Tristes Tropiques

Recommended by Larry Rohter, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #16 in Anthropology

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line ‘I hate travelling and explorers’, yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found ‘human society reduced to its most basic expression’. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of ‘primitive’ man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly... more

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Larry Rohter My original intention was to choose only Brazilian books because it’s good for us to hear Brazilian voices, but this one is so good that I had to throw aside my Brazilian choice and give you this. It’s mostly but not entirely about Brazil. Levi-Strauss was in São Paulo, which is now the world’s third largest city, in the 1930s. He draws a lovely, fascinating portrait of the city, but then he also goes off into the Amazon and that’s where he’s at his best. He stays with four different indigenous peoples and he does a portrait of each. I’ve been doing the same since the 1970s, and even though... (Source)


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