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Tristes Tropiques
7.5Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss's 1955 anthropological memoir — the founder of structural anthropology writing a travelogue that reads like a novel; one of the greatest twentieth-century French prose works.
GBM Assessment (Score: 7.5/10)
Tristes Tropiques is one of the great works of twentieth-century French prose: part travel memoir, part philosophy, part elegy for vanishing peoples. Claude Levi-Strauss is the founder of structural anthropology, and structuralism itself, the intellectual movement that reshaped linguistics, literary theory, and philosophy in the postwar era, begins with this book's method of analyzing cultures as systems of signs and relationships.
Drawing on fieldwork in 1930s Brazil among the Nambikwara and Bororo peoples, Levi-Strauss produced a work that appeared the same year as Nabokov's Lolita and Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. He was elected to the Academie francaise in 1973 and lived to the age of 100. Tristes Tropiques has remained continuously in print and stands as a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand how the human sciences were transformed in the second half of the twentieth century.
Britain, 1954-1955
Post-war Britain: austerity ending, empire receding. Tolkien publishes Lord of the Rings — creating modern fantasy. Golding's Lord of the Flies strips away Victorian optimism. Nabokov's Lolita appears in Paris. Rock and roll is born. Rosa Parks refuses to move.
Awards & Adaptations
Structuralism reshaped linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy. Tristes Tropiques continuously in print. Lévi-Strauss elected to the Académie française (1973). Lived to 100 (d. 2009)
Recommended Edition
John Russell trans. (Criterion, 1961); John & Doreen Weightman trans. (Cape, 1973; Penguin Classics, 2012)
