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In an article published in 1956 in the journal Critique, Georges Bataille praises the publication of Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes tropiques. According to him, the book’s main merit is to go beyond scientific writing and to adopt a literary register combining narration and reflection. He claims that the topics addressed in this book transcend ethnography and open onto in-the-field experience: a “limitless research” that questions ourselves. Bataille also points out in Tristes tropiques the numerous passages devoted to religion, for him a fundamental sphere that reveals the fantastical part of the human being. This essay underlines the two authors’ opposing references: the first situates himself in literature, a realm described by Bataille as irreducible, acquainted with evil; the second, notwithstanding the hybrid form of Tristes tropiques and some purely literary digressions, Levi-Strauss has its roots in science, another metalanguage. Moreover, the author of Les larmes d’Eros shows himself not very sensitive to the confrontation described by Lévi-Strauss between two civilisations, one dominant, the other dominated, and to the threats that the first poses to Amazonian Indians.