The French missionary-linguist Emile Petitot (1838-1916) spent twenty years near the Arctic Circle in Canada, publishing numerous works on First Nations languages and practices. Over time, however, he descended into delirium and began to summon imaginary persecutions, pen improbable interpretations of his Indigenous hosts, and burst into schizoid fury. Delving into thousands of pages in letters and memoirs that Petitot left behind, Pierre Deleage has reconstructed the missionary's tragic story. He takes us on a gripping journey into the illogic and hyperlogic of a mind entranced with Indigenous peoples against the backdrop of repressive church policies and the emergent social sciences of the nineteenth century. Apocalyptic visions from the Bible and prophetic movements among First Nations peoples merged in the missionary's deteriorating psyche, triggering paroxysms of violence against his colleagues and himself. Whoever wishes to understand the contradictions of living between radically different societies will find this anthropological novella hard to put down.

The Arawete are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Arawete social cosmology and ritual order. His analysis of the social and religious life of the Arawete--a Tupi-Guarani people of Eastern Amazonia--focuses on their concepts of personhood, death, and divinity.
Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of divinity--consumption--showing how its cannibalistic expression differs radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies. He situates the Arawete in contemporary anthropology as a people whose vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. For the Arawete the person is always in transition, an outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic ways they imitate. "From the Enemy's Point of View" argues that current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other Amazonian societies.