Tristes tropiques

PAUL-FRANÇOIS TREMLETT
Open University, United Kingdom

Tristes tropiques was first published in 1955. A best seller in France, it secured the
position of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) in French public intellectual life. Simulta-
neously ethnography and autobiography, Tristes tropiques is notable for its articulation
of a powerful critique of Western notions of progress and civilization and problems
of pollution and racism. The book merits attention not only for those interested in
Lévi-Strauss, it also provides key insights into developments in structuralism and
anthropology.
Although structuralism is often reduced to linguistics, it was far from the only influ-
ence on Lévi-Strauss who, in Tristes tropiques, approvingly cites Marxism, psychoanal-
ysis, and geology because they demonstrate the necessity for a kind “superrationalism”
(2011, 58). The text is replete with references to a range of anthropological, historical, lit-
erary, and philosophical figures from Robert H. Lowie to Jean de Léry and from Michel
Eyquem de Montaigne to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There are also tantalizing references
to “cyberneticians” (2011, 391) and “entropology” (2011, 414). Elsewhere Lévi-Strauss
made a number of references to Rousseau (e.g., 1994a) while later distinctions between
“hot” and “cold” societies (1994b) reflected his interdisciplinary engagements with sys-
tems theory.
The expeditions Lévi-Strauss recounts in Tristes tropiques belong, even by the
standards of the 1930s, to a nineteenth-century anthropology of “adventures” (2011,
161) concerned with collecting (salvaging) artifacts (for the Musée de l’Homme,
Paris) rather than conducting prolonged fieldwork. Lévi-Strauss makes references to
locations to which “no professional anthropologist had ever ventured” (2011, 251) and
to uncontacted tribes (2011, 326), while a discussion of the “Stone Age” Nambikwara
with its allusions to “stock” (“souche,” 1955, 322) seems to belong to the very type
of anthropology he was writing against (2011, 276). However, Tristes tropiques is best
known for its moving passages describing the consequences of contact for the minority
peoples of Brazil as a “cataclysm” (2011, 326; also 2011, 37–44). Lévi-Strauss frames
this as a disaster because its consequence is “monoculture.” He also describes travel
as the experience of seeing “our own filth, thrown in the face of mankind” (2011, 38).
In another famous passage he describes cultures as “reducible to systems” translatable
into a periodic table of “actual and hypothetical customs,” posing a utopian vision of
anthropology where “one could see at a glance which customs a particular society had
… adopted” (2011, 178).

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1350
2 T RISTES TROPIQUES

SEE ALSO: Autobiography, Anthropology and; Brazil, Anthropology in; France,

Anthropology in; Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009); Structuralism (Linguistic
Anthropology)

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1994a. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man.” In Struc-
tural Anthropology, translated by Monique Layton, 33–43. Vol. 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1994b. “The Scope of Anthropology.” In Structural Anthropology, translated
by Monique Layton, 3–32. Vol. 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2011. Tristes tropiques. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wiseman, Boris. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.