Tristes Tropiques
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, and part ethnographic masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques chronicles Claude Lévi-Strauss's formative expeditions into the heart of the Brazilian interior during the 1930s, where he lived among and studied some of the continent's most isolated indigenous peoples, including the Nambikwara and the Tupi-Kawahib. With the eye of a scientist and the soul of a poet, Lévi-Strauss presents a devastating portrait of civilisations on the brink of erasure, weaving together personal narrative, cultural analysis, and a profound reckoning with what it means to encounter the other. Beyond its fieldwork, Tristes Tropiques stands as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable works of intellectual autobiography, illustrating the foundational ideas that would come to define structural anthropology. Lévi-Strauss argues passionately against the arrogance of Western modernity, his prose oscillating between lyrical beauty and rigorous scholarship in a manner that dismantles the boundary between literature and science. First published in France in 1955, the book was controversially passed over for the Prix Goncourt on the technicality that it was not fiction — a decision that only underscored how impossible it was to categorise. For anyone who has ever questioned what progress truly costs, this is an essential and unsettling read.
Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Format: Paperback
Genre: Anthropology
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, and part ethnographic masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques chronicles Claude Lévi-Strauss's formative expeditions into the heart of the Brazilian interior during the 1930s, where he lived among and studied some of the continent's most isolated indigenous peoples, including the Nambikwara and the Tupi-Kawahib. With the eye of a scientist and the soul of a poet, Lévi-Strauss presents a devastating portrait of civilisations on the brink of erasure, weaving together personal narrative, cultural analysis, and a profound reckoning with what it means to encounter the other. Beyond its fieldwork, Tristes Tropiques stands as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable works of intellectual autobiography, illustrating the foundational ideas that would come to define structural anthropology. Lévi-Strauss argues passionately against the arrogance of Western modernity, his prose oscillating between lyrical beauty and rigorous scholarship in a manner that dismantles the boundary between literature and science. First published in France in 1955, the book was controversially passed over for the Prix Goncourt on the technicality that it was not fiction — a decision that only underscored how impossible it was to categorise. For anyone who has ever questioned what progress truly costs, this is an essential and unsettling read.