In Memory of the Aymorés: The Subterranean World of the Pataxó Indians, Bahia, Brazil At the base of Monte Pascoal, in the far south of the State of Bahia in Brazil, lives a community of 3,000 Pataxó Indians. They are among the last representatives of the Macro-Gé group, and descend from they who were spread along the coast together with the Tupi when the Portuguese arrived. At that time they were called the Aymorés and their sole name spread terror amongst the villages and trading posts on the coast. Their recent history has been marked by a struggle to reintegrate Monte Pascoal National Park, of which they were driven out fifty years ago. More recently, UNESCO proclaimed this Park a "biosphere reserve" because it is one of the last refuges of the original biodiversity of the "Atlantic Rainforest," which today has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Although the Pataxó's demands are imbued with ethno-ecological arguments, which portray the redeemed figure of the wild Indian, guardian of the wisdom of the natural world, we can detect a guiding principle which suggest that a "natural area" cannot be considered for itself, and needs the same kind of transformation that a piece of meat which must be cooked before it can be eaten. Therefore, regardless of the extent of environmental awareness mobilized around the issue of the National Park and its survival, a set of Pataxó cosmological values results in an outcome contrary to the one which was hoped for. Little by little "uncontrolled" fires burn away the forest as local crafts are being replaced by increasingly mechanized production of wooden pieces. The current destruction of the Monte Pascoal National Park's tree cover cannot be understood only under pragmatically economic consideration. The destruction of these forest remnants is "programmed" in the execration of the Savage that is part of the Pataxó's religious affirmation as Catholics and their "civilized" vision of raw nature. Undoing the skein of stereotypical constructions, like the mythical figures of the Naked Jaguar or the Man-Beast, altogether paradoxical and dualistic - allow us to apprehend this cosmological consistency, which skirts the confines of analyses based on concepts of ethnogenesis and invention of tradition. From this standpoint, this book falls within a structural perspective, in which a narratological analysis is applied to various types of discourse and stories, postulating that their totality forms a single albeit discontinuous narrative thread. However, today, the focus of ethnology is ever-shifting and falls within a much broader issue -- managing a global environmental crisis. Ethnic re-composition, political action, social disaggregation or community re-aggregation based on the concepts of tradition and respecting biodiversity shape part of the ethnographic reality. Attempts to delimit the scope of these issues are astonishingly complex and require several explanatory diagrams, conceptual frameworks and several scales, ranging from the individual to regional and political institutional dynamics. We shall come to understand that this consideration of contexts draws my position near to that of "micro-history": we can and we must historicize representations so as to fit them into a continuous dialectic with the reality experienced by the groups we happen to know and study.