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: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few works of the twentieth century blur the boundaries between memoir, philosophy, and anthropology as brilliantly as Tristes Tropiques — a landmark text that chronicles Claude Lévi-Strauss's formative expeditions through the rainforests of Brazil during the 1930s, immersing the reader in the vanishing worlds of the Nambikwara, Caduveo, and Bororo peoples. Equal parts travelogue and intellectual odyssey, the book presents the raw human experience of fieldwork alongside a profound meditation on civilization, primitivism, and the very nature of what it means to be human, all filtered through a rigorously structuralist lens. Lévi-Strauss writes with a lyrical intensity that is at once scholarly and deeply personal, weaving together myth, linguistics, and cultural observation into a tapestry that permanently reshaped the discipline of anthropology. Tristes Tropiques argues, with quiet devastation, that Western progress carries within it the seeds of cultural destruction — a thesis that resonates as powerfully today as when it was first published in France in 1955. For anyone who has ever stood at the edge of an unfamiliar world and felt the simultaneous pull of wonder and loss, this book remains an unparalleled guide to the furthest reaches of the human condition.
Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Format: Hardback
Published: 1974, Atheneum
Genre: Anthropology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few works of the twentieth century blur the boundaries between memoir, philosophy, and anthropology as brilliantly as Tristes Tropiques — a landmark text that chronicles Claude Lévi-Strauss's formative expeditions through the rainforests of Brazil during the 1930s, immersing the reader in the vanishing worlds of the Nambikwara, Caduveo, and Bororo peoples. Equal parts travelogue and intellectual odyssey, the book presents the raw human experience of fieldwork alongside a profound meditation on civilization, primitivism, and the very nature of what it means to be human, all filtered through a rigorously structuralist lens. Lévi-Strauss writes with a lyrical intensity that is at once scholarly and deeply personal, weaving together myth, linguistics, and cultural observation into a tapestry that permanently reshaped the discipline of anthropology. Tristes Tropiques argues, with quiet devastation, that Western progress carries within it the seeds of cultural destruction — a thesis that resonates as powerfully today as when it was first published in France in 1955. For anyone who has ever stood at the edge of an unfamiliar world and felt the simultaneous pull of wonder and loss, this book remains an unparalleled guide to the furthest reaches of the human condition.