1934 in the autumn, I accidentally got a chair in sociology at the University of S? o Paulo in Brazil, which provided me with the opportunity to conduct anthropological research on South American Indians. After crossing the equatorial windless zone, I arrived in Brazil by boat and landed in Rio de Janeiro. My main activity is to explore the Amazon river basin in South America. I started from the dense rain forest in the Amazon and went deep into the Brazilian plateau, and made several years of anthropological field trips to the Kaduweo, Phororo, South Bikwala and Tubic Wasi. I described in detail the social structure, production and life, religious beliefs and customs of these Indian tribes, and also recorded the unique thinking of an anthropologist.

selected works

Indians in South Bikwala woke up in the morning and lit a bonfire. After a cold night, they used all possible methods to keep warm and then had a simple breakfast. The food was left over from the night before. Shortly after eating, the men went out hunting, some in groups, some alone. The women stayed in the camp to cook. Women and children like to play in the water, and sometimes they make a fire. Everyone was warming themselves by the fire, trembling with deliberate exaggeration. At other times, they also take a bath from time to time. The daily work changes little every day. Preparing food is the most time-consuming and energy-consuming activity: cassava must be ground, squeezed and dried before cooking; There is also kumaru fruit, which is used for seasoning and adding bitter almond flavor to everything. This kind of fruit must be shelled and cooked. When necessary, women and children will go out to collect wild fruit lettuce. If there is no shortage of food, women knit, sometimes squatting, sometimes kneeling, with their hips sitting on their heels. Otherwise, they carve, polish or string beads, which are made of shells or shellfish, and sometimes make earrings and other decorations. If they are tired of their jobs, they will catch fleas for each other, or wander around lazily, or sleep.

At the hottest time of the day, the whole camp was silent; The residents of the camp, some sleeping, some silent, enjoy the incomplete shady space provided by their residence. The rest of the time, they chat while working. Almost always interesting. They tell jokes, sometimes pornographic or obscene jokes, which often cause laughter. Work is often interrupted by visitors or questions; If dogs or horses begin to mate, everyone stops working and observes the process with interest. After commenting on such an important event, they began to work again.

Most children do nothing all day; Little girls sometimes help older women do things, while little boys do nothing or go fishing by the river. The men who stayed in the camp worked as basket weavers and sometimes helped with housework. Most families live in harmony. At three or four o'clock in the afternoon, the hunters returned to the camp and the whole atmosphere became more active. The conversation became louder and more vivid, and various groups outside the family began to appear. Cassava cakes or other foods found during the day will be eaten. In the evening, it was one or two women's turn to cut wood. They went to the nearby bushes to find wood to make a fire. In the light of the last dusk, you can see them walking back to the camp, stumbling because of their burden, with wood in the basket and a belt hanging from their heads. They must squat down and lean back slightly so that the basket rests on the ground, so that they can take off the belt tied to their foreheads and take out the wood in the basket.

Branches and wood are piled up in a corner of the camp, and everyone can take their own use as needed. Every household is surrounded by their own fire, which has already started to burn. Most of the evening is spent chatting, singing or dancing. Sometimes this kind of entertainment will last until the early hours of the morning, but usually after a friendly touch and scolding, married couples will lean together, the mother will hug the sleeping child, and everything will become quiet. Cold and silent nights are occasionally interrupted by the sound of wood burning, the light footsteps of people adding firewood, the barking of dogs and the crying of children.

The number of children born in South Bikwala is very small: I later found that couples without children are not uncommon; It seems natural and common to have only one or two children, and it is rare for a family to have more than three children. Parents are not allowed to * * until their children are weaned, and children usually don't wean until they are three years old. The mother held the child next to her thigh and tied it with a wide belt made of bark or cotton cloth; If she wants to take another child, she can't carry the basket. Their erratic lifestyle, coupled with the lack of material environment, makes them have to be extremely careful; When necessary, women will not hesitate to use mechanical methods or botanical drugs to cause abortion.

However, indigenous people feel and show their strong love for their children, and children love their parents. However, this feeling is sometimes covered by their irritability and depression, and they can easily fall into this mood. There is a little boy suffering from indigestion. He has a headache and is ill. He is either sleeping or sleeping most of the time. Nobody cares about him. He has been ignored all day. At night, his mother came to his side, carefully caught lice for him while he was sleeping, and signaled others not to come near, and used her own arm as the cradle of the boy.

Another time, a young mother patted her child on the back and played with him; After the baby was beaten, he began to laugh. The young mother played harder and harder until the baby began to cry. After the baby cried, the young mother stopped beating him and began to comfort him.

