254 definitions
The book's index
Tristes Tropiques
229 concepts · 254 definitions
- adoption1
- adornment1
- adventure2
- afterlife1
- ageing1
- air travel1
- alienation1
- altitude1
- ambition1
- America1
- American city1
- anthropologist3
- anthropology2
- antiquity1
- archive1
- Asia1
- assimilation1
- Aztecs1
- bath1
- beach1
- beauty1
- bee1
- begging1
- beginning1
- blue1
- Brazil1
- brotherhood of man1
- Buddhism2
- camper1
- cannibal1
- cannibalism1
- caste2
- change1
- chief2
- chieftainship1
- choice1
- Christianity1
- city2
- civilization3
- coexistence1
- coffee1
- commitment1
- complaint1
- consent1
- contemplation1
- convert1
- correspondence1
- cricket1
- cultural relativism1
- custom1
Travel (n.) now shows us first of all our own filth flung in the face of mankind: the waste the West must shed to keep its famous order and harmony.
Travel (n.) may be an exploration of the deserts of one's own mind rather than of those around one.
Travel (n.) traps you in a circle: the less societies had touched and corrupted one another, the less their visitors could grasp what their differences meant — come early and see without understanding, come late and chase vestiges.
Civilization (n.) has opted for monoculture: a mass civilization grown the way beetroot is grown in bulk, until man's daily bill of fare holds a single item.
Civilization (n.) is, taken as a whole, an extraordinarily complex machine that might look like humanity's chance of survival — were its function not to produce what physicists call entropy, that is, inertia.
Civilization (n.) reached the upper Machado in two symbolic consignments: a small depot sent upriver by canoe only railings for graves and enema douches.
Writing (n.) did not make the neolithic revolution — farming, herding and the crafts were achieved without it — and for some five thousand years after its invention, knowledge fluctuated more than it grew.
Writing (n.) has always appeared with cities and empires, with masses of people graded into castes and classes: its primary function seems to be to facilitate slavery, and its use for disinterested pleasure is a by-product.
Writing (n.) reached the Nambikwara as a symbol, not a skill: their chief scrawled wavy lines and 'read' from them the list of gifts, borrowing writing to raise his authority over the others while its reality stayed unknown.
Anthropologist (n.) is a critic at home and a conformist abroad: subversive among his own people, respectful to the point of conservatism toward any society unlike his — and the value he sets on foreign ways rises with his disdain for his own.
Anthropologist (n.) acquires a chronic rootlessness, cut off from his group for long stretches and jolted between worlds: in the end he feels at home nowhere.
Anthropologist (n.) can do unseen harm: two French ranchers who despised the Caduveo were shown the beauty of their art, 'went native', and one was later killed by his new-found friends — a victim less of the Indians than of the confusion a visit had planted in him.
Anthropology (n.) may exist because the West was gnawed by remorse: the anthropologist's very existence makes sense only as an attempt at redemption — he is the symbol of atonement.
Anthropology (n.) is, like mathematics or music, one of the few genuine vocations: you can discover it in yourself before anyone has taught you a thing about it.
Exotic (n.) is only an inequality of rhythm: a gap that matters over a few centuries and hides destinies that might just as well have stayed joined or run side by side.
Exotic (n.) now boils down to collecting earlier or later stages of one familiar story of development: the traveller is an antiquary who, his African art run out, must haggle for quaint junk in the flea markets of the inhabited world.
Truth (n.) reveals its nature by the care it takes to stay elusive: the real is never the obvious, and to understand is to reduce one kind of reality to another.
Truth (n.) comes in nested worlds, each truer than the one it encloses and false in relation to the one that encompasses it — we grant meaning to the nearest and deny it to the furthest, when the truth lies in widening the meaning until it bursts.
Caste (n.) lets every individual behave like a king toward someone else — provided he can find, or invent, an inferior being.
Caste (n.) was India's great experiment in turning quantity into quality — letting crowded groups live side by side by making them different — and its tragedy is that difference slid into a common measure, and so into hierarchy.
City (n.) works like a microscope: crowding vast numbers into a small space, it magnifies on the plate of the collective mind the swarming, microbial mass of our ancestral superstitions — such as towns drifting west and leaving their eastern districts to poverty.
City (n.) is not merely like a symphony or a poem but an object of the same kind — natural thing and cultural subject at once, individual and group, real and dreamed: the supremely human achievement.
A Journey (n.) moves you through space, through time and up or down the social scale all at once — and since space has three dimensions, five axes are needed to plot even a simple trip.
A Journey (n.) across a continent can be a climb through layers of time: the Nambikwara took him back to the Stone Age, the Tupi-Kawahib to the sixteenth century, and the rubber camps' dances to the eighteenth.