Tristes Tropiques

"Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in France in 1955. Claude Lévi-Strauss's ground-breaking 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 attaché to the United States). Lévi-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." Lévi-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."-- Amazon.