Now let's talk about adult life. South Bikwala people's attitude towards * * * can be expressed by their sentence tamidige mondage, which can be literally translated as "* * * good". I mentioned earlier that their daily life is full of atmosphere. Anything related to love makes the indigenous people feel great interest and curiosity; They like talking about this topic very much, and their conversation in the camp is full of metaphors and hints. * * * usually at night, sometimes near the campfire, but usually people who want to * * * will retreat to the grass about 100 yards away from the camp. If someone leaves, it will immediately attract attention, everyone will be full of interest and start talking about jokes, and even children will participate. They understand the reasons for these hilarious jokes. Sometimes a small group of men, young women and children will follow the couple in the bushes to watch the whole process, whispering and suppressing laughter. This pair of * * * don't like others watching, but they can only endure, they can only endure the jokes they will face when they return to the camp. Sometimes, another couple will follow in his footsteps and seek peace in the Woods and grass.

However, this kind of behavior does not happen often, and the taboo about this kind of behavior only provides a partial explanation for this phenomenon. The real reason seems to be the indigenous temperament. Married couples often caress each other freely in public, and the degree is almost unlimited. However, I have never seen a man get an erection in this caress, not once. Caressing doesn't seem to come from the satisfaction of physical function, but a game of love and intimacy. Perhaps this is why men in South Bikwala don't wear sunscreen, which is worn by men of almost all races in central Brazil. In fact, the purpose of wearing goggles is at least to show that the wearer is not sexually aggressive, if not to avoid erection. People who live completely in clothes still have what we call modesty, but the standards of shyness and shyness are different. Indians in Brazil, like some melanesians, don't take the physical degree as the standard to distinguish between shyness and ignorance, but take calmness and excitement as the standard to distinguish.

However, these subtle differences sometimes inevitably lead to misunderstandings between us and Indians, and the mistakes are neither ours nor Indians'. For example, it's hard to be completely indifferent when you see one or several beautiful young women lying on the beach scratching my feet. Every time I take a bath in the river, I am often embarrassed by the collective attack of about six women, old and young. Their goal is my soap. They like soap very much. In daily life, they will make similar actions without hesitation; After the young woman is covered with red resin, she will sleep in my hammock, which makes me have to put up with a hammock covered with red; Sometimes, when I walk on the ground and work with a group of reporters, I feel someone pulling my shirt. It turns out that some women find it convenient to blow their noses with my shirt, which is much more convenient and easier than what they usually have to do. First, they went to pick a branch from the bush and folded it into a clip to blow their noses.

I really want to know the approximate population of the South Bikwala people, at least I hope to know indirectly. 19 15, Longdong thinks the total is 20,000, but this estimate may be on the high side; However, at that time, there were hundreds of members in each group of South Bikwala people, and according to the news I got on the telegraph line, its population has dropped sharply since then. Thirty years ago, the total number of known parts in Saban exceeded 1000. In 1928, the shabanet group visited Campos Novos telegraph office, among which there were 127 adult men besides women and children. But in 1929, when camping in a place called "Espiro", this group of people were attacked by the flu. The disease turned into pulmonary edema, and as a result, 300 people died within 48 hours. The group broke up and abandoned the sick and dying. Of the 1,000 known shaban insiders, by 1938, there were only 19 men, plus their women and children. In addition to the epidemic, the reason why the number of words is so small must be added to the war between them and the neighboring tribes in the east. However, not far from Trebritis, there is another huge ethnic group. Under the attack of 1927 influenza outbreak, six or seven people died, and only three people were left in 1938. Tarande was once one of the most populous ethnic groups, with only 12 men (plus women and children) in 1936; 1939 There are only four people left.

Now, the population scattered in this area may not exceed 2,000. It is impossible to make systematic statistics, because some ethnic groups have always had strong hostility, and all ethnic groups will migrate around during the migration season. But I managed to persuade my friends in Udi, the ghost mother, to take me to their village, where people of other nationalities related to them managed to get together before going; Using this method, I can measure the size of the current meeting scene of relatives and compare the number of participants with the number observed by people before. I promised to bring gifts to exchange with them. The chief of that ethnic group was very hesitant when he agreed to my request: he was not sure about the attitude of the guests he would invite. If my companion and I really disappear in this area where no white people have entered since the murder of seven telegraph workers in 1925, the peace that has existed at any time since 1925 may be destroyed for a long time.

