"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\'.
It is a memoir of exquisite. "Tristes Tropiques" is a major work of art as well as of scholarship.
His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of \'primitive\' man. "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\'
