The present study has demonstrated thc potential fÍJr, and utility of applying Lévi-Strauss's work on myth, and his proposals for a historical anthropology, to the kinds of data and insights collected by the Malinowskian project of extended fieldwork by participant observatÍon. With Malinowski, we can thus !ook over lhe myth-maker's shoulder and watch the myths being maele, and with Lévi-Strauss, we can beg'in to see alI the other myth-makers who went before. By taking a myth told by one Piro man I knew well, and then com paring it to earlier versions collected by others, I was able to suggest that this myth has an intrinsic connection, for Piro people, with the social category to which I was assigned, Anel gringos, in the form of American missionaries, have had an important set of meanings for Piro people, long pre-dating any active and regular contacts. As we saw in the story of the were imagined by some Piro people, On the basis of what knew about the world as it then was. Because of this, Piro people reacted to the arrival of the SIL missionaries in ways that made sense to them, even if it baffled those missionaries, and laid the grounding for the situation I found among them in the 1980s. It was not, as I originally thought, that Piro culture or society was falling apart: it was the system that orders the inner logic of how Piro people think that was impelling them towards certain kinds of changes, towards abandoning certain kinds of practices in favour of novel but analogous practices, and this was happening because that system is inherently transformational.