Claude Lévi-Strauss
In the Field in Mato Grosso
One should not fail to mention Claude Lévi-Straus’s ‘Tristes Tropiques’ in which the acclaimed cultural anthropologist wrote about his trip to the ‘New World’ to help establish USP as Brazil’s leading university in the 1930’s. The book tells of his travels and field work including his ethnographic focus on certain tribes in Mato Grosso. While he does not appear to have spent anytime in Cáceres proper, the Borroro were living just up the São Lorenzo River a short distance to the east, and the Nambikwara to the north along Col. Rondon’s telegraph line to Porto Velho, an area through which President Roosevelt traveled and wrote about.
A section of the book describes his introduction to the Pantanal and his arrival in Mato Grosso (then one large state) by the Noreste Rairoad from Barau, SP. He disembarked “in the heart of the pioneer zone”, at “dismal” Porto Esperança on the Rio Paraguay, then continued by steamboat up river - “And yet what a delightful voyage it was!” – Through the wetlands to Cuiabá, the state capital. Much time is spent in this city - “with its slow and ceremonious way of life” - preparing for his trip by oxen train to the Rio Madeira in Amazonia. ‘Tristes Tropiques’ is at the same time a travelogue, memoir and an anthropological study of four native Brazilian culture groups; the Caduveo, the Borroro, the Nambikwara, the Tupi-Kawahib, and of the Brazilian people he encountered on his journeys.
It is best to read a latter translation of this work; e.g. “Tristes Tropiques”, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955, translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman, 1973 Jonathan Cape.
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