a 'stroke of fate'. 'The Writing Lesson', in the range of its discontinuity, is anticipated by the fate of the journey, by the journey as malign experience, before it is anticipated by the ethnographer's phonocentrism. Any penetration into the cultural space of the other produces violence a priori. We can find a thousand examples to demonstrate the presence of violence, among them the example of the disqualification of writing, whether taking it as exemplary of Rousseau's time or not.

The journey to Brazil constitutes a model of journey that is the counter-journey. The great absent author of Tristes Tropiques--and not by mere coincidence--is the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes, and the great absent book of Tristes Tropiques--and not by mere coincidence--is The Lusiads. The counter-journey ends up deconstructing the concept and the model of journey as they were described and configured by the tradition of the Western epic poem. For a better understanding of the question posed in Tristes Tropiques it is important to shift the genealogical axis from Levi-Strauss's French descent, of whom Rousseau is the best example, and follow the lineage of Dante Alighieri and the world of his reading (also a counter-example) of the traveller and explorer Ulysses. The journey, involuntary supplement to Rousseau, or rather the counter-journey, related to Dante, can be read in canto XXVI of the Divine Comedy, where the poet himself and Virgil find Ulysses in flames in the eighth circle of Hell. There lie the bad counsellors, Ulysses and Diomedes, condemned for having conceived the idea of the Trojan Horse. Ulysses had repressed his pity so that he could give himself exclusively to his 'ardour', which took him to face the unknown. Driven by that ardour for adventure, he now succumbs to the flames of hell. Virgil asks Ulysses to reveal the circumstances of his death, and Ulysses tells him of his last journey.

In canto XXVI, Dante performs a significant change in the circumstances that close Ulysses's journey/life. Instead of the return to Ithaca and to the arms of Penelope, as the classical lesson teaches us, he makes him the victim of a shipwreck before Mount Purgatory. This shift, as John Freccero, our guide through the Dantean jungle, teaches us, is only possible because after a first death, that of the body, there follows 'la seconda morte', that of the soul. Freccero writes: 'We should note in passing that this distinction between the two kinds of death is useful in explaining the difference between the natural death of Ulysses, largely irrelevant to Dante, and the death by shipwreck which he devised'. (11)

Let us go back to Levi-Strauss: 'But the problem still remains: how can the anthropologist overcome the contradiction resulting from the circumstances of his choice? He has in front of him and available for study a given society--his own: why does he decide to spurn it and to reserve for other societies--which are among the most remote and the most alien--a patience and a devotion which his choice of vocation has deflected from his fellow-citizens?' (p. 501).

In spite of his hatred for the journey, in spite of the shame and the revulsion he feels when he remembers the ancient deeds, the traveller writes Tristes Tropiques as the epitaph of his journeys and adventures. He writes it as if he were telling a tale that ends in a double shipwreck. First, the shipwreck of Europe before Mount Purgatory: 'The adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction' (p. 515). Second, the shipwreck of the ethnographer before the Indians. To Ulysses's peroration to the ship's crew, 'you were not born to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge' (XXVI. 119-20), there follows the punishment which comes from the mountain: 'for from the new land a storm rose' (XXVI. 137), and the storm would not end 'until the sea closed again over us' (XXVI. 142). Seeking salvation in the journey of the book that now ends, the ethnographer takes his leave: 'Oh, fond farewell to savages and explorations!' (p. 544) 'Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour' (p. 503). The ethnographer no longer needs words, he remains in a space in between, 'below the threshold of thought and over and above society' (p. 544). The rest is silence. (12)

(1) The appearance of chance as a generating model in the discontinuity of the evolutionary process is characteristic of the texts by Levi-Strauss. See, for instance, his thesis on the birth of the phonetic language: 'Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually'. Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Barbara Freeman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 59. On the 'theme of chance' see also Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), and Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

(2) Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 18. Hereafter the page numbers corresponding to a quotation are given in brackets in the text.

(3) See the contribution '1933, February--Negrophilia', by James Clifford, in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) pp. 901-08. As to the revealing and symptomatic absence of Amerindian cultures from the French artistic world of the late 1920s and early 1930s see also James Clifford, 'On Ethnographic Surrealism', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (1981), 539-64. One is surprised at the little attention given to the classic work of Alfred Metraux, Marcel Mauss's disciple and a member of the Trocadero group--see Alfred Metraux, La civilization materielle des tribus Tupi-Guarani (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1928).

(4) Among the Frenchmen who helped deprovincialize the USP, it was Roger Bastide who opted for studies on acculturation, interested primarily in the African culture in Brazil. The 'principle of cutting', formulated by him as he analysed the Afro-Brazilian religions, institutes the journey between two social and cultural worlds as the measure of non-marginalization. The Negro can be, at the same time and without conflict, an ardent adept of Candomble and an economic agent perfectly adapted to modern rationality. See Roger Bastide, Les religions africaines au Bresil (Paris: PUF, 1960).

(5) Here we are using Roman Jakobson's concept to configure the meaning of a linguistic unit. 'For Jakobson the interpretation of any linguistic unit sets forth, at any given moment, two independent intellectual mechanisms: comparison to the similar units (=that could therefore substitute it, which belong to the same paradigm), establishing the relation with coexisting units (=that belong to the same syntagma). Hence, the meaning of a word is determined simultaneously by the influence of those which are around it within discourse, and by the evocation of those which could have taken its place'. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dicionario das ciencias da linguagem (Lisbon: Publicacoes Dom Quixote, 1973), p. 140.

(6) Sergio Buarque de Holanda made a similar reading of the Brazilian intellectual profile at the time, in his classic Raizes do Brasil [1936], 10th edn (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Jose Olympio Editora S.A., 1976). See especially the chapter 'Novos Tempos', pp. 113-25.

(7) 'The perpetual race of Achilles and the tortoise' in Discussao [1932], in Jorge Luis Borges, Obras Completas, 4 vols (Sao Paulo: Globo, 1999), I, pp. 261-62. [My own translation].

(8) 'Zeno's arguments on motion present no difficulty for us', in Aristotle, Physics, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 161.

(9) Of Grammatology, p. 103.

(10) Of Grammatology, p. 107. My emphasis.

(11) John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 148. This and the following quotations are from Chapter 8, 'Dante's Ulysses: from epic to novel'.

(12) This article is a summary of the first part of a long essay on the concept of the journey in Levi-Strauss and Antonin Artaud. My thanks go to Richard Correll for revisions to the English translation.

SILVIANO SANTIAGO

Universidade Federal Fluminense