Tristes Tropiques
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
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Sociology. Travel. Nonfiction. "A magical masterpiece."—Robert Ardrey. A chronicle of the author's search for a civilization "reduced to its most basic expression.".Tags
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Member Reviews
One of the most extraordinary and rewarding books I've ever read, but those who thought they were going to get a mere travelogue or a work of "scientific" ethnography are bound to be disappointed. Its power comes from seeing a masterful mind at work on the problems of his own discipline, and then of his civilization, and finally, of his predicament as a human being. It is as existential in its exploration of the absurdity of that predicament as anything by Sartre. Amazing that he provides you with hundreds of pages of the most meticulous detail about particular cultures, and then wipes it all away at the end with a Gallic shrug and says - really none of this has any but the most elusive, contingent meaning, and it is of no use at all show more unless humans actually manage to learn from themselves how to make coherent societies. Which would mean, at the very least, to stop being forces of entropy ripping to shreds the negentropic systems which some of them, at least, had once respected. Anyone who thinks this work is dated has either not read it fully or not looked very closely at the world around him or her today. show less
Really didn't expect to blast through this one like I did. Thoroughly enjoyable in a way I can't put my finger on; maybe it's just that I'd come to expect anthropological writing to be either dry and//or belittling.
Gross generalisations, convenient stereotypes, fanciful but terribly flimsy structures of contrast or similarity and a spurious objectivity mask a real lack of interest in actually perceiving what is under the eye of the writer, except perhaps, the writer's own ego. This is Anthropology.
Anyone who thinks this book is not dated needs to stop only reading books written in the 1950s or earlier and get out more.
Alas ! Poor Orient!
Anyone who thinks this book is not dated needs to stop only reading books written in the 1950s or earlier and get out more.
Alas ! Poor Orient!
The author was one of the great anthropologists of the 20th century. He started out studying philosophy between the wars and was heavily influenced by Marx and Freud. His theory of structualism seems, at least superficially, to be a Marxist or Hegelian view of society. Structuralism is not really discussed or explained in this book, and that is probably why it is his most popular. I've read that he cobbled Tristes Tropiques together from other published magazine articles, travelogues and his notes. The book does read that way, but some of it, perhaps much of it, is quite fascinating. I found the central part of the book about his time with the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib tribes in Brazil to be the most straight forward and interesting. show more Other extraneous chapters include a detailed summary of a play that was never published, an account of a trip to a Pakistani archeological site and a great description of his escape from Vichy France to Mozambique. show less
Wow, I'm not sure why I never marked this as "read" before, but yeah... I read it as a young university student, recommended to me by a goddess who descended from heaven on a cloud of aromatic smoke. (It was one of several she brought with her.) It's a classic that should definitely be on everyone's reading list who purports to have an interest in anthropology.
Chapters XIV, XV, XVI, XXXIX of the French edition are omitted in this English edition (Atheneum New York, 1972)
This anthropological study has become a classic and is well known as such even if not read. But it is rewarding for a wider point of view even if you are not particular interested in the Brazilian indigenous societies C. L-S. encountered in the middle 1930s and which are most likely extinct now. As he writes (39): ‘people delight in travel-books and ask only to be mislead by them … humanity has taken to monoculture. The same dish will be served to us every day. … What travel has now to show us is the filth, our filth, that we have thrown in the face of humanity.’ This L-S has written in the 1950s, 70 years ago!
A few show more notes I made:
The Bororo society: The circular lay-out of the village provides a basis for and reflects the relationship between Man and the Universe, between Society and the Supernatural, and between the living and the dead (216). Thus the missionaries, in making them abandon this circular structure and build their houses in parallel rows destroyed their culture.
Kurt Unkel (Nimuendaju) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Nimuendajú
https://doaj.org/article/1d58714d09354b0d96fbde771f9c1730
The Nambikwara society:
‘The Writing Lesson’.
On the origin and function of power: the intuition of Rousseau rather than Freud (308f).
For an indigenous society the encounter with the West had come as a ‘monstrous and unintelligible cataclysm.’(319)
Thoughts on Man and his changing relation to the Universe: Rousseau again.
Tristes Tropiques is a travel book in more than just the physical sense: a book of profound exploration were Humanity is coming from and were Humanity is going to. (IIX-22) show less
This anthropological study has become a classic and is well known as such even if not read. But it is rewarding for a wider point of view even if you are not particular interested in the Brazilian indigenous societies C. L-S. encountered in the middle 1930s and which are most likely extinct now. As he writes (39): ‘people delight in travel-books and ask only to be mislead by them … humanity has taken to monoculture. The same dish will be served to us every day. … What travel has now to show us is the filth, our filth, that we have thrown in the face of humanity.’ This L-S has written in the 1950s, 70 years ago!
A few show more notes I made:
The Bororo society: The circular lay-out of the village provides a basis for and reflects the relationship between Man and the Universe, between Society and the Supernatural, and between the living and the dead (216). Thus the missionaries, in making them abandon this circular structure and build their houses in parallel rows destroyed their culture.
Kurt Unkel (Nimuendaju) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Nimuendajú
https://doaj.org/article/1d58714d09354b0d96fbde771f9c1730
The Nambikwara society:
‘The Writing Lesson’.
On the origin and function of power: the intuition of Rousseau rather than Freud (308f).
For an indigenous society the encounter with the West had come as a ‘monstrous and unintelligible cataclysm.’(319)
Thoughts on Man and his changing relation to the Universe: Rousseau again.
Tristes Tropiques is a travel book in more than just the physical sense: a book of profound exploration were Humanity is coming from and were Humanity is going to. (IIX-22) show less
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.
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Author Information
150+ Works 9,325 Members
Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, was the founder of structural anthropology. This theoretical position assumes that there are structural propensities in the human mind that lead unconsciously toward categorization of physical and social objects, hence such book titles as The Raw and the Cooked (1964) and such expositions of his work show more by others as The Unconscious in Culture and Elementary Structures Reconsidered. According to Levi-Strauss, the models of society that scholars create are often dual in nature:status-contract (Maine): Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft (Tonnies); mechanical-organic solidarity (Durkheim); folk-urban (Redfield); universalism-particularism (Parsons); and local-cosmopolitan (Merton). Levi-Strauss's writings---some of which have been described by Clifford Geertz as "theoretical treatises set out as travelogues"---have been enormously influential throughout the scholarly world. George Steiner has described him, along with Freud (see also Vol. 5) and Marx (see also Vol. 4), as one of the major architects of the thought of our times. Levi-Strauss died October 30, 2009. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Tristes tropiques
- Original title
- Tristes tropiques
- Original publication date
- 1955
- Important places
- Brazil
- Epigraph
- Nec minus ergo ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque. Lucretius, De rerum natura, III, 969
- Dedication
- To Laurent
- First words
- I hate travelling and explorers.
Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whether its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists -- Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! -- in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
- Publisher's editor*
- Malaurie, Jean (Directeur de collection)
- Original language
- French
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- ISBNs
- 74
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- 32