Tristes Tropiques

Tristes Tropiques
source
Name	Tristes Tropiques
Author	Claude Lévi-Strauss
Language	French
Genre	Ethnography, Memoir, Philosophy
Publisher	Plon
Pub date	1955
Pages	624

Contents

Tristes Tropiques is a 1955 book by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss documenting fieldwork in Brazil and reflections on culture, history, and modernity. Combining travelogue, ethnography, and philosophical meditation, it reports encounters with Indigenous peoples such as the Nambikwara and Tupi, recalls episodes in cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and engages with thinkers including Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, Maurice Halbwachs, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. The work situates Lévi-Strauss within postwar intellectual circles of Paris, dialogues with contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, and interacts with institutions such as the Musée de l'Homme and the Collège de France.

Background and Composition

The book emerges from Lévi-Strauss's field expeditions for the French National Centre for Scientific Research and missions funded by the Brazilian National Museum and the Foundation Rockefeller. It narrates ethnographic work among groups like the Nambikwara, Caduveo, Bororo, Tucano, and Guarani while referencing travel through regions such as the Amazon River, the Pantanal, and Mato Grosso. Composition occurred amid intellectual debates in Paris involving figures tied to the École pratique des hautes études, the Société des Américanistes, and publishers including Plon and Gallimard. Lévi-Strauss interlaces field notebooks with theoretical reflections drawing on texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss's predecessors and interlocutors like Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kroeber.

First published in French by Plon in 1955, the book quickly attracted attention from journals such as Revue de l'histoire des religions, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, and the New York Review of Books in later translations. Reviews appeared in outlets associated with intellectuals and institutions including Les Temps modernes, Le Monde, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. Academic responses engaged scholars from departments at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and the Sorbonne, while critics invoked debates with writers like George Bataille, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Raymond Queneau. Awards and recognitions linked the author to posts at the Collège de France and memberships in academies such as the Académie Française-adjacent circles and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The narrative interweaves ethnographic description of ritual, kinship, and material culture among the Nambikwara, Tupi-Guarani, and Kayapó with philosophical meditations invoking Plato, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Lévi-Strauss analyzes myths alongside comparative work by Sir James Frazer, Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Mircea Eliade, and draws on linguistic studies from Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Noam Chomsky. Chapters juxtapose field episodes in locales like Manaus, Belém, and Porto Velho with historical surveys referencing Christopher Columbus, Alexander von Humboldt, Pedro Álvares Cabral, and Jesuit reducciones. The prose treats themes of colonialism through references to Treaty of Tordesillas-era legacies and interactions with agencies such as the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the Imperial Brazilian Navy in historical context. The work also meditates on modernity, citing industrial sites in São Paulo and urban scenes invoking Haussmann-era Paris transformations, while engaging debates by contemporaries Hannah Arendt and Marshall McLuhan on mass society.

The book shaped structuralist anthropology alongside theoretical programs at institutions like the École normale supérieure, the Musée de l'Homme, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. It influenced thinkers in fields connected to literary theory and philosophy including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gaston Bachelard, and Pierre Bourdieu. Traces of its method appear in studies by scholars at Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics. The book informed cultural critiques by novelists and essayists such as Italo Calvino, Giorgio Agamben, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and filmmakers referencing ethnography like Jean Rouch and Werner Herzog. Debates about fieldwork ethics and preservation involved organizations including UNESCO, International Council on Archives, and the Brazilian National Archives.

Major translations include the English edition by John Russell and later reprints by publishers such as Penguin Books, University of Chicago Press, Random House, and Vintage Books. Subsequent editions featured introductions or notes by scholars at Harvard University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the Royal Anthropological Institute. Translations appear in languages served by houses like Suhrkamp Verlag (German), Feltrinelli (Italian), Editorial Planeta (Spanish), Iwanami Shoten (Japanese), and Zhonghua Book Company (Chinese). Critical editions and annotated volumes have been produced by editorial projects linked to the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and university presses at Oxford, Princeton, and Yale.

Category:Books about Brazil Category:Anthropology books Category:Claude Lévi-Strauss