Tristes Tropiques
Studying social anthropology in the 1960s was to confront a subject in transition. Perhaps that is too strong. In most British university departments, the social anthropology that claimed to have its origins and approach derived from the work of Bronislaw Malinowski was still the core curriculum. In what is usually described as ‘functionalism’, the underlying assumption was that all aspects of society, its institutions, roles, norms, and myths all worked together to sustain the social system. Indeed, this perspective went further to claim the inter-relationship between all these parts of the social system were indispensable parts of the whole, all functioning together to make a society ‘work’. The social anthropologist’s task was to describe these elements of a society, and demonstrate how they were learnt, linked together and sustained. Famously, Radcliffe Brown at the University of Oxford explained that functionalism was relationship between a social institution and the “necessary conditions of existence” of a social system. He saw the function of a unit as the contribution it makes to the maintenance of a social structure, the set of relationships integrating social units.
Not everyone agreed. There were some, encouraged by anthropologists like Edmund Leach at the University of Cambridge, who advocated a rather different perspective. This was that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures. In other words, all cultures are essentially equatable. This approach drew in large part from dialectics, as explored by Hegel and Marx, although it has its roots back in ancient philosophy. Hegel explained that every situation presents two opposing characteristics and their resolution, or ‘thesis, antithesis and resolution’. Structuralist anthropologists argued that cultures also have this underlying form. Claude Lévi-Strauss was a leader in showing how opposing ideas would compete and were resolved to establish the rules of marriage, mythology and ritual: “people think about the world in terms of binary opposites – such as high and low, inside and outside, person and animal, life and death – and every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites … From the very start the process of visual perception makes use of binary oppositions”
Who was this Claude Lévi-Strauss, a Frenchman causing so much trouble in the world of British ethnography? His work was key to the development of structuralism. Enormously influential, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, was elected a member of the Académie Française in 1973 and was a member of the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He argued the ‘savage’ mind had the same structures as the ‘civilized’ mind, that human characteristics are the same everywhere. Structuralism is “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity”.
There’s a book to be written about Lévi-Strauss – well, of course, there have been several already. However, I want to concentrate on just one of his own books, Tristes Tropiques. A brilliant student, Lévi-Strauss’s adult life began in secondary-school teaching, but in 1935 he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, with his wife, a visiting professor of ethnology. The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939, although Lévi-Strauss only spent short periods of time in various tribes, including the Guaycuru, Bororó, Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib. He returned to France in 1939, almost immediately leaving to escape the Nazis, and eventually ending up in the US, where he was joined the New School for Social Research in 1941. He returned to Paris in 1948.
I’m sure you don’t want to read any more of his biography, other than to note the first of his key books, The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949. As a professor at the École Practique des Hautes Études, he continued to publish, but it was in 1955 he became one of France’s best-known intellectuals by publishing Triste Tropiques. It is an extraordinary book, a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s, and his travels, an amazing mixture of beautiful prose, philosophical meditations, and ethnographic analyses of several Amazonian peoples . It is said the organisers of the Prix Goncourt wanted to award Lévi-Strauss their annual prize, but as their award was for a work of fiction, they could not. In my 1973 edition, the first time it appeared in English, the bottom of the book cover states: ‘The great French anthropologist’s autobiographical travelogue, translated by John and Doreen Weightman’. I guess it is a little more than that!
What makes this book so special? Famously, Triste Tropiques begins with a short sentence: “I hate travelling and explorers” ! But there was more in that first paragraph:
“It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available; periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service …”
We would have to wait another ten years until David Maybury Lewis wrote a second similarly insightful book about being an anthropologist, The Savage and the Innocent: “My wife and I lived among the Sherente for eight months in 1955-1956 and among the Shavante for slightly longer in 1958. This book is an account of our experiences; it is not an essay in anthropology. Indeed I have tried to put down here many of those things which never get told in technical anthropological writings – our impressions of Central Brazil, our personal reactions to the various situations in which we found ourselves, and above all our feelings about the day-to-day business which is mysteriously known as ‘doing fieldwork’.”
Ah, but that comparison leaves out the fact that Tristes Tropiques is both about the personal experience of fieldwork, but also it is a series of explorations in philosophy, and, on top of all that, it is also an ethnographic work, describing the cultures and the peoples he saw. It is an extraordinary amalgam. It is also a tantalising introduction to the many topics explored in just over 400 dense pages. Why ‘tristes’? What does ‘tristes’ mean? Most commentators translate the title of the book as Sad Tropics, but I think that is inadequate: it does have a sorrowful theme, but it is also wistful, conveying regret for what has changed and what has been lost, with an underlying sense of melancholy. Unable to read the French, I can’t tell you how well it was done, but I’m confident the English version is true to the author’s style.
How can I explain why I think this is such an engaging, witty yet profound and thought-provoking book? He could be witty. Here is Lévi-Strauss in an overcrowded and very dirty boat, having left France a month before and about to arrive in Martinique:
“There were young and pretty women on board; flirtations had begun and sympathies had ripened. For them, to appear in a favourable light before the final separation was more than coquettishness; it was an account to be settled, a debt to be honoured; a proof they felt owed of the fact that they were not fundamentally unworthy of attentions bestowed on them. With a touching delicacy of feeling, they had taken these attentions only, as it were, on credit … So there was not only an element of farce but also a slight element of pathos in the cry which arose from every pair of lungs. Instead of the call ‘Land! Land!’ as int traditional sea stories, ‘A bath, at last a bath, a bath tomorrow’ could be heard on every side”
Did you want to know they didn’t get their chance to have a bath!
