Tristes Tropiques

For those who have heard of him but little more, the name of Claude Levi-Strauss is likely to inspire a kind of intellectual terror not far short of that provoked by other grand French names like Derrida, Foucault or Lacan. The book of his that I'm going to discuss here, though, is not only his most accessible - surprisingly enough, it was also the one that first gained him his reputation as a public intellectual in 1950s France. Even though Levi-Strauss, like many since, rejects the whole concept of "travel literature", his Tristes Tropiques ("Sad tropics") of 1955 (translated, keeping the French title, in 1973) is at bottom a travel book, a memoir of adventures and encounters in foreign lands.

This membership of what is normally considered a "minor genre" of literature, with all the personal and anecdotal inflections that come with it, does not in any way reduce the work's importance. I think I would agree with Susan Sontag, one of the book's first champions in the English-speaking world, when she called it "one of the great books of our [i.e. the 20th] century. It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beautifully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice." (Her essay on Levi-Strauss is printed in her famous volume Against Interpretation, which I think would have to count, in turn, as one of the great books of criticism of the 20th century.) Although based around the journeys Levi-Strauss made in Amazonia in the 1930s as a young anthropologist, the author continually weaves in personal reflections on his own intellectual development or his position in between Western and native world-views. He is also a master at interspersing memories gathered in other times and places than those of the narrative (I always find this such an attractive technique in travel-writing); from his early tastes in music, to his experiences of the Indian subcontinent in Calcutta and Karachi, to his flight, as a Jew, from the Nazis in 1941, travelling on a packed steamer - whose other passengers happened to include the surrealist Andre Breton - from Marseilles to Puerto Rico. Details such as the last one impart a vivid sense of the chaos and serendipity that must have been so typical of that era: Levi-Strauss only learnt of the outbreak of war through a damp four-month-old newspaper left behind by chance in the hut of a rubber-tapper deep in the Brazilian rainforest, and mentions that he had the decisive military importance of the principle of atomic fission explained to him in a Martinique hotel courtyard by the later director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

The personal aspect of the book sits in an oddly uneasy, but perhaps also productive relationship with Levi-Strauss's theoretical ambitions. The latter have been criticized as overweening, anti-empirical and based on insufficient knowledge of native cultures - for as the British anthropologist Edmund Leach has observed, on the evidence of Tristes Tropiques itself, Levi-Strauss never stayed with any one tribe long enough to acquire a proper degree of fluency in their language. His was a study of culture from the outside rather than from the inside. And yet, at the same time, he wanted to reach a level more "inside" than was accessible even to the natives themselves; to discover the formal "structures" that governed their myths, systems of kinship, organizations of space, and styles of art, without their being aware of these structures. He famously described his approach to myth as an investigation, not into how men thought of their myths (invented, heard and elaborated them), but how myths "thought themselves through men, and without their knowledge".

This led to a formal and comparative approach that often seems at first glance either dangerously speculative or embarrassingly superficial, above all through blankly refusing to try to see things through the eyes of the people he was studying. And yet in Tristes Tropiques Levi-Strauss almost always manages to rescue his more absurd generalisations by hanging some brilliant apercu on the end. By the end of chapter 20, for instance, a prolonged speculation about the "structural" relationship between the geometrical face-painting designs used by the Caduveo people and their social hierarchy, bringing in European heraldry and playing-cards along the way, the reader might be inclined with some justice to dismiss the whole discussion as an intellectual game. Yet the very last two sentences contain an idea which is not only highly plausible in general terms (art not as expression of society so much as expression of what society lacks, of its longing), but crystallises perfectly that pathos which is so characteristic of the book: "If my analysis is correct, in the last resort the graphic art of the Caduveo women is to be interpreted...as the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way. In this charming civilisation, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their make-up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age..."

Again, in the chapter on Bengal (15. "Crowds"), the author's attempts to make sense of the poverty around him and its place in the social structure often seem banal or even insulting, and one begins to wish he had spent more time getting to know the culture before disparaging it. But then we come across an appreciation of the link between religion and the modesty of life which is genuinely moving. I think anyone who has travelled on the Indian subcontinent will feel the truth of this sketch: "Very little is needed in order to exist: little space, little food, little joy, few utensils or tools; it is life on a pocket-handkerchief scale. But on the other hand, there seems to be no lack of soul; one is aware of it in the bustle of the streets, the intensity of the look in people's eyes, the passion which marks the most trifling discussion...Only quality of soul can explain the ease with which these people fit into the cosmos. Theirs is indeed a civilization in which a prayer rug represents the world, or a square drawn on the ground marks out a place of worship." And as an illustration, a memory of walking along a deserted beach near Karachi, and finding a turbanned old man who "had fashioned a small mosque for himself with the help of two iron chairs borrowed from a neighbouring eating-house...He was all alone on the beach, and he was praying."

The beauty of images like these encloses a sympathy that is somehow more than human, or humanist. It reaches its peak in the deeply moving chapters on the Nambikwara, a poverty-stricken yet strangely carefree people living on the bare central Brazilian plateau. It is less directly empathetic and at the same time wider in compass than a humanist vision: Levi-Strauss can write with the same detached affection of a travelling companion and of a pet monkey he picked up (named Lucinda) - indeed the very final image of the book, disconcertingly, is "the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat." And this lack of willingness to prize human consciousness above nature must be somewhere behind Levi-Strauss's rigorously cold-toned formalist analyses. Levi-Strauss belongs namely on one side of a great division in early/mid twentieth-century thought, one which he locates himself in the chapter on his intellectual education, "The Making of an Anthropologist". On the one side, as his great influences, are psychoanalysis, Marxism (in its social-analytical variety), sociology and structural linguistics, all of which attempt to explain the human world through the use of causal models similar to those of the natural sciences. (Levi-Strauss mentions geology as a particularly inspiring model for his own thinking.) On the other side are history, political/radical Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism, most of which tendencies came together in the person of Levi-Strauss's great opponent, Jean-Paul Sartre.

You could define the split - perhaps crudely - as one between types of thinking concerned with objective necessity, on the one hand, and subjective freedom on the other. The fallacies each falls into when badly practised are equally characteristic: if the first tends toward pseudo-scientific absurdity and hyperbolic, overstretched generalisation, the second can often seem based on nothing more than "dressed-up" common sense. (Trying to explain Heidegger's phenomenological analyses in everyday language, for instance, has made me wonder whether he wasn't alarmingly close to stating the obvious much of the time. On the other hand, maybe the value of his approach was precisely in reasserting the need to see human experience in its own, "common-sense" - but also sometimes very poetic - terms, instead of reducing it to a scientifically-conceived model like Descartes'.)

On a deeper level though, the two strands embody two fundamentally different ways to make sense of the human world. The late 19th-century cultural historian Wilhelm Dilthey called these Erklären (explaining) and Verstehen (understanding); and the second, which he thought fundamentally necessary to the study of history, involved just that act of empathy or "trying to see things through the other's eyes" which, as I mentioned earlier, was so uncongenial to Levi-Strauss. The dilemma is acute in both history and anthropology: trying to think one's way inside the "common-sense" world-view of a society massively different from one's own is no mean feat, and may be more rewarding, as well as more time-consuming, than putting together grand causal models (in history, incidentally, this was done at about the same time as Levi-Strauss by Arnold J. Toynbee). But it carries the risk of obliterating a detachment which also has its value - particularly for thinking objectively about a society's faults, illusions or contingencies.

It is his preference for this detachment, and the ironic but compassionate attitude springing from it, that explains one of the most surprising intellectual confessions in the book: Levi-Strauss's allegiance to Buddhism. At a temple in the Chittagong hills on the Burmese border he feels that "between this form of religion and myself there was no likelihood of misunderstanding. It was not a question of bowing down in front of idols or of adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society which created his legend, had evolved twenty-five centuries before and to which my civilisation could contribute only by confirming it. What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have visited and even from that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the Sage at the foot of the tree?" For in a way, even when unsuccessful in its attempts to "explain", the whole of Tristes Tropiques is a "meditation" in the Buddhist sense: an attempt to rise above the chains of necessity in which we find ourselves caught (no different from the Caduveo or Nambikwara) and see our limitations from a more universal perspective.