"When Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote about this dwindling tribe in Tristes Tropiques, his fascinating 1955 memoir, he compared these 'knightly Indians' with their 'aristocratic arrogance' to a deck of European playing cards; they even looked the parts of jacks, kings and queens, he wrote, with their cloaks and tunics decorated in red and black with recurrent motifs resembling hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. The tribal queens, Mr. Lévi-Strauss noted, even seemed to trump Lewis Carroll’s imagined Queen of Hearts with their taste for playing with severed heads brought back by warriors."
Link: Richard Rorty - Philosophy - Postmodernism - New York Times.
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