Levi-Strauss as a protagonist of his ethnographic prose : a cosmopolitan view of "Tristes tropiques" and its contemporary interpretations

This article inscribes itself into the intellectual tradition of anthropology as literature. It offers a critical view on one of the iconic (albeit also problematic) texts of the discipline, Tristes tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss. My aim is to broaden the frame of reference of the analysis to make it more cosmopolitan, more biographical, and more historical. I offer here the results of the re-reading of the text "with my Polish eyes". In accordance with the methodological principles of anthropology of art, I was interested not just in the work itself, but also in its author and reception. Firstly, I situate Tristes tropiques in the broader context of, what I call, ethnographic prose. This enables me to show the working of disciplining practices of academia (following Michel Foucault), which kept literary writings of anthropologists outside the profession. Authors themselves were aware that they wrote them with the "other hand" than regular monographs. These observations are confirmed by the biographical context of the origin of Tristes tropiques. Another contribution of my paper consists in analysing (applying James Clifford's categories) the way the author presents himself in his text. I am showing that he describes himself consistently as an anthropologist, not only rhetorically but also on a deeper level of his professional habitus. The third part of my paper gives the results of my research concerning the reception of Tristes tropiques and its hero. I show how the book was received by the French public and anthropological community, as well as a reaction to it in Brazil, where the author’s journeys took place, and in Poland at the time of the post-Stalinist “thaw”, where the book was published for the first time in the Soviet bloc. The reception of the work in various places and times shows how differentiated the process of reading is. In the conclusion I put these interpretations in the historical context and suggest reasons for the unwavering popularity of Tristes tropiques. Its greatness is that, in addition to criticism, it inspires profound reflection and broader interpretation of the modern world