EXCERPT In the two watershed works of 1962, Totemism Today and The Savage Mind, where the ‘prestructuralism’ of Elementary Structures… begins to give way to the ‘poststructuralism’ of Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss establishes a paradigmatic contrast between ‘totemism’ and ‘sacrifice’ which has come to assume, for me, a status one could describe as properly mythic, allowing me to formulate more distinctly what I had confusedly perceived as being the limits of structural anthropology. Limits in the geometrical sense of the term – the perimeter of jurisdiction of the Lévi-Straussian method – as well as in the mathematico-dynamic sense – the attractor towards which certain virtualities of this method tend. This contrast has been important, in particular, for a rereading of Amazonian ethnography in the light of research carried out among the Araweté,a Tupi-speaking people of the east Amazon. It has played a pivotal role in my enterprise of rethinking the meaning of warfare cannibalism and of shamanism, two central (or rather ‘de-central’) cosmopolitical institutions of the Tupi and other Amerindian societies…