Tristes Tropiques: the unintentional classic

 Those haunting jacket pictures! Pretty much every edition of the book (except the very first, below) has featured Levi-Strauss's own photographs of the peoples he encountered.  If ever there was a book that wore its heart on its sleeve, as it were, it is Tristes tropiques, the 1955 account by Claude Levi-Strauss of his ethnographic field trip to Brazil; the only major field work he ever completed.  Those photos capture the haunting, strange, sad pride of these vanishing (probably by now completely vanished) peoples. In fact, one of the groups he encountered was actually on their journey to join the modern world. Levi-Strauss persuaded them to turn round and to pretend to be primitive.

Claude Levi-Strauss published Tristes tropiques several years after his experiences took place. I understand this is by far the most readable of his works, a fascinating combination of travel writing and serious anthropological research. According to Patrick Wilcken, author of a biography of Levi-Strauss, his subject was almost on the point of becoming a full-time journalist when he wrote Triste tropiques.

"He wrote Tristes tropiques consumed by guilt, feeling that it was taking up time that should really have been devoted to proper academic work."

It's easy to pick holes in this magnificent wreck. A few comments will make it clear how the book was compiled as a hotchpotch of travel writing, theoriszing, and vague speculation. It includes:

·         Fragments from his own play, set in ancient Greece, and abandoned (rightly so)

·         Outrageous anti-Islamic sentiment in a passage inserted towards the end of the book, and unconnected with the fieldwork in Brazil.  "The bigotry permeating Islamic moral and religious thought" ... "The whole of Islam would, in fact, seem to be a method for creating insurmountable conflicts in the minds of the believers"..."if one were looking for a barrack-room religion, Islam would seem to be the ideal solution ... masculine promiscuity ... and no women."  

·         Whole sections of binary-obsessed description of the art of the peoples he encounters, as if he cannot bear simply to write about these people without showing off his elite French education in analysing what he has seen.

Why then is the book so powerful? Perhaps it is unfair coming to the book as a non-anthropologist, but Levi-Strauss writes best as a journalist, not, for me, as a theorizing anthropologist. He writes best when he does not try to theorize too hard.

·         It has a magnificent title - alliterative, haunting and somehow passing a judgement on the cultures he recorded without his ever stating this verdict in the written accounts themselves. After all, what could be sadder than the face on the French edition of 1985?

·         It records without judgement and with sensitivity the things that he saw.

·         Its remarkable honesty, from the opening lines onwards: "I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions."

·         The fact that his account, although based on diaries kept at the time, is in fact a mixture of recent investigation and much later reflection, all jumbled together in a fascinating way.

·         The combination of fieldwork with Levi-Strauss's other insights. His description of the initial journey to Brazil, on an almost deserted cruise liner, with other young researchers, is a joy to read. And we haven't even got to Brazil at this point!

"During the nineteen days at sea, all this space, which seemed almost limitless through the absence of other people, became our province; it was as if the boat were our appanage."

Of course, what the book doesn't answer is the huge topic of what anthropology should be. Levi-Strauss openly set out to do what most anthropological explorers had done, which was to find some people who had never encountered the modern world. Unwittingly, he reveals in this book that his observations of the modern world are sometimes as fascinating as those of the "primitive" (his word) peoples he encountered.