Lévi-Strauss's Nostalgia for Brazil

Saudades do Brasil (Nostalgia for Brazil) is a collection of photographs taken by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss during his stay in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. With a serene gaze, he captures the disappearing landscapes and the people who live there, including the indigenous peoples of Mato Grosso and the Amazon, and the cityscape of São Paulo, which he saw as a young man.

The title "Saudade" is a Portuguese word that includes the emotions of nostalgia, sadness, and affection, and is also a word that symbolizes the distance and resonance that Strauss felt between civilization and nature, and between observer and subject.

The photographs transcend ethnographic documents and resonate like an elegy for the world an intellectual saw in his youth. His gaze, which drifts between the boundaries of city and forest, science and poetry, illuminates the origins that led to his later masterpiece, "The Tropics."

[Title] Nostalgia for Brazil
[Publisher] Misuzu Shobo
[Publication date] October 16, 1995 (1st edition)
[Number of pages] 235 pages
[Size] Approx. 28.8 x 25.1 x 2.6 cm, 1.64 kg
[Format] Hardcover
[Title reading] Travel to Brazil
[Authors/Editors] C. Levi-Strauss/Author, Junzo Kawada/Translator
[Printing] Mitsumura Printing/Printing and Binding
[ISBN] 4-622-03901-X
[Condition] Used 5 (cover slightly discolored, edges wrinkled, top slightly stained, slightly discolored)
[Accessories] None
[Featured books]
[Related Exhibitions]

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

French cultural anthropologist and thinker, who, as the founder of structuralism, had a decisive influence on the humanities of the 20th century.

Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1908, he studied philosophy at the University of Paris.

In 1935, he was appointed to the University of São Paulo in Brazil, where he conducted fieldwork in Mato Grosso and the Amazon and researched indigenous societies, experiences that would later become the basis for his masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques.

During the war, he fled to the United States, where he met the linguist Roman Jakobson and established his structuralist thinking. He published works such as "Elementary Structures of Kinship," "Savage Mind," and "The Logic of Myth," which analyzed universal patterns in myths and kinship structures, and presented a perspective for interpreting human culture as a "structure."

He was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1973 and the Académie française in 1984.

He passed away in 2009 at the age of 100.

< Related Figures >