Fora da ordem, or on Time and Travel in Cunha and Lévi-Strauss

In his article, "Fora da ordem, or on Time and Travel in Cunha and Lévi- Strauss," Javier Uriarte discusses the representations of spaces through the use of some key temporal notions in two canonical accounts of displacement in Brazil, Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands; 1902), and Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (1955). It examines the ways in which the narrators imagine the temporal status of the spaces they visit and the importance of time and memory in the construction of these books, the nostalgic tone used by both narrators to describe the spaces and the peoples they encounter, and the ambiguous relation they establish with the notions of progress and modernization. As both travellers discover realities that were previously unknown to them, they transform their vision of the ideological and cultural origin of their voyages. Thus, homecomings become impossible. Instead, both books propose that the "new worlds" encountered are in reality their national or cultural origins. Finally, the article studies the temporal connotations of the images of ruins, which are pervasive in both texts, focusing on their connections to modernity, destruction, origins, and resistance.