Tristes Tropiques [Paperback]

Claude Levi-Strauss (Author), John Weightman (Translator), Doreen Weightman (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1992

First published in 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss's accounts of his researches among the peoples of the Amazon is a fascinating study and influential in understanding the organization of human society. He writes of myths and superstitions, modern cities and ancient villages, and each page is packed with anecdotes and observations. Photos & illus.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I hate travelling and explorers," famously declared Claude Lévi-Strauss, but how fortunate for readers that he should overcome his loathing to write about his experiences among the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian interior, including the Caduveo, Bororo, and Nambikwara tribes. Those who know Lévi-Strauss and Tristes Tropiques by reputation only will be pleasantly surprised by the intimate tone that colors even its most precise anthropological sections, as well as the autobiographical passages at the beginning, in which the author recounts how he fell into his career and how, shortly after the Nazis occupied Paris, he was forced to flee to America in a grueling sea voyage. Twenty-five black-and-white photographs of tribespeople, as well as numerous line drawings, accompany the text.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (August 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140165622
• ISBN-13: 978-0140165623
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #99 in Books > History > Americas > South America

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Idea overload and totally interesting, May 24, 2005

By 

Chris Stolz (canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tristes Tropiques (Paperback)

Tristes Tropiques, surely one of the great books of the twentieth century, is Levi-Strauss at his intoxicating, idea-overloaded best and an elegy for a world that colonialism and then globalisation have doen their rational best to annihilate.

Levi-Strauss, like most thinkers who come up with new ways of describing the world-- those who Richard Rorty calls "inventors of philosophical vocabularies"-- has of course been mis-read and his ideas mis-applied, as we see with the much-hyped "creation" and then "demise" of "structural anthropology." The real pleasure of this book, which mixes fascinating accounts of Levi-Strauss' travels in Brazil in the '30s with autobiography, and adds chapters on the Maya and ancient Hindu (Indian) civilisations, is in its sheer mass of artfully arranged detail and its endless, provocative play of ideas.

Levi-Strauss stays conversational, descriptive and straightforward, avoiding academic jargon and obscure references. He assumes you know the basics about people like Freud, Marx, Darwin and the Buddha, and then shows you a trip through largely non-industrial societies which unfolds from anthropological description into deep philosophical speculation on the meaning of society and life.

In Brazil, Levi-Strauss watches an illiterate but canny chieftain use his anthropological fieldnotes to intimidate his illiterate tribesmen subordinates, and speculates on the parallel origins of writing and slavery. In Matto Grosso, he meets a butcher fascinated with elephants, since "he could not imagine so much meat in one place." On the banks of the Amazon, a non-industrial tribe is dying, hypnotically lost in the symbolic intricacies of an ancient social system that makes its citizens inbreed. In India, Levi-Strauss watches Islam and Hinduism-- the "locker room" and "mother" religions-- wage symbolic and then real war post-Independence.

The book starts as anthropology, turns into philosophy, and ultimately becomes a critique of the West, driven by "reason" and technology to shake off what Levi-Strauss calls the "thick blanket of dreams" with which non-industrial civilisation arranges the Universe into Meaning, which remains for the industrialised world the greatest and unanswered question.

But Levi-Strauss does not idealise the primitive. His point is that through the study of those and that which are different, a kind of "ideal model" of society-- one which will never exist-- can be built in the imagination, and people can evaluate their world by reference to this community of mind.

This is a remarkable book-- easy to read, engrossing, and endlessly thought-provoking.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual and stimulative!, August 13, 2000

By 

M. OKAZAKI (Kochi, JAPAN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tristes Tropiques (Paperback)

This book is the first of his writings and the easiest to read. As a sociologist, I estimate it as one of premier field works, while at the same time it is the intellectual and stimulative reading, which cultural relativism criticizes the Western rationalism. The story of the anthropological research begins at "The End of The Travel" and closes at "The Beginning of The New Trip." It suggests which culture seems home to him. If once you experience the field work of the different culture, this feeling will be easily sympathized. This composition implies this touch. I remember words of witches at MacBeth: "The beauty becomes the dirty, while the dirty turns out the beauty."

Not only the students of the anthropology and sociology, but also the general educated people will enjoy the thought of this book.

38 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Parrot Flambee, December 29, 2003

By 

Buce (Palookaville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tristes-Tropiques (Paperback)

One way to gauge who's in among fashionable academics is to read the catalog for the "Writers and Readers' Documentary Comic Book" series. Sartre has an entry, and so does Derrida, and Lacan. Thirty years ago, you would have expected to find an entry in this index for Claude Levi-Strauss. No more. Translations of his principal works appear to persist in print, but the sales numbers are look low, and he seems almost to have disappeared from the trendy book reviews and such. This is perhaps a matter for at least idle curiosity: Levi-Strauss is surely no more abstruse than his magisterial contemporaries - but no less so; one is perfectly willing to be relieved the obligation of ever picking him up again.

With one exception. In style and temperament, Tristes Tropiques is so different from almost everything else Levi-Strauss wrote that it is hard to believe it is written by the same man. Oh, the primitive tribes are there, and a brief personal intellectual history, that offers a bow to Freud, and Bergeson, and Saussure. In my own copy, which I first read about 1980, I even have a pencilled notation "structuralism" - this at page 375 (Pocket Books edition, 1977). But there is almost none of the portentous vacuity that you had to cope with in the so-called "serious" works.

What you get instead is Levi Strauss the raconteur, full of travelers' tales. He dines on roasted parrot, flamed with whisky. The termites make the earth rumble. Virgins are made to spit in pots of corn, to provoke fermentation - but "as the delicious drink, at once nutritious and refreshing, was consumed that very evening, the process of fermentation was not very advanced." You almost expect the anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, that you meet in the Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, Knight.

Laced through it all, you get a kind of austere sadness which is either (a) a tragic view of life; or (b) a kind of self-indulgent posturing, depending on your temperament for skepticism. "Every effort to understand," he says, "destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature." Or: "Anthropology could with advantage be changed into 'entropology', as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of [a] process of disintegration."

Well, call me anything the like, they say, as long as you call me for dinner. It might even be an elaborate con. But so, for that matter, might the stories of Herodotus were you get the same mix of the eclectic and the tolerant, the surreal and the sly. Herodotus, we may note, is one of the first great works of Western literature. Let's hope that Levi-Strauss is not one of the last.