Saudades Do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir

by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sylvia Modelski (Translator)

Claude Levi-Strauss, internationally known as a brilliant and sometimes controversial anthropologist, is also a skilled and sensitive photographer. Saudades do Brasil - "nostalgia for Brazil," from the title of a musical composition by Darius Milhaud - presents 180 of the more than 3,000 photographs Levi-Strauss took in Brazil between 1935 and 1939. While serving as professor of sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, the young ethnographer made expeditions among the natives of Mato Grosso and Southern Amazonia that resulted in numerous publications, most notably Tristes Tropiques. Most of these photographs are published here for the first time.
Levi-Strauss begins his photographic memoir in Sao Paulo, then a frontier city rapidly changing to an industrial metropolis, a city with "a singular beauty, due to breaks in rhythm, architectural paradoxes, contrasting shapes and colors." The rest of the photographs chronicle Levi-Strauss expeditions among the Caduveo, The Bororo, the Nambikwara, and other tribes - "the last escapees from the cataclysm that discovery and subsequent invasions had been for their ancestors." His pictures capture the Amazonian landscape, the people, and their activities, social lives, and ceremonies. Informative captions by Levi-Strauss enhance the ethnographic and human interest of his photographs.
Saudades do Brasil will be of interest to anthropologists, photographers, and readers concerned with a part of the world that is geographically remote but globally significant.

221 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.

Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.

Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Reviews

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1994 the 86-year-old anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was persuaded to go through over a thousand old photos that he had from several trips he made in Brazil in the late 1930s. During these journeys he visited the Bororo, Mande and Nambikwara tribes of the western Amazon, and gathered ethnographic data that became the basis for much of his anthropological writing. This book is a collection of 180 of these photos with a prologue and captions.

It is marvelous because it tells the story of Brazil in the 30s, a country with a few small cities and a vast outback of forests and rivers about which very little was actually known. Although most of Brazil's indigenous peoples had died out long before, Levi-Strauss visited a few communities that survived.

These black-and-white photos are clear and well-composed, often contemplative studies of hunter-gatherers living in a wilderness little touched by western civilization. Levi-Strauss treats his subjects with kindness and respect and is unreserved in his praise for their beauty and their often casual existence without clothes, using the most rudimentary of shelters and tools. They are often shown comfortably coexisting with birds and animals. Levi-Strauss also records some of the challenges he faced in his journey through undeveloped wildlands, by truck, horseback, canoe and on foot.

It is fortunate that we have this photographic record of a past era, and that Levi-Strauss himself took the time to annotate these pictures. An invaluable historical document.

[Teme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vraiment magnifique. 6€ à Emmaüs je suis très heureux. C’est un véritable voyage avec une sincère envie de découvrir les autres peuples et leurs mœurs. Aucun paternalisme, aucune malhonnêteté capitaliste. C’est beau. Chris Marker aurait pu en faire une adaptation cinématographique génial.