Tristes Tropiques : Levi-Strauss 1961 [ First American Edition ]

Description

First American Edition of Tristes Tropiques a Meditation on Meaning In Modernizing Brazil by Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Criterion Books. New York. 1961. First American Edition.

The first American edition of anthropologist and structuralist theorist Claude Levi-Strauss’s memoir of his time in the upland jungles of Brazil while working as a professor at Sao Paolo University studying local native tribes in the 1930s.

Opening with Levi-Strauss’ ironic reflection that he hates explorers, Tristes Tropiques is not a formal academic work but a bittersweet ethnographic reflection and meditation on the supposed superiority of the colonial Western “modern world”. As Levi-Strauss witnesses the arrival of modernity amid the traditional groups of Brazil, his experiences beg the question of what exactly progress promises these supposedly “primitive” people. The author’s negative opinion of modern society is perhaps informed by the circumstances under which he was writing. Most of the text was written in New York during self-imposed exile to avoid the Vichy regime in France.

First published in France in 1955 under the same title as this edition, the text was retitled World On The Wave when rereleased in the United States in 1962. This 1961 first American edition reuses sheets from the earlier first British edition of the same year. Per an inscription seen in another copy of this edition of Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss hated this translation.

404pp. Green cloth boards with decoration and lettering to front and spine, gilt. Small crease to lower corner photo frontis and title page. Thoroughly illustrated with photographs and in-line drawings. Pages clean. Price clipped dust jacket with minor edgewear. Some losses to spine ends with wear and creasing along joints. Small chip back wrap top edge. Minor soiling back wrap. Very good.

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