ABSTRACT
Recently one of us (Dervin) reread Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 memoirs Tristes Tropiques (A World on the Wane). The book documents the anthropologist’s travels and work principally in Brazil. For those who know Lévi-Strauss’s work, this book is very surprising when compared to the scholar’s scientific production. Tristes Tropiques is very reflexive—which was rare at the time!—and rather pessimistic about the state of the world after the Second World War, especially in relation to developing countries. The first line of the book is very famous: “I hate traveling and explorers”. Lévi-Strauss not only questions the nature and purpose of anthropology and travel, but he also reflects on people’s place on our Earth and the interrelations between ‘cultures’. In a sense his book represents a treatise on identity and interculturality even though Lévi-Strauss did not use these concepts at the time. Tristes Tropiques differs immensely from Lévi-Strauss’s most famous books Structural Anthropology (1963) and Mythologiques (1969–1981) since they deal with similar issues but from a ‘cold’ objectivising structuralist position, in which the author disappears.
