I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writ… - Claude Lévi-Strauss

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so! It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available; periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service … The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.

I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.

"Var olduğundan beri, her zaman ve her yerde "fikrinin peşine düşmek" insanın en değişmez uğraşlarından biri olmuştur. Bu alıştırma insana bir tatmin sağlar, bir yarar bulur onda; bu arayışın nereye götüreceğini sormaz kendine.
Şu bir vaıkadır: Fantastik görünümlü fikirlerin; gerçek dünyanın uzun süre gizli kalmış hangi düzeyinin yansıması olduğunun keşfedilmesi yüzyıllar, hatta binyıllar alsa bile zihne ait güçlerin olanaklarının araştırılması daima bir yere varır - bilimsel düşüncenin, özellikle de matematiğin tarihi bunu ispatlar."