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Tristes Tropiques
552 pages
A deeply reflective, genre-defying journey that blends vivid travelogue with profound philosophical and anthropological exploration.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like embarking on a deeply intellectual and physical journey alongside a brilliant, agile mind. It is a meandering, immersive experience that defies simple categorization, seamlessly weaving together the vivid, sensory details of a Brazilian travelogue with the dense, reflective weight of a philosophical memoir. The narrative invites you to sit in a contemplative, observant space, exploring the foundational roots of human society while simultaneously navigating the author's own sense of exile and identity. The prose is both academically groundbreaking and richly literary, prone to brilliant diversions that reward a patient reader. It will thoroughly delight those who crave a masterful blend of anthropology, personal history, and evocative travel writing.
- Mood
- contemplative
- immersive
- vivid
- Tone
- intellectual
- reflective
- observant
- philosophical
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- intellectual discovery · cultural observation · nature of human society · exile and identity
- The writing
- A masterful blend of vivid, descriptive travel writing and dense, agile philosophical analysis.
- The arc
- A journey from personal displacement and intellectual curiosity to a profound, reflective understanding of humanity's basic expressions.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave immersive, genre-defying works that weave personal memoir with foundational anthropological thought.
Content notes
- anthropological observation of indigenous peoples
- themes of exile and displacement
About the book
Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in France in 1955.
Claude Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking study of the societies of a number of Amazonian peoples is a cornerstone of structural anthropology and an exploration by the author of his own intellectual roots as a professor of philosophy in Brazil before the Second World War, as a Jewish exile from Nazi-occupied Europe, and later as a world-renowned academic (he taught at New York's New School for Social Research and was French cultural attache to the United States). Levi-Strauss's central journey leads from the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil.
There, among the Amerindian tribes - the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib - he found "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." Levi-Strauss's discussion of his fieldwork in Tristes Tropiques endures as a milestone of anthropology, but the book is also, in its brilliant diversions on other, more familiar cultures, a great work of literature, a vivid travelogue, and an engaging memoir - a demonstration of the marvelous mental agility of one of the century's most important thinkers.
Presented here is the translation by John and Doreen Weightman of the complete text of the revised French edition of 1968, together with the original photographs and illustrations.
Description from Open Library.
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