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Description
The leading exponent of structural anthropology comments on his experiences in South America prior to World War II, his life as a Jewish exile in German-occupied France, and his later years.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Brasidas
The book starts with quaint praise of Marx. There is a barely restrained anti-U.S. rhetoric in the early going. Both of these were very much in vogue when Levi-Strauss was writing in the mid-1950s. All in all, Levi-Strauss relies far too much on metaphor as an explanatory tool. Sometimes this is
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helpful, but too often he heaps metaphor on metaphor until the writing goes bellyup. I must say I am puzzled by the long preamble about travel itself----the ships he takes, his wartime escape as a Jew from France, his long description of the phenomenon of sunrise/sunset. I must confess to skipping a few pages here. And then this extended overview of São Paulo. Perhaps this will become clear; I'm still reading. Show Less
LibraryThing member tomcatMurr
Gross generalisations, convenient stereotypes, fanciful but terribly flimsy structures of contrast or similarity and a spurious objectivity mask a real lack of interest in actually perceiving what is under the eye of the writer, except perhaps, the writer's own ego. This is Anthropology.
Anyone who
Alas ! Poor Orient!
Anyone who
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thinks this book is not dated needs to stop only reading books written in the 1950s or earlier and get out more.Alas ! Poor Orient!
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LibraryThing member Crowyhead
The attitudes towards native peoples expressed in this book are dated, to say the least, but it remains an important classic of structural anthropology. It also happens to be very well-written and fascinating.
LibraryThing member LibrarysCat
Exploring the ideologies of cultural anthropology, Levi-Strauss relates his experiences in beautiful language and passages so descriptive one can almost go there with him.
LibraryThing member dmarsh451
One of my stars is for the drawings. I get a feeling he orders his thoughts with them before there are words, and he's tuned into this. Or maybe that's just my brain on mana.
LibraryThing member valerietheblonde
Fantastic work! Scattered in time and space, full of diversions and opinion, this book captivated me from start to finish.
LibraryThing member valerietheblonde
Fantastic work! Scattered in time and space, full of diversions and opinion, this book captivated me from start to finish.
LibraryThing member markm2315
The author was one of the great anthropologists of the 20th century. He started out studying philosophy between the wars and was heavily influenced by Marx and Freud. His theory of structualism seems, at least superficially, to be a Marxist or Hegelian view of society. Structuralism is not really
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discussed or explained in this book, and that is probably why it is his most popular. I've read that he cobbled Tristes Tropiques together from other published magazine articles, travelogues and his notes. The book does read that way, but some of it, perhaps much of it, is quite fascinating. I found the central part of the book about his time with the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib tribes in Brazil to be the most straight forward and interesting. Other extraneous chapters include a detailed summary of a play that was never published, an account of a trip to a Pakistani archeological site and a great description of his escape from Vichy France to Mozambique. Show Less
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Original publication date
1955