...I cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved. There will always be new problems, and exactly at the same pace… - Claude Lévi-Strauss

...kültürel çeşitlilik olgusu yadsınır; yaşamımızı düzenleyen normlara uymayan ne varsa kültürün dışına, doğaya atılması yeğlenir.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; many may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt 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 mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

C’est un métier, maintenant, que d’être explorateur ; métier qui consiste, non pas, comme on pourrait le croire, à découvrir au terme d’années studieuses des faits restés inconnus, mais à parcourir un nombre élevé de kilomètres et à rassembler des projections fixes ou animées, de préférence en couleurs, grâce à quoi on remplira une salle, plusieurs jours de suite, d’une foule d’auditeurs auxquels des platitudes et des banalités sembleront miraculeusement transmutées en révélations pour la seule raison qu’au lieu de les démarquer sur place, leur auteur les aura sanctifiées par un parcours de vingt mille kilomètres.