Claude LeviStrauss, Tristes Trop Quotes

A collection of quotes by Claude LeviStrauss, Tristes Trop.

Claude Levi-Strauss was a renowned French anthropologist and ethnologist, best known for his groundbreaking work, "Tristes Tropiques." Born on November 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, Levi-Strauss revolutionized the field of anthropology with his structuralist approach, exploring the underlying patterns and structures in human societies. "Tristes Tropiques," published in 1955, is a seminal travelogue and memoir that recounts his experiences studying indigenous cultures in Brazil and reflects on the broader themes of culture, civilization, and the human condition. Levi-Strauss's work continues to be highly influential in anthropology and his contributions have left an indelible mark on the discipline.

Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos . . . . But the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes and, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. . . . My aim is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . I quite naturally looked upon Freud's theories as the application to the human being of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology. . . . Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. . . . But I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality.

Claude LeviStrauss, Tristes Trop

Philosophy