Tristes Tropiques

"Tristes Tropiques" begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Levi-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.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a pioneering French anthropologist and a central figure in structural anthropology. Known for applying structuralist approaches to the study of human cultures, he analyzed societies through their myths, kinship, and rituals, seeking to uncover universal patterns in human thought. His key works, including Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind, and Mythologiques, transformed anthropology by examining cultural phenomena as structured systems. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas influenced fields beyond anthropology, including sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, making him one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers.