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.