As for the profound and thought-provoking content, it can’t be conveyed in short extracts. It might help to explain the structure. Those 400 pages are broken up into nine parts: the first four are concerned with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s jouney to South America, the last with his return, and the remaining four are accounts of his visits to four tribes, The Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. However, well before we get to the ethnographic sections, the text is packed with wry, perceptive, irreverent and deeply thoughtful comments.
Arriving in São Paulo, he says, “Some mischievous spirit has defined America as a country which has moved from barbarism to decadence without enjoying any intermediary phase of civilisation. The formula could be more correctly applied to the towns of the New World, which pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old.” Nice one, and having managed to lump New York in with São Paulo, he points out that “it is not the absence of traces of the past which strikes me; this lack is an essential part of their significance.” He goes on to observe that with the passing of time American towns degenerate, built to be renewable “that is, badly”! Like stands in a fairground, he continues, ending with the observation that New World towns are “untamed, wild, perpetually young but never healthy”.
Just before he, and we, meet the Caduveo, Lévi-Strauss offers a sombre warning: “What frightens me in Asia is the vision of our own future which it is already experiencing [the devaluation of man by man]. In the America of the Indians, I cherish the reflection, however fleeting it may now have become, of an era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied, and when there was still a valid relationship between the enjoyment of freedom and the symbols denoting it”. What would he add 50 years later?
Among the sections on different ethnic groups, those on the Nambikwara are the most detailed, and provide a good introduction to Lévi-Strauss’s method. The first chapter starts with a fascinating discussion on how he chose the glass beads he would take with him from Paris. Any social anthropologist would understand his dilemmas, but for other readers this is a telling way to convey something of the realities of fieldwork. Soon after, we are taken through an extensive analysis of what is known of migration between the ‘Old World’ and the New: detailed and illuminating, he concludes the problems are vast, the information we have is small, and there is almost no certainty about who came when and where – “nothing is possible, so all is possible.” After this speculation we read on to find we’ve arrived in South America, only to learn about the real and seemingly interminable problems in getting organised to set about making contact with any one of the groups he wanted to study.
He sets the scene well: “Imagine an area as big as France, three quarters of it unexplored, frequented only by small groups of native nomads who are among the most primitive to be found anywhere in the world” only to continue “and traversed, from one [side] to the other, by a [single] telegraph line … over a distance of several hundred kilometres”. He goes on to add that the telegraph wire became useless almost as soon as it was put up in the early 1920s, an impressive if foolish attempt to create communications across a vast area, just at the time when such telegraph lines were becoming obsolete. Eventually, (many pages later), Lévi-Strauss has met the Nambikwara, a small group of some 20 people divided into six families and sets up camp. Almost impossible to believe, but he found he was two weeks behind a group of three Jesuit Fathers, who’d arrived in the same area. They quickly disappear in his account, as a mere three paragraphs on the missionaries are followed by a description of the native group, and we’re reading about the Nambikwara, and how they describe the seasons. This is ethnography by jumping in, just as the experience must have been for Lévi-Strauss.
Social anthropologists used to describe their subjects as ‘primitive people’, and this is certainly the case for the Nambikwara. They had few possessions, almost no clothing, bows and arrows, some knives or pieces of iron obtained through barter, all easily carried in one simple plaited basket. Pottery was largely unknown, and even canoes were non-existent. They even slept naked, huddling together near are dying fire on cold nights. Language was a major challenge, with several dialects which, back in the late 1930s, had not been translated.
The challenge for the outsider is to describe what can be observed, and slowly find words and ways to ask questions. In a chapter on family life, Lévi-Strauss describes a world in which young children are left to play among themselves, but well before puberty life becomes what he describes as an ‘imitation’ of adult behaviour. Girls spin and cook, boys start to hunt. As he describes it, “the fundamental, and at times tragic, problem of the Nambikwara, which is the search for food, and the active part they [the children] are expected to play”. Almost everyone, except the very young, is engaged in surviving. In case that sounds almost inhumanly primitive, we later read about the social life of the people, stories, adventures and dalliance. It might be a marginal existence, but there is also joy, drama, and time for games.
Lévi-Strauss wrote with a poet’s skill. An account of relations between men and women, husbands and wives ends with description of night time, people sleeping on bare ground, husbands and wives ‘closely intertwined’ and aware of each other’s care and support. This follows a quote from a foreign colleague, who saw the Nambikwara many years later, and witnessed the effects of disease combined with the foolish enthusiasms of missionaries. Without any substantial impact from the outside world, Lévi-Strauss saw people who lived on the margin but were happy and integrated. As is so often the case, the later observer saw what contact with our advanced civilisation had done: Nothing new: we see it in Australia when we witness the many dire effects of our world on that of the indigenous Australians.
Perhaps one last observation from this so-called ‘autobiographical travelogue’. Like most anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss was interested in power, and how a tribe is managed. In formal terms, he learnt that political power was not hereditary, but the process was that as a chief began to feel ill, or too old to continue, he would choose his successor. An autocracy? That was the apparent process, but he soon observed reality was more complex. The choice of a successor was made by quietly sounding opinions within the group. Even that process was not the final determinant. Once identified as a preference, a chosen individual might reject the offer of chieftainship, and the process would have to be repeated. Not an autocracy, not a democracy, but a real, messy, and practical working approach.
What makes Triste Tropiques special, a work which precedes Lévi-Strauss important work on symbols and systems of thinking? Although it appeared after some of his more academic analyses, it consolidated his reputation. It is raw ethnography, often coloured by his personal preferences and concerns, an insight into a gifted observer and even more gifted writer. It is an extended reflection on life, on society, on how we think, on what we share with other people, and above all on what we can learn about ourselves by looking at the lives of others.
