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Tristes Tropicomix

The Financial Times Weekend Magazine invited Apostolos Doxiadis, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, the creators of Logicomix, to do a short tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss. The result is as good and insightful as Logicomix. You can read it in full online. I now look forward to their take on Heidegger's Being and Time.

Incidentally if you haven't read it, I can highly recommend Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss's travelogue of his research among the peoples of the Amazon. It is quite simply a wonderful, interesting, engrossing and thought-provoking book, drenched in melancholy.

The one question that's been on my mind since I finished it, is what happened to the little monkey that at one point clenched to one of his boots and wouldn't let go and which he kept for weeks or months until it is no longer mentioned in the narrative.

Links

The English translation of Tristes Tropiques.

More on Lévi-Strauss, the man and the structuralist approach to anthropology he is famous for. Here's what Susan Sontag had to say about his book Structural Anthropology back in 1963. Over at YouTube you can find various interviews with Lévi-Strauss, here's one from 1972.