Tristes Tropiques

Introduction

Lévi-Strauss wrote the book in a few months and published it in 1955 in the Terre humaine series; its first sentence declares that he hates travels and explorers. Looking back some fifteen years, it recounts his time as a young professor in São Paulo and his expeditions among the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara and the Tupi-Kawahib, mixed with memories of his flight from France in 1941 and a later journey to India and Pakistan. Anthropological description, autobiography and reflections on civilisation, colonialism and Islam alternate; it ends with Buddhism and the disappearance of humanity. The book brought Lévi-Strauss a wide public and is read as literature as well as ethnography.

Connections

Builds on

• Discourse on Inequality1755 · Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Criticized in

• Of Grammatology1967 · Jacques Derrida

More works by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• 1962Wild Thought (La Pensée sauvage)