Tristes Tropiques

"My original intention was to choose only Brazilian books because it’s good for us to hear Brazilian voices, but this one is so good that I had to throw aside my Brazilian choice and give you this. It’s mostly but not entirely about Brazil. Levi-Strauss was in São Paulo, which is now the world’s third largest city, in the 1930s. He draws a lovely, fascinating portrait of the city, but then he also goes off into the Amazon and that’s where he’s at his best. He stays with four different indigenous peoples and he does a portrait of each. I’ve been doing the same since the 1970s, and even though he’s writing in the 1930s he really captures the dilemma of these people who are being overwhelmed by the modern world, and also the perplexity of being a foreigner plopped down among them and the adjustments he had to make. So, in a way it’s a guide book and in a way it’s a novel. The most fundamental one is that you can’t think that they are primitive and that you are so utterly different. You have to have an open mind and be attentive. Characteristics that are true here are true in advanced societies as well. Well, in late 2006 I had to go into an area where the Cinta Larga tribe lives. This particular group had recently killed 40 or 50 miners who’d invaded their land looking for diamonds. I was a little bit concerned, even though the Cinta Larga had invited me in. Levi-Strauss had, in fact, been in this area 70 years before. I was sitting in a car, talking to a chief, and he suddenly asked me: ‘Why are your people so war-like?’ He knew I was American and it was just an amazing moment. I turned it around and asked him why he thought we were so war-like. He was referring to Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan. He had ordered the killing of the miners and he said he had been complaining to FUNAI, the government’s National Indian Foundation, and he’d got sick of telling them and not being listened to. No. But there are complicated reasons for that. Originally it was going to have a different title. I think it’s triste not because of what he saw in São Paulo but what he saw further north in the Amazon, people whose ways of life were doomed to disappear. There’s a tribe called the Nambikwara, and in Tristes Tropiques he predicts their demise as a people. In 1978 I got to where their homeland had been and a huge unpaved highway had just been built right through it. I would sometimes see the Nambikwara moping by the side of the road, drunk, morose or just passive. It was a sad prophecy and it did occur. This is a country that’s supposed to be so happy but there is a strain of tragedy below the surface."