That is why, last night, the opening of a new show in Paris was particularly timely. Brazil Indian is the most spectacular and extensive display of Amerindian artefacts to be shown in Europe. Bringing together some 350 objects — from funeral urns that brood like great owls over their bellies full of bones through the myriad-hued headdresses of dancing warriors to the goggle-eyed masks of tribal shamans — it represents something of the range and complexity, the ingenuity and dignity of Brazil’s indigenous peoples from primeval times to the present day.

But this culture is fast depleting. First slavery and disease and now an expanding agribusiness sweep away forest dwellers and with them knowledge of countless forest species whose potential importance may now never be discovered. What can be done to prevent this? How can 2,000 soldiers even begin to police an isolated region that is twice the area of France?

When I visited this place with the Parisian journalists last year, we were invited to meet the governor of the state of Pará, who delivered an interminably dull lecture. There was barely a word about the Amerindians whom we had been sent to learn about. Bauxite production seemed to be his main boast. “The Brazilians are ashamed of us Indians,” a young man with feathered armbands (Füpeatucü he was called — it means “unfurled wing”, apparently) informed me. “Compare this to Mexico, where the indigenous people have recovered their identity through national politics,” Cristina Barreto, a curator of the Grand Palais show, says.

A global reaction to the death of Sister Dorothy has elicited a government response. Now Brazil Indian builds on this. Emphasising to thousands of European visitors that the rainforest peoples are neither the “savages” of colonial legend nor the isolated primitives of modern stereotypes, but the creators of an intricate, sophisticated and adaptable civilisation, it asks for wider respect. “It is only when the Brazilians start to take their indigenous peoples seriously,” Barreto says, “that indigenous peoples will start to have a serious chance to survive.”

• IN 1532, the Pope declared that the Amerindian had a soul. Publicly the Brazilians agreed for the sake of national pride. But privately they continued to think of them as savages. Some 300 further years were to pass before the question of whether an Indian was also a human being occurred. So this week’s trip to Paris offered no escape from the blood-curdling tales of cannibalism that have recently riveted the British press. It was all there — bar, of course, the brains fried in Clover butter — but not, as you might have expected, in the Amerindian show. It was in an exhibition at the Cartier Foundation by a young, sophisticated Brazilian artist. Adriana Varejaõ harks back to the disturbing preconceptions of terrified colonialists. Her thought-provoking images challenge identities. “Brazil is a hybrid,” she said. “Its artists imbibed the ideas of other artists much as one warrior ate another to add the dead man’s strength to his own.”

  Cannibalism is much closer to us than we like to think.

• A COUPLE of hours in Notre-Dame did nothing to erase the suspicion. It was there in the north transept, amid the sharded light falling through the great rose windows, that Eudes de Sully first elevated the host and chalice 800 years ago. This elevation of the flesh and blood of Christ was subsequently extended to all Roman Catholic churches by the Council of Trent in the 16th century and is still practised today. Sometimes, distracted by novelty, poking about curiously amid “primitive” cultures, we forget how striking, how extraordinary, how primal is our own. Certainly, last year during my visit to the Amazon, there were few things more fascinating than the anthropology of a dozen Parisians shooting the rapids in a wobbly dugout.

Times Recommends

• A new kind of western conservatism
• Georgiana is the wrong role model
• Alaska, where cops don't bother you