Lévi-Strauss is a many-sided genius, so that it is still partly an open question what part of his work will survive after he crosses the Acheron. His heritage may overstep the limits of ethnology. Any description of his work focused on existing academic disciplines could miss whatever may prove to be the essence of his work. I have chosen the theme of local versus universal knowledge, because from one perspective a group's bodily and external universe is the sum of all it can know, but each group's universe differs from all others. Yet, humanity also has a common universe: some similarities are more potent than differences. This is one great question structuralism was set up to consider. It involves analysis of exacting factual data, as well as much methodological discovery, philosophical awareness and literary descriptive power.

The peoples I studied, such as Mâori and Orokaiva, still perceived themselves, in 1960, as wholly enveloped in their own local system of thought. Today, their civilisations are not lost but their myths have been ordered by a new calculus, aimed at relating the core of their historical universe to another one, global in its range, contemporary in its forms, inspired by abundant objective knowledge and a metaphysical source of moral rules. As such transformations were not a field of anthropological study fifty years ago, it was only with the help of structural methods that I could hope to model the transformed relations of these plural universes, to discover by what hidden logic they took shape and how new frames were created to cope with new experiences.