Claude Levi-Strauss Tristes tropiques (Penguin Modern Classics) /anglais - Softcover

LEVI-STRAUSS CLAUDE

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141197544 ISBN 13: 9780141197548

Publisher: PENGUIN UK, 2011

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of our century," said Susan Sontag. "It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beauti-
fully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice."
    Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in
France in 1955. Claude Lévi-Strauss's ground-
breaking study of the societies of a number of Amazonian peoples is a cornerstone of structural anthropology and an exploration by the author of his own intellectual roots as a professor of philosophy in Brazil before the Second World War, as a Jewish exile from Nazi-occupied Europe, and later as a world-renowned academic (he taught at New York's New School for Social Research and was French cultural attaché to the United States). Lévi-Strauss's central journey leads from the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil. There, among the Amerindian tribes--the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib--he found "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." Lévi-Strauss's discussion of his fieldwork in Tristes Tropiques endures as a milestone of anthropology, but the book is also, in its brilliant diversions on other, more familiar cultures, a great work of literature, a vivid travelogue, and an engaging memoir--a demonstration of the marvelous mental agility of one of the century
's most important thinkers.
    Presented here is the translation by John and Doreen Weightman of the complete text of the revised French edition of 1968, together with the original photographs and illustrations.

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurat-
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About the Author:

Claude Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 and died in 2009. He is the founder of modern anthropology and taught in France, Brazil and at the New School in New York before being appointed to the Chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France in 1959. His other boks include Structural Anthropology, Totemism and The Savage Mind.

About this edition

• Publisher: PENGUIN UK
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141197544
• ISBN 13: 9780141197548
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448