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| Tristes Tropiques | 
 enlarge | Author: Claude Levi-strauss
Creators: John Weightman, Doreen Weightman
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (10 reviews)
Sales Rank: 154897
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0140165622
Dewey Decimal Number: 981.00498
EAN: 9780140165623
ASIN: 0140165622
Publication Date: August 1, 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
Amazon.com Review
"I hate travelling and explorers," famously declared Claude Levi-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 Levi-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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
Into the remote parts of South America August 27, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I like to travel and to observe the cities, landscapes, the plants and animals and the human inhabitants of the countries I go to. So does Levy-Strauss, and he is a fantastic observer, much more sharp-eyed than I could ever hope to be, and a highly entertaining writer. In this classic he talks about a wide range of observations from a number of corners of the world, but mainly about South America.
The book deals with Levi-Strauss' time as a teacher in Brazil and his trips into the South American hinterland; his escape from Nazi-occupied France; His later expeditions to visit remote tribes in the Amazon; and an assortment of observations about such diverse topics as the frustration of the traveler to never encounter the true, pristine state of a culture, the Indian caste system and the division of public and private space in different parts of the world. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes: My favorite one is how a native chief from observing Levy-Strauss grasped the social importance of writing, but not its role in information storage and transmission. He bluffed to impress his underlings and drew freshly invented line configurations on a paper. This leads Levy-Strauss to observe that from the invention of writing to its universal knowledge a few millennia passed, during which it did not serve to liberate the masses, but to control them. Such wide-ranging philosophical associations are frequent and were very enjoyable to me. The book is, however, definitely not only a collection of anecdotes, but in parts a very detailed description of the life of some of the native tribes he visited in the Amazon. Drawings of artifacts, patterns used in body-painting and photographs supplement the text. We are given both anthropological descriptions of the lifes of these peoples, their social organization, attitudes and material culture, as well as Levy-Strauss' personal experiences when living among them, sometimes his friendships with members of these tribes. Of course these people were strongly affected by the contact with European civilization, often to the worse. We also learn about these developments. There isn't really much direct explanation about his theoretical approaches to anthropology. This is the kind of book which made me wish that I could have been an expedition member of Levy-Strauss' team. Highly recommended.
A journey down the savage river of mind and memory June 28, 2005
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.
Idea overload and totally interesting May 24, 2005
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism January 21, 2004
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
 Parrot Flambee December 29, 2003
19 out of 22 found this review helpful
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.
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