The road which it indicates to us is one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve.
The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may be open in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind.
On this opportunity, this chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends. As it accomplishes the twin tasks of alerting us to the fact of our never-ending transgressions and reminding us of our inherent sameness, Tristes Tropiques emerges as a potent and indispensable read for a time of bitter divisions — be they political, religious or of any other sort.
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I will especially remember you! View all posts by Tulika Bahadur. Like Liked by 1 person. Such a great article, for a great writer! In reality, that was just his way of making sense of the world. He tried so very hard to understand the very human, and for that he can only be respected. Thanks a lot for commenting.
The tribespeople are of course remote, well-hidden; at least a little dangerous; and naturally naked. He took notes, and some of his rather beautiful photographs are in the book. Their bodies, the jewels in these caskets, were delicately modelled and the flesh tones were heightened by the brilliance of their make up and paint, which in turn seemed to be intended as a background to set off even more splendid ornaments, the rich bright glint of the teeth and fangs of wild animals among feathers and flowers.
Was a state of nature, if this is what it is, ever more beautifully described or more romantic? But perhaps Unhappy Tropics, with its suggestion of unluckiness, is quite close. Then in the second half the author comes into his own, interspersing his sympathetic, observant, and perceptive descriptions of small native groups with accounts of the difficulty of finding them, or inadvertent mistakes that caused offense and could have cost the party dear, or just getting lost in areas where white men were known to have ventured before and never returned.
The tribes he saw had lew more than a dozen members each, as they wandered nomadically through the Brazilian forest. Some lacked women, others fighting men. He ignores the now notorious attempts to spread disease among the Indians by dousing blankets with infection and distributing them to the remaining tribes. His anthropology is not mechanistic or data-bound. It deals with human beings, but in the professional way that a doctor or lawyer might admire.
It involves adventure and danger, but the result is cool and analytical. This he does with his comparisons, peppered throughout the book, which are derogatory to our so-called civilized life.
What wear and tear, what useless irritation, we could spare ourselves if we agreed to accept the true condition of our human experience and realize that we are not in a position to free ourselves completely from its pattern and rhythm. In one group, the chief used his paper and pen for random wavy lines in imitation of the anthropologist's writing. The experience prompts another homily, this one about the power of writing as an expression of authority quite apart from whatever is written.
There is something obviously attractive about a man wandering lost in a tropical forest, finding scattered tribes of primitive natives, and coming to flashes of insight about the horrible dirty old world he's left behind. The native chiefs hold their authority through a system of reciprocity in which they distribute gifts among the tribes in return for being allowed the privileges of chief.
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