The author was one of the great anthropologists of the 20th century. He started out studying philosophy between the wars and was heavily influenced by Marx and Freud. His theory of structualism seems, at least superficially, to be a Marxist or Hegelian view of society. Structuralism is not really discussed or explained in this book, and that is probably why it is his most popular. I've read that he cobbled Tristes Tropiques together from other published magazine articles, travelogues and his notes. The book does read that way, but some of it, perhaps much of it, is quite fascinating. I found the central part of the book about his time with the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib tribes in Brazil to be the most straight forward and interesting. Other extraneous chapters include a detailed summary of a play that was never published, an account of a trip to a Pakistani archeological site and a great description of his escape from Vichy France to Mozambique. ( )

this is what popular nonfiction imagines it is doing ( )

Chapters XIV, XV, XVI, XXXIX of the French edition are omitted in this English edition (Atheneum New York, 1972)

This anthropological study has become a classic and is well known as such even if not read. But it is rewarding for a wider point of view even if you are not particular interested in the Brazilian indigenous societies C. L-S. encountered in the middle 1930s and which are most likely extinct now. As he writes (39): ‘people delight in travel-books and ask only to be mislead by them … humanity has taken to monoculture. The same dish will be served to us every day. … What travel has now to show us is the filth, our filth, that we have thrown in the face of humanity.’ This L-S has written in the 1950s, 70 years ago!

A few notes I made:
The Bororo society: The circular lay-out of the village provides a basis for and reflects the relationship between Man and the Universe, between Society and the Supernatural, and between the living and the dead (216). Thus the missionaries, in making them abandon this circular structure and build their houses in parallel rows destroyed their culture.
Kurt Unkel (Nimuendaju) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Nimuendajú
https://doaj.org/article/1d58714d09354b0d96fbde771f9c1730

The Nambikwara society:
‘The Writing Lesson’.
On the origin and function of power: the intuition of Rousseau rather than Freud (308f).
For an indigenous society the encounter with the West had come as a ‘monstrous and unintelligible cataclysm.’(319)
Thoughts on Man and his changing relation to the Universe: Rousseau again.

Tristes Tropiques is a travel book in more than just the physical sense: a book of profound exploration were Humanity is coming from and were Humanity is going to. (IIX-22) ( )

Más que un libro de viajes, el presente texto es un libro sobre los viajes, sobre cómo y por qué puede alguien llegar a hacerse etnólogo, y sobre el modo en que se integran las aventuras del explorador y las investigaciones del científico hasta llegar a formar la experiencia propia del etnólogo. El autor trata de analizar estas cuestiones cotejando sus recuerdos y proponiendo un recorrido que no renuncie a los pintorescos detalles, pero que a la vez los sitúe en una perspectiva más amplia.

Un pozzo di scienza autoreferenziale. ( )