Tristes Tropiques (1955)

One of my stars is for the drawings. I get a feeling he orders his thoughts with them before there are words, and he's tuned into this. Or maybe that's just my brain on mana. ( )

The book starts with quaint praise of Marx. There is a barely restrained anti-U.S. rhetoric in the early going. Both of these were very much in vogue when Levi-Strauss was writing in the mid-1950s. All in all, Levi-Strauss relies far too much on metaphor as an explanatory tool. Sometimes this is helpful, but too often he heaps metaphor on metaphor until the writing goes bellyup. I must say I am puzzled by the long preamble about travel itself----the ships he takes, his wartime escape as a Jew from France, his long description of the phenomenon of sunrise/sunset. I must confess to skipping a few pages here. And then this extended overview of São Paulo. Perhaps this will become clear; I'm still reading.

I revisited this book after 20+ years (a boarding pass bookmark is dated June 1982). Rereading a book after a number of years, especially if it is a good one, rewards one with new insights and perspectives. At times, one is disappointed. I believe that in rereading Levi-Strauss, with his sense of sorrow and the futility of the human race, his sense of the human and environmental catastrophe we have wrought upon the earth these last several hundred years (and accelerated in the 20th century), one must see the truth in his dire perspectives.

Written in 1955, this account, primarily of Levi-Strauss's researches among Brazilian/Mato Grosso tribes in the 1930's*, contained a damning enough account of the miseries of disease, deforestation, and cultural collapse which, true to his prediction, has had a devastating effect on native Brazilians. Other meditations on the miseries of Calcutta; the wasteful cycle of land use in the Americas; the authoritarian, frozen in time deficiencies of Islam; and the transcendent truths of Buddhism tie into the author's narrative.

Finally, this memoir is an excellent exposition of the mental makeup and the cultural rootlessness which characterize the anthropologist. The last few pages, which I have revisited many times over the years, are a beautiful, lyrical (in a book characterized by its lyricism) exposition of man's beginnings and his ultimate significance in the universe. An anthropological classic. 3/04

*Levi-Strauss was the editor of the Tropical Forest volume of the Handbook of South American Indians.

Exploring the ideologies of cultural anthropology, Levi-Strauss relates his experiences in beautiful language and passages so descriptive one can almost go there with him. ( )

The attitudes towards native peoples expressed in this book are dated, to say the least, but it remains an important classic of structural anthropology. It also happens to be very well-written and fascinating. ( )