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"Whether traditional or degenerate, this society offered one of the most rudimentary forms of social and political organization that could possibly be imagined." Is this search an essential rejection of the West. This is a universal text by a man searching for universal structures of meaning. Can one avoid proselytizing ones subject. How can the observer not also be an intruder.
While I have little to say about the anthropological veracity of this seminal text, I am capable of recognizing its vast aesthetic and intellectual beauty. In the final analysis, Levi-Strauss laments the eventual disintegration of the purely human society. Levi-Strauss is searching for the purely human society, which he finds perhaps most completely in the Nambikwara. Levi-Strauss places himself (or inserts himself), in a number of so called 'savage' tribes in Brazil- the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib.
What is the basic object of inquiry. A beautiful an important (albeit dated) text. This is also an anthropological memoir, Levi-Strauss retraces his training in philosophy to his break and subsequent beginnings as a professor of anthropology in Brazil. He poses questions that remain central to the role of the anthropologist to this day.
To me, the main point is that the romantic savage doesn't exist and man is a social/civilized being from the most primitive roots. This book is positively breezy tone, but at the same time it's kind of an intellectual mission statement for Levi-Strauss. A sentiment I agree with, and a sentiment borne out by his less-then-thorough anthropological field work in Brazil. I stumbled upon this book, but I did enjoy reading it. I can handle myself in the presence of digressive french academia, though I don't go out of my way to engage it.
He compares Islam society with the society of France, in that both have become fossilised at a time some centuries before, continuing to believe that what they evolved at those much earlier times should still stand them in good stead for the future. His description is probably reasonably accurate, but I would have thought a little more thought as to the reasons and causes would have helped (along with a little more gratitude to the New World for giving him a home, all the while he was grizzling about them).His accounts of his time with the various South American native groups I found disjointed, purely narrative, little rationale for the few conclusions that he did try to draw, and, in his descriptions of the various components of the Bororo society in Chapter 23, almost fanciful.Finally, as though he had put together the first two parts of the book for some other purpose, he launches into a different dialogue about the progress of mankind. Although, in some ways the most interesting of the three parts, this last was to a large extent contradictory to the views espoused in the first part - in the latter he bemoaned the progress of mankind, and in the former he bemoaned the lack of progress of mankind.All in all, interesting read, but a little disappointing. This book is really a number of books in one - a diatribe against the New World vis a vis the Old World, time spent with the natives in South America, and a bemoaning of the lack of progress by Mankind in its development.His comparison of the New and Old Worlds is probably quite apt - the Old World, with its social and physical structures evolved during a slower moving time and "was made to last". The New World came when progress was increasing much more quickly, new materials became available, and social and physical structures were relatively short term.
It is the mind destroying the object in the process of knowing it , as the Western explorers of these tribal societies transformed them out of their own natural state by meeting with them. The long travelogue and explorations into Amerindian society and mind, interested me less. And meanwhile the heart of the book is forever unknown to me and lost. For Levi- Strauss and this I remember, the ' primitive mind' is not ' primitive at all' and may be in its linguistic complexity and social structure far more intricate than the ' civilized ' as it were sophisticated worlds we believe we live in.I read this work as a way of being acquainted with a great mind, a mind which to my mind proved to be quite elusive and even distant. This certainly applies to my reading of this particular work, ,the one work of Levi- Strauss which I remember reading with any degree of real understanding and pleasure. I often review works which I have read long ago.
And my review becomes an amalgalm of distant past and most recent present impression. I understand though that the real voyage is into and along with the mind of Levi- Strauss itself, a mind much more complicated than I was ordinarily used to meeting and ingesting.I do remember however the somewhat majestic tone, the tone of restrained sadness of quiet mourning which seemed to go through the work as Levi- Strauss met with worlds being lost and deterorating , in part through their meetings with the very kind of Western mind he himself exemplified. Upon beginning to write about them I invariably discover how much time I gave to something which seemed so worthwhile at the time, and which I have almost completely forgotten. His making of a life and career as an anthropologist which are a good part of the first part of the work interested me then. But clearly the exploration made by Levi- Strauss of his own inner and external worlds is one which calls to the curious human mind and heart in its quest for understanding ' of the other' Montaigne took a trip in the Brazilian jungle in the twentieth century, looked in the mirror and saw the face of Levi- Strauss. I then ordinarily do some catch- up learning about the book.
And my review is only a minor tracing an impression both of the book itself and what of my mind knew when reading through it.
His point is that through the study of those and that which are different, a kind of "ideal model" of society-- one which will never exist-- can be built in the imagination, and people can evaluate their world by reference to this community of mind. The book starts as anthropology, turns into philosophy, and ultimately becomes a critique of the West, driven by "reason" and technology to shake off what Levi-Strauss calls the "thick blanket of dreams" with which non-industrial civilisation arranges the Universe into Meaning, which remains for the industrialised world the greatest and unanswered question. But Levi-Strauss does not idealise the primitive. Tristes Tropiques, surely one of the great books of the twentieth century, is Levi-Strauss at his intoxicating, idea-overloaded best and an elegy for a world that colonialism and then globalisation have doen their rational best to annihilate.Levi-Strauss, like most thinkers who come up with new ways of describing the world-- those who Richard Rorty calls "inventors of philosophical vocabularies"-- has of course been mis-read and his ideas mis-applied, as we see with the much-hyped "creation" and then "demise" of "structural anthropology." The real pleasure of this book, which mixes fascinating accounts of Levi-Strauss' travels in Brazil in the '30s with autobiography, and adds chapters on the Maya and ancient Hindu (Indian) civilisations, is in its sheer mass of artfully arranged detail and its endless, provocative play of ideas.Levi-Strauss stays conversational, descriptive and straightforward, avoiding academic jargon and obscure references. This is a remarkable book-- easy to read, engrossing, and endlessly thought-provoking. In Matto Grosso, he meets a butcher fascinated with elephants, since "he could not imagine so much meat in one place." On the banks of the Amazon, a non-industrial tribe is dying, hypnotically lost in the symbolic intricacies of an ancient social system that makes its citizens inbreed. He assumes you know the basics about people like Freud, Marx, Darwin and the Buddha, and then shows you a trip through largely non-industrial societies which unfolds from anthropological description into deep philosophical speculation on the meaning of society and life.In Brazil, Levi-Strauss watches an illiterate but canny chieftain use his anthropological fieldnotes to intimidate his illiterate tribesmen subordinates, and speculates on the parallel origins of writing and slavery. In India, Levi-Strauss watches Islam and Hinduism-- the "locker room" and "mother" religions-- wage symbolic and then real war post-Independence.
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