The second book was Tristes tropiques. What we had in our hands was an American edition of the British translation done by John Russell in 1961. It had appeared in England with the title A World on the Wane, an attempt to the translate alliteration without sense. Fortunately, when the American edition appeared two years later the author was already famous, so the more exotic and opaque French title had returned. By 1968, the name Lévi-Strauss was enough to sell the book, even if Americans didn’t understand what the title meant. This was an assigned text, we didn’t have to understand.

The black and white images have a powerful charm of their own, quite independent from the prose. They stand as evidence of the author’s presence in an exotic world similar in many ways to the images of nineteenth century explorers in the Americas
and Africa.

The cover claimed it was a book about “primitive societies in Brazil.” That advertisement and the photographs of naked Indians were reassuring. Without them it was hard to understand why I was reading over 150 pages of travelogue and social criticism with no natives in sight. Finally, the natives appeared and the author convinced me that the people he described and photographed lived in poverty, but at the same time he invited me to marvel at their happiness and energy in the face of a cruel world. He had a unique way of describing how the natives create artistic expression from the simplest things – patterns painted on their skin, feathers, strings, and folded leaves.

Near the center of the book I was confronted with my first shaman. He was the author’s unintended roommate during his sojourn in a Bororo village. The local name for this role was bari, and I underlined portions of the description. “The bari is asocial…. But the bari is also under the dominion of one or more guardian spirits…. The old adage about the quick and the dead here takes on an unexpected and terrible significance; for, between the spirit and the sorcerer, the bond is of so jealous a nature that one can never be quite sure which of the two partners is, in the end, the master, and which the servant.”^[1] My own unintended roommate that year, a gifted photographer, was similarly mysterious. He had inherited the Asian features of his Japanese mother and the Washington DC culture of his Jewish father. When I looked at him I was never sure which side was looking back.

At the time I did not have the linguistic or intellectual tools to see how the British translator had deformed the author’s metaphor in the passage I underlined. Russell had substituted an ambiguous reference to the King James Bible – “who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead” (1 Peter 45) – for a French legal reference – “Le mort saisit le vif” (the dead seize the living). John and Doreen Weightman, who re-translated Tristes tropiques twelve years later and went on to produce English versions of much of Lévi-Strauss’ later writing, explain that the legal term means “the heir is immediately invested with the possessions and prerogatives of the dead man.” It would have been interesting to hear that in 1968. During this time when a search for authenticity and roots was commingling with the desire to survive the latest war, many of us were looking for a spirit to invest us.

I didn’t grasp the shape of the book reading the Russell translation. After reading it again, I read the second Weightman translation and began to see how Lévi-Strauss actually presented the balance between the Old and New Worlds. I discovered the parts Russell left out: the three chapters about India that conclude the first act, and a chapter and a half about India in the third.

I also found copies of the original French (Plon) edition. The first copy I found was on the shelf in a friend’s living room, beside others from the same Terre humaine series. Here I discovered that the French edition contained sixty-three photographs, three times the number included in the English edition. The second copy was on a sagging shelf in another friend’s country house in Normandy. As I flipped through it, I could smell the fifty years of moisture and dust that had settled on the edges of the pages. The current paperback edition is easy to find in the larger bookstores of Paris. Ten years before, his French publisher had produced a large edition of just the photographs Lévi-Strauss and his associates had taken in Brazil. The black and white images have a powerful charm of their own, quite independent from the prose. They stand as evidence of the author’s presence in an exotic world similar in many ways to the images of nineteenth century explorers in the Americas and Africa. At the same time the portraits of the men, women and children he studied exude a sense of the photographer’s intimate contact with fellow human beings.