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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
When in 1984 I accepted an invitation from editor Frank Smith at Cambridge University Press to collaborate in a new “Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,” I was naive and somewhat unaware of the potential intellectual dangers and pitfalls involved in what seemed to me, at that time, to be a challenging and worthwhile project. Now, eighteen years later, and having been recently been denounced as the Americanist equivalent of a Holocaust Revisionist by no less than Claude Lévi-Strauss, the grand figure of structural anthropology and arguably the most distinguished scholar in his field in the late Twentieth Century, I am forced to question myself and the whole enterprise of trying to write such as history. Lévi-Strauss's critique was published in the French anthropology journal L'Homme. It was a thunderbolt cast from Olympus— a place which as Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta has recently reminded us, is located roughly between the Rue des Ecoles and the Boulevard St. Michel—and I find it particularly discouraging since its author was one of my intellectual heroes and Tristes tropiques one of the formative books of my own education. To be accused by him of editing a volume that is “politically correct,” and “post-modernist” I find slightly amusing. [I carry a copy of the review to show my graduate students whose characterizations of me tend to run in quite the opposite direction]. Why a Lévi-Strauss should use the analogy of holocaust denial to criticize a work edited by two guys named Salomon and Schwartz is itself worthy of consideration, but it is not what concerns me in these remarks.
1 L'Homme, vol. 158–159 (2001), pp. 439–442.
2 da Matta, Roberto, “Back to the Tristes tropiques: Notes on Lévi-Strauss and Brazil,” Brazil, 2001. A Revisionary History of Brazilian Literature and Culture (Dartmouth, MA, 2001), pp. 529–40.Google Scholar This volume is actually a special number of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, n. 4/5 (2000). A lucid analysis of Tristes tropiques in relation to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism as a whole is found in Geertz, Clifford, “The World in a Text. How to Read Tristes Tropiques ” in his Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, 1988), pp. 25–48.Google Scholar
3 Steward, Julian, Handbook of South American Indians, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1946–59);Google Scholar Steward, Julian and Faron, Louis, Native Peoples of South America (New York, 1959).Google ScholarPubMed
4 de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, “Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1966), pp. 179–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 For example, Tom Zuidema, R., Ceque System of Cuzco (Leiden, 1964);Google Scholar Wachtel, Nathan, The Vision of the Vanquished. The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570. B. and Reynolds, S., trans. (Hassocks, England, 1977).Google Scholar
6 Gow, Peter, An Amazonian Myth and its History (Oxford, 2000).Google Scholar
7 Clifford Geertz long ago pointed out Lévi-Strauss fascination with Man but his rather disinterested attitudes toward men. See Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 356 Google Scholar and the discussion in Fred Inglis, Geertz, Clifford. Culture, Custom, and Ethics (Cambridge, 2000), p. 140.Google Scholar
8 Gorender, Jacob, A escravìdão reabilitada (São Paulo, 1990).Google Scholar
9 “Goodbye to Tristes tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History,” in Sahlins, Marshall, Culture in Practice (New York, 2000), pp. 425–470.Google Scholar (The essay was originally published in 1988.)
10 Ibid., p. 478.
11 Sahlins, , “Goodbye to Tristes tropes ,” p. 478 Google Scholar where Sahlins cites Stephen Greenblatt's denunciation of “sentimental pessimism” as the tendency to homogenize all non-Western experience in terms of the West's dominance.
