Tierra del Fuego is the southernmost inhabited locale in the world and one of South America's most popular tourist destinations, although there's nothing there except the end of the world. When asked why they have come to Tierra del Fuego, most visitors say, I just wanted to be able to say I'd been here. Paul Magee, the anthropologist among them, seizes upon this absurd nonreason to investigate the West's complex relationship to an island synonymous with the word elsewhere. Beginning with Darwin, who saw the Fuegian Indians as the world's most primitive inhabitants, Magee interweaves the...