In 2005, full of days, experiences, knowledge, and glory, Claude Lévi-Strauss expresses his disappointment and anguish for our era in one of his last television appearances: "I observe the modern disasters, the terrifying disappearance of living species, plant or animal, and the fact that, precisely because of its current density, the human species undergoes a form of internal poisoning, if I may use the term, and I contemplate the present and the world in which I end my life: it is not a world that I like."

In the three chapters that make up this book, which are three lectures given twenty years earlier, in the spring of 1986, on the occasion of his fourth visit to Japan, the eminent anthropologist demonstrates with astonishing insight ways to overcome the superficial Western messianism that for centuries proclaimed an unsubstantiated universal truth and a leveling unified culture for the entire planet. "Western civilization has lost the model it shaped for itself and no longer dares to propose it to others": blind faith in a uniform, insatiable, and one-way evolutionism that obeys exclusively the laws of production and consumption collapses as an unsustainable choice.

In the era of globalization and rapid rearrangements, Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us that humanity lives and breathes through diversity and variety and that science has little to teach and much more to learn from the cultural richness of ancient peoples, such as the Japanese, who progress without renouncing their roots and traditions.