Tuesday, April 6, 2010

$*$ Tristes tropiques



While I have little to say about the anthropological veracity of this seminal text, I am capable of recognizing its vast aesthetic and intellectual beauty. Levi-Strauss places himself (or inserts himself), in a number of so called 'savage' tribes in Brazil- the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. This is also an anthropological memoir, Levi-Strauss retraces his training in philosophy to his break and subsequent beginnings as a professor of anthropology in Brazil. This is a universal text by a man searching for universal structures of meaning. He poses questions that remain central to the role of the anthropologist to this day. How can the observer not also be an intruder? What is the basic object of inquiry? Can one avoid proselytizing ones subject? Levi-Strauss is searching for the purely human society, which he finds perhaps most completely in the Nambikwara. "Whether traditional or degenerate, this society offered one of the most rudimentary forms of social and political organization that could possibly be imagined." Is this search an essential rejection of the West? In the final analysis, Levi-Strauss laments the eventual disintegration of the purely human society. A beautiful an important (albeit dated) text.
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