He finally agreed to my request, but on one condition, that is, we must reduce the expedition and bring only four cows with gifts. Even so, we still can't walk along the ordinary path under the valley, because the plants on the path are too dense for camels to pass. We must cross the plateau along a temporary special road.

In retrospect, this extremely dangerous trip seems to be the most interesting episode. As soon as we left, we went to Jurny, Runje. Our Brazilian compatriots immediately found that Indian women and children didn't go with us, only Indian men with bows and arrows walked with us. In travel books, this situation means that we are about to be attacked. Therefore, we walked with trepidation, and from time to time we checked the Smith and Wei Sen pistols (our expedition members pronounced the name of the pistol "Cemite Vechetone") and rifles we carried with us. Our fears proved unnecessary: at noon, we caught up with others in the same ethnic group. Its chief knew that our mule walked much faster than the woman carrying the basket, while the woman carrying the basket walked more slowly, so the women and children had to leave the night before we left.

However, shortly after everyone met, Indians got lost: the new road was not as simple as they thought. In the evening, we have to spend the night in the forest. Before we set out, we were told that we couldn't hunt on the road, but the Indians didn't bring any supplies and had to rely on our hunting rifles to provide food. We only carry necessary emergency supplies, so we can't share food with you. As soon as we approached, a group of deer grazing by the pool ran away. The next morning, there were voices of discontent everywhere. The Indians publicly expressed their anger at the chief, accused him and asked him to be responsible for the travel plan he and I designed together. All the aborigines did not organize hunting activities or go out to collect food in groups, but lay in temporary shelters and waited for the chief to find a way to solve the problem himself. The chief went out with one of his wives, and they didn't come back until evening. The baskets on their backs are full of locusts that they spent the whole day catching. The indigenous people thought that the crushed locusts were not good food, but they still ate them to their heart's content and refreshed themselves. We'll leave the next morning.

We finally arrived at the appointed meeting place. This is a sandy terrace, from which you can see a stream with trees on both sides and some semi-hidden indigenous pastoral areas inside the trees. All ethnic groups arrived at the meeting place in dribs and drabs. At night, 75 people representing 17 families were crowded under 13 shelter buildings, and the structures of these shelters were almost as simple as those of indigenous camps. They explained to me that during the rainy season, these people live in five ground huts, which can last for several months. Several aborigines seem to have never seen a white man. Their attitude is rather stubborn, while the director is rather impatient. It seems that the chief managed to persuade them to come to this unexpected place. We have no sense of security, and neither do the Indians. It was quite cold that night, because there were no trees on the platform, and we had to lie on the ground and sleep like the South Bikwala people. No one fell asleep: everyone watched each other's every move politely but closely.

It is unwise to delay this dangerous situation for too long, so I encourage the chiefs to exchange gifts as soon as possible. A very unusual accident happened at this time, and I have to trace back some past events to explain it. There is no need to point out that South Bikwala people have no writing, but they don't know how to draw things yet. They can only point a few dotted lines or draw a sawtooth pattern on the gourd. However, I still give them paper and pencils, just like when I was with the Kaduvians. At first, they didn't do anything with pen and paper. Then one day, I found that they were all busy drawing flat wavy lines. I was wondering what they really wanted to do, and then I suddenly understood that they were writing, or that they were trying to use pencils like I did when I was writing. This is the only purpose they know of pencils, because I didn't show them my sketches to make them happy. Most people only draw wavy lines, but the chief himself is ambitious. There is no doubt that he is the only aborigine who understands the purpose of writing. So he asked me for a writing book, and after each of us had one, we began to write together. When I asked him a question about something, he didn't answer me. He just drew some wavy lines on the paper for me to see, as if I could read his answer. He almost believes that his own disguise is true; Every time he draws a line, he looks at the wavy line nervously, as if hoping that its meaning will jump out of the paper, but every time his face will show disappointment. However, he never admits that he can't understand it. There is an unwritten agreement between him and me that the words he can't recognize are meaningful, and I must pretend to understand its meaning; Fortunately, after he showed me what he had written, he immediately added an oral explanation, so I didn't have to ask him to explain what he had written.

After he gathered the whole group of Indians, he immediately took out a piece of paper full of wavy curves from the basket and began to show how to read what was written on the paper. He pretended to hesitate for a moment and checked the list of items I wanted to exchange gifts with them: someone's bow and arrow will be exchanged for a machete; So-and-so's necklace will be replaced with some beads ... The real fake performance lasted for two hours. Maybe he wants to deceive himself. More likely, he wants to surprise his companions, make them believe that he plays the role of a middleman in exchanging goods, and make them believe that he has an alliance with white people and share their secrets. We are anxious to leave there as soon as possible, because this is the most dangerous moment when all the treasures I brought are transferred to the indigenous people. So I didn't make any further investigation, but asked the Indians to be guides and began to walk back.

This unsuccessful party, as well as the hypocritical performance I inadvertently triggered, made the whole atmosphere quite unpleasant; To make matters worse, the mule I rode had a sore and bleeding mouth, which was quite painful. The mule either rushed forward impatiently or stopped suddenly. Suddenly, I found myself alone, alone in the bushes, and I didn't know which direction to go.

The travel book says that in this case, it is necessary to open a gun to attract the attention of people in the same industry. I got off the horse, fired a shot and didn't respond. After the second shot, I seemed to hear a response. I fired the third shot just to scare the mule; The mule ran forward and stopped far away.

I systematically dispersed my weapons and photographic equipment, put them at the root of a tree, and carefully recorded the position of that tree. Then I ran to catch my mule. I saw it from a distance, and it seems that my mood is quite docile. It didn't move. When I got very close and reached for the reins, I started running. The mule kept playing this game several times, which made me farther and farther away from the original place. Finally, I felt desperate, so I suddenly jumped forward and grabbed the mule's tail with both hands. It was frightened by this strange way and stopped running away. I climbed into the saddle and wanted to go back to get the equipment, but I walked in the bushes many times and couldn't find the place where I hid the equipment.

This loss made me sad, so I decided to try my best to catch up with that group of people. But neither mule nor I know which direction they are going. Either I decided to go in a certain direction, but the mule boss refused to go; Either I let the mule walk as he pleases, but it just turns around. The sun has begun to set on the horizon, my weapon has been lost, and I may be shot through by a shower of arrows at any time. I may not be the first person to enter this hostile zone, but no one who has been here before me has come back alive. No matter what my own conditions are, my mule is the best food for these people who lack food. While waiting for the sunset, I thought about these pessimistic thoughts over and over again in my mind. I still have some matches on me. I'm going to make a fire. Just as I was about to make a fire, I heard a voice: two South Bikwala people came back to me immediately after discovering that I was missing. They have been walking along the road I walked since noon. It is easy for them to find those lost instruments, which is nothing. They took me back to the camp in the dark and the others waited for us there.

I can't sleep because of this stupid accident. Those sleepless hours are spent thinking about the episode of exchanging gifts. At that time, written characters first appeared among the South Bikwala people, but they did not go through a long and arduous training process as we thought. The appearance of words is only borrowed as a symbol, and its purpose is sociology, not intellectual use, and the truth of words has never been understood. Words are not used to acquire knowledge, help remember or understand, but only to increase personal feelings and status, or to increase the authority and status of a certain social function, at the expense of belittling other people or social functions. An aborigine who still lives in the Stone Age can guess that this great tool can be used to understand. Even if he doesn't know the truth, he knows that this tool can be used for other purposes. After all, writing has been a system for several years, and it still remains so in a large part of the world. In those societies, most members of society don't know how to use words. I have been to the Chittagong Mountains in eastern Pakistan and once lived in a local village. People in the village don't know how to write, but every village has a ghostwriter who writes for individuals in the village or the whole village. All villagers know the existence of written words and use this tool when necessary. However, they regard written language as an outsider and a means of communication with the outside world. They must communicate with this external means and its representatives through oral English. The person who acts as a book substitute is rarely the staff or employee of the village group: the book substitute gives him the power to write knowledge, so the same person is often both a book substitute and a lender; This is not only because lenders need to be able to read and write to start their business, but also because people like Daishu can master others at two levels.

(Translated by Wang Zhiming)

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Although Melancholy Tropical is an anthropologist's field notes, it is written in a language that ordinary people can understand, and it has a literary style and bold and open thoughts that are rare in professional literature. Therefore, as soon as it was published, it became a popular bestseller, and Levi-Strauss became a well-known expert in the industry and became a household name scholar in the western world overnight.

Much of the charm of Melancholy Tropical comes from the literary skills of Levi-Strauss. Someone once described this book as a "travel novel", revealing the narrative characteristics of this book that are different from ordinary travel notes or adventure memoirs. Melancholy Tropics has a unique modern novel jumping style: the author mainly tells about his scientific investigation in the Amazon basin of South America in 1930s, but at the beginning of the work, he tells about his experience of fleeing to new york after the fall of France in the early 1920s, his original intention of giving up philosophy and studying anthropology in college, and his general thoughts on anthropology. When reviewing the impression of coming to Brