Tristes Tropiques'
by Claude Levi-Strauss
Mankind has opted for monoculture
From early in the book, perhaps from the introduction. I don’t recall precisely.
Chapter 9
The ground that his observations cover is truly remarkable. In chapter 9, Guanabara, he goes from travelogue to France’s early colonial history in Brazil to urban design over the course of only a few paragraphs.
He speaks of the way that places have ceased to shock and surprise in the way they once did before the sustained contact between colonial and native cultures. He says places are growing close together and the displacement we feel when going to a new place is much diminished from its previous levels. This phenomenon really hasn’t showed down since he wrote this book in 1953. If anything, it has probably increaseda travel has become cheaper and the internet has become so ubiquitous.
The search for the exotic boils down to the collecting of earlier or later phases of a familiar pattern of development. The traveller is like an antiquary obliged, by the dearth of material, to abandon his collection of Negro art and to fall back on bargaining for quaint pieces of junk as he tours the flea markets of the inhabited world.
Chapter 10
The Santos hinterland, an inundated plain, variegated with lagoons and marshes and crisscrossed by innumerable rivers, straits and canals, the pattern of which is perpetually blurred by a pearly vapour, seems like the earth itself, emerging on the first day of creation.
Themes:
- man and nature
- the European colonial legacy
- the milktoastification of cultures throughout the world