 Diderot’s contributions to Raynal’s Histoire have been described as proto-anthropological, and another provocative work from these years, his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, was similarly conceived and influential. The text offers an imagined dialogue between Tahitians and Europeans about the different sexual, marital and familial mores of the two cultures, and Diderot anticipates through fiction the figure of the native ethnographer who asks comparative questions about the foundations of morality and civilization so as to generate universal cultural understandings through comparison.