Tristes tropiques pdf

Claude Lévi-Strauss (French: Claude Lévi-Strauss); (November 28, 1908 - October 30, 2009), French sociologist. Lévi-Strauss began his formation by studying philosophy, but these arbitrary abstract theories far from social reality soon disappointed him, so he traveled to Brazil, where he taught sociology and discovered the works of American anthropologists (unknown in Europe at the time) such as Boas, Cropper and Louie. After returning to France in 1948, he presented his thesis on the theoretical problems of kinship. He was elected professor at the Collège de France in 1959 and held the chair of social anthropology that had been held by Marcel Mauss before him. The work and science of Lévi-Strauss had the greatest impact in the field of anthropology and ethnological field investigation.

Tristes tropiques pdf by Claude Levi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line ‘I hate travelling and explorers’, yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found ‘human society reduced to its most basic expression’. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of ‘primitive’ man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.