ABSTRACT
It is commonplace in studies of travel writing to invoke the opening words of Tristes Tropiques-“I hate travelling and explorers”2-which have become synonymous with the problematic relationship between anthropology and travel writing. I start with the introduction to Lévi-Strauss’s “seminal autobiography-cum-travel-book-cum-ethnography”,3 not for his repudiation of travelling, however, but rather for the resonance of other, less well cited statements of that section of his book for the text under consideration in this chapter. Following his uncompromising beginning to “An End to Journeying”, Lévi-Strauss dismisses the role of adventure in anthropology. “Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession”, he writes (while simultaneously affi rming its place) “it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months.” That statement and sentiment are also known well enough. Nevertheless, further to his portrayal of it as anthropology’s negative side, Lévi-Strauss goes on to foreground the close association between adventure and visual representation. “Being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study,” he elaborates sardonically, “but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in colour, so as to fi ll a hall with an audience for several days in succession.”4 It is the French anthropologist’s association of exploration and travelogue (in the original sense of that term, denoting a fi lm or visually illustrated lecture about a journey) that is of relevance in what follows: a consideration of a young anthropologist’s transcontinental journey, which is spectacular in more ways than one-extensive and impressive in scope and from its outset conceived as a visual spectacle.
