This chapter surveys a halfdozen, focusing on the most controversial: the major exhibition held at the museum of modem art (MOMA), ‘“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’. Travelers tell different stories in different places, and on West Fifty-third Street an origin story of modernism is featured. At the Museum of Modern Art an exact history is told featuring individual artists and objects, their encounters in specific studios at precise moments. Anthropologists, long familiar with the issue of cultural diffusion versus independent invention, are not likely to find anything special in the similarities between selected tribal and modern objects. Achebe’s image of a ‘ruin’ suggests not the modernist allegory of redemption but an acceptance of endless seriality, a desire to keep things apart, dynamic, and historical. The organizers of the MOMA exhibition have been clear about its limitations, and they have repeatedly specified what they do not claim to show.