John Weightman Bücher

"Traurige Tropen" meint das Aussterben der "primitiven" Kulturen in ihrer Konfrontation mit dem zivilisatorischen sogenannten "Fortschritt", mit seiner imperialistischen Zerstörungswut und seinen Krankheiten - in diesem Falle das Aussterben der Indianervölker im Mato Grosso (Brasilien), zu denen Levi-Strauss mehrere ausgedehnte, ebenso abenteuerliche wie gefährliche Expeditionen unternahm.

<i>Tristes Tropiques</i> begins with the line ‘<i>I hate travelling and explorers</i>’, yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found ‘<i>human society reduced to its most basic expression</i>’. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of ‘primitive’ man. <i>Tristes Tropiques</i> 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.