"Tropical Melancholy" Author: [France] Claude Levi-Strauss Publisher: China Renmin University Press Series: Collected Works of Levi-Strauss

"The Melancholy of the Tropics" is a famous autobiography of the master of structural anthropology, Levi-Strauss, and one of the classic works in the history of anthropology. In his youth, Levi-Strauss visited the Amazon River Basin and the Brazilian highland forests, looking for human societies that have preserved their most primitive forms in the depths of the jungle. This book describes his interesting and profound thinking process and life experience in several of the most primitive tribes, such as Kaduveo, Poloro, and Nambikwara.

With a new approach, an open vision, keen insight, vivid imagination and delicate brushstrokes, Levi-Strauss placed these tribes in the context of human development as a whole and proposed fascinating mutual confirmation and comparative studies.

Tropical Melancholy is a masterpiece of anthropology, literature, and human thought that makes a rare contribution to promoting human self-understanding.

Claude Levi-Strauss, professor emeritus of the Collège de France, member of the French Academy of Sciences, famous anthropologist, main founder of the French structuralist humanistic academic thought, and the only one of the five "masters of structuralism" still alive today.

Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 and studied at the University of Paris in his early years. In his youth, he was fond of philosophy and was fascinated by the ideas of Rousseau, Freud and Marx. He then devoted himself to the study of cultural anthropology for more than 50 years. In the 1930s, he studied the local indigenous society in Brazil for many years. During his stay in the United States in the 1940s, he studied Anglo-American anthropology and structural linguistics and published a large number of research results. He has been a professor at the Collège de France since 1959. His academic influence has spread to many fields such as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and history.

In French culture, which has always attached great importance to the theory of humanities, the two major "national thought heroes" after World War II should be represented by: existentialist philosopher Sartre and structuralist anthropologist Levi-Strauss.