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Claude Lévi-Strauss advocated a restricted understanding of the concept of landscape. In Tristes Tropiques, the reading of the landscape is that proposed by the ethnologist, not by the peoples under study, insofar as the ethnologist’s gaze alone is informed by a tradition of landscape formation and figuration. Yet La Pensée sauvage offers detailed analyses of Aranda interpretations of Central Australian landscapes. We explain this discrepancy by showing that this Aranda reading is, on the one hand, substantiated by the existence of Aranda depictions of the landscape, and, on the other, that it seems to be based on the same principles that Lévi-Strauss applies in his own reading of the landscape.