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“Levi-Strauss was in São Paulo, which is now the world’s third largest city, in the 1930s. He draws a lovely, fascinating portrait of the city, but then he also goes off into the Amazon and that’s where he’s at his best. He stays with four different indigenous peoples and he does a portrait of each…Originally it was going to have a different title. I think it’s triste not because of what he saw in São Paulo but what he saw further north in the Amazon, people whose ways of life were doomed to disappear. There’s a tribe called the Nambikwara, and in Tristes Tropiques he predicts their demise as a people. In 1978 I got to where their homeland had been and a huge unpaved highway had just been built right through it. I would sometimes see the Nambikwara moping by the side of the road, drunk, morose or just passive. It was a sad prophecy and it did occur.” Read more...
Larry Rohter, Foreign Correspondent
