Latin America & the Caribbean - Travel Essays & Descriptions - General & Miscellaneous, Brazil - Travel, Native South American & Caribbean Peoples - General & Miscellaneous

Tristes Tropiques

Name: Tristes Tropiques
Author: Levi-Strauss
ISBN: 9782266026123

by Levi-Strauss

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Overview

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.

About the Author, Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), the founder of structural anthropology, was born in Belgium and studied at the University of Paris. A member of the French Academy, he authored numerous works, including Structural Anthropology, The Savage Mind, and Myth and Meaning.
Patrick Wilcken is the author of Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology. He lives in London.
John Weightman (1915-2004) and Doreen Weightman (d. 1985) together translated several important anthropological works of Claude Levi-Strauss and a book about Rousseau by Jean Guehenno.