Mythology -- Case studies, Mythology, Spirituality -- Indigenous 

"Everything separates the Indians of central South America from those of the northwest of North America: geographical distance, environment, life-styles, languages, cultures. And yet this book shows that in both places a similar mythological system is in operation — the proceeding volumes unveiled its structure and analysed how it works — subject to a series of transformations which are astonishingly consistent: winter patterns changed for summer ones or vice versa; nakedness in place of the symbol of uncooked food, and wearing clothes in place of cooking; salt instead of honey; barter or sale of food supplies replacing culinary art as a symbol of the passage from being in a natural state to having a culture; war between heaven and earth instead of what appeared at first to be a family of conflict.

This far-reaching unity of the whole of American mythology, which is proved here for the first time, poses vast theoretical and methodological problems; not only about the history of the New World, but also about the nature of thinking about myths in general and the analysis of the myths and their relationship to the currents of contemporary philosophy.

Crowning the immense undertaking begun with The Raw and the Cooked, followed by From Honey to Ashes and The Origin of Table Manners, The Naked Man tackles all these problems and, through a wide-ranging empirical investigation of the New World, tries to explain and justify, on theoretical bases, the growing importance of the position of anthropology in the other grouping, itself indissoluble, formed by the social sciences and humanities."--Book jacket. 

746 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. 

Includes bibliographical references and index.