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Tristes Tropiques

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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.

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.

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.

This is Levi-Strauss most readable book, and it is a fantastic introduction to the "why" behind his interest in structuralism. There are hints of the various methods and approaches that he uses in later works, but this book shows why he was to develop structuralism in later works. The writing is clever and eloquent, and various conclusions he made about cultural diversity address contemporary concerns in a highly articulate and responsible manner. Read this book before delving into the other writings of one of the 20th Century's most important anthropologists.

While I have little to say about the anthropological veracity of this seminal text, I am capable of recognizing its vast aesthetic and intellectual beauty. Levi-Strauss places himself (or inserts himself), in a number of so called 'savage' tribes in Brazil- the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. This is also an anthropological memoir, Levi-Strauss retraces his training in philosophy to his break and subsequent beginnings as a professor of anthropology in Brazil. This is a universal text by a man searching for universal structures of meaning. He poses questions that remain central to the role of the anthropologist to this day. How can the observer not also be an intruder? What is the basic object of inquiry? Can one avoid proselytizing ones subject? Levi-Strauss is searching for the purely human society, which he finds perhaps most completely in the Nambikwara. "Whether traditional or degenerate, this society offered one of the most rudimentary forms of social and political organization that could possibly be imagined." Is this search an essential rejection of the West? In the final analysis, Levi-Strauss laments the eventual disintegration of the purely human society. A beautiful an important (albeit dated) text.

I often review works which I have read long ago. Upon beginning to write about them I invariably discover how much time I gave to something which seemed so worthwhile at the time, and which I have almost completely forgotten. I then ordinarily do some catch- up learning about the book. And my review becomes an amalgalm of distant past and most recent present impression. And meanwhile the heart of the book is forever unknown to me and lost. And my review is only a minor tracing an impression both of the book itself and what of my mind knew when reading through it.
This certainly applies to my reading of this particular work, ,the one work of Levi- Strauss which I remember reading with any degree of real understanding and pleasure. His making of a life and career as an anthropologist which are a good part of the first part of the work interested me then.
The long travelogue and explorations into Amerindian society and mind, interested me less.
I understand though that the real voyage is into and along with the mind of Levi- Strauss itself, a mind much more complicated than I was ordinarily used to meeting and ingesting .
I do remember however the somewhat majestic tone, the tone of restrained sadness of quiet mourning which seemed to go through the work as Levi- Strauss met with worlds being lost and deterorating , in part through their meetings with the very kind of Western mind he himself exemplified. It is the mind destroying the object in the process of knowing it , as the Western explorers of these tribal societies transformed them out of their own natural state by meeting with them.
For Levi- Strauss and this I remember, the ' primitive mind' is not ' primitive at all' and may be in its linguistic complexity and social structure far more intricate than the ' civilized ' as it were sophisticated worlds we believe we live in.
I read this work as a way of being acquainted with a great mind, a mind which to my mind proved to be quite elusive and even distant.
But clearly the exploration made by Levi- Strauss of his own inner and external worlds is one which calls to the curious human mind and heart in its quest for understanding ' of the other'
Montaigne took a trip in the Brazilian jungle in the twentieth
century, looked in the mirror and saw the face of Levi- Strauss.

Claude Levi-Strauss begins TRISTES TROPIQUES by noting how much he hates traveling. It is fortunate, then, that he managed to overcome this aversion since his book is one of the most startling and engrossing books of the decade (published in 1955). TRISTES TROPIQUES is a book for academics but Levi-Strauss' prose style is anything but. Part autobiography, part philosophy, and part cultural anthropology, the book details the wanderings of a man who chose to wander into the Amazon rain forest to study a variety of indigenous tribes like the Bororo and the Nambikwara. The book title translates from the French as "sad tropics," but the sadness of both title and theme does not emerge until midway when Levi-Strauss has a chance to reflect on the meaning of his travels. In chapter 28, he notes the unforeseen deaths of hundreds of natives who died ten years earlier of pulmonary oedema, probably from contact with Europeans. He continues in the same vein by noting other and similar mass deaths. As an experienced anthropologist (oddly enough his academic preparation was in philosophy and sociology), he observed with a sharp eye the all too human foibles of the Nambikwara with whom he was then dwelling. In his interactions with their chief, a puffed-up charlatan, Levi-Strauss taught this chief about the existence of writing. Though the chief knew nothing of the alphabet, he was quick enough to foresee the power that the printed word could offer so that by pretending to read to his tribe, he could "borrow" the totemic significance of words on paper. I almost accused Levi-Strauss of violating STAR TREK's Prime Directive by inserting new technology denied to competing tribes.

One of the joys of reading TRISTES TROPIQUES is Levi-Strauss's ability to place himself in the line of fire even as he makes that line a point of drama. Levi-Strauss is not bashful about taking frequent digressions that after reading them one can see that they are not digressions at all. In that same chapter, he waxes philosophical about the nature and history of writing after he sees what that chief has tried to co-opt it for. Levi-Strauss concludes from this that mankind did not invent writing to better himself in any aesthetic sense. Instead, writing was simply seen as yet another handy tool by which one race might oppress another. It is possible, I suppose, to intuit the embedded structuralist tenets that later came to mark Levi-Strauss's worldview. There are plenty of binary polarities lurking in the margins that typify traditional structural thought, but I prefer to read TRISTES TROPIQUES as an extended metaphor that puts to bed the competing philosophy of Sartre who looked in all the wrong places to find Meaning in the Universe.

After disdaining 'travel writing' Levi-Strauss went on to write a masterpiece that among many other things is ultimate travel writing. This is a rich feast of past and lost worlds and cultures, of nature, an entire chapter beautifully describing the ocean sky at sunset, a vivid description of the ocean's doldrums, and then of course, the story of the people of the Amazon basin and the upland rain forests. All of this, prefaced by a horrific account of escaping the Nazi regime. Definitely a book to savor.

This book is really a number of books in one - a diatribe against the New World vis a vis the Old World, time spent with the natives in South America, and a bemoaning of the lack of progress by Mankind in its development.
His comparison of the New and Old Worlds is probably quite apt - the Old World, with its social and physical structures evolved during a slower moving time and "was made to last". The New World came when progress was increasing much more quickly, new materials became available, and social and physical structures were relatively short term. His description is probably reasonably accurate, but I would have thought a little more thought as to the reasons and causes would have helped (along with a little more gratitude to the New World for giving him a home, all the while he was grizzling about them!)

His accounts of his time with the various South American native groups I found disjointed, purely narrative, little rationale for the few conclusions that he did try to draw, and, in his descriptions of the various components of the Bororo society in Chapter 23, almost fanciful.

Finally, as though he had put together the first two parts of the book for some other purpose, he launches into a different dialogue about the progress of mankind. He compares Islam society with the society of France, in that both have become fossilised at a time some centuries before, continuing to believe that what they evolved at those much earlier times should still stand them in good stead for the future. Although, in some ways the most interesting of the three parts, this last was to a large extent contradictory to the views espoused in the first part - in the latter he bemoaned the progress of mankind, and in the former he bemoaned the lack of progress of mankind.

All in all, interesting read, but a little disappointing.

Having been a fan of Levi-Strauss based on his book THE SAVAGE MIND from some years back,was delighted to find this book.While it is part travel,largely anthropology,one of the gems is his analysis of the thrust of Islam toward other,non-Moslem societies. A very good read and highly recommended.