Saudades do Brasil

by Claude Lévi-Strauss

En publiant ou republiant sur le tard un choix de ses photographies prises entre 1935 et 1939 - avant que, lui disparu, plus personne ne sache les décrire - l'auteur souhaite communiquer à d'autres le charme indicible d'un monde qui lui fut cher, devenu méconnaissable depuis. Il fait défiler ces images en les accompagnant d'un récit continu de ses aventures, un peu à la façon d'une bande dessinée. Pour les curieux de la photographie, il rappelle aussi un temps où cet art ne donnait pas encore matière à des dissertations savantes, et où le voyageur se contentait d'enregistrer naïvement ce qu'il avait sous les yeux. D'un intérêt certain pour l'Historien à ces deux titres, ce recueil voudrait être d'abord un témoignage sur le Brésil et ses habitants il y a plus d'un demi-siècle, auxquels l'auteur adresse, ainsi qu'à sa jeunesse lointaine, un salut amical et nostalgique.

223 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.

Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.

Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Reviews

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1994 the 86-year-old anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was persuaded to go through over a thousand old photos that he had from several trips he made in Brazil in the late 1930s. During these journeys he visited the Bororo, Mande and Nambikwara tribes of the western Amazon, and gathered ethnographic data that became the basis for much of his anthropological writing. This book is a collection of 180 of these photos with a prologue and captions.

It is marvelous because it tells the story of Brazil in the 30s, a country with a few small cities and a vast outback of forests and rivers about which very little was actually known. Although most of Brazil's indigenous peoples had died out long before, Levi-Strauss visited a few communities that survived.

These black-and-white photos are clear and well-composed, often contemplative studies of hunter-gatherers living in a wilderness little touched by western civilization. Levi-Strauss treats his subjects with kindness and respect and is unreserved in his praise for their beauty and their often casual existence without clothes, using the most rudimentary of shelters and tools. They are often shown comfortably coexisting with birds and animals. Levi-Strauss also records some of the challenges he faced in his journey through undeveloped wildlands, by truck, horseback, canoe and on foot.

It is fortunate that we have this photographic record of a past era, and that Levi-Strauss himself took the time to annotate these pictures. An invaluable historical document.

[Teme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vraiment magnifique. 6€ à Emmaüs je suis très heureux. C’est un véritable voyage avec une sincère envie de découvrir les autres peuples et leurs mœurs. Aucun paternalisme, aucune malhonnêteté capitaliste. C’est beau. Chris Marker aurait pu en faire une adaptation cinématographique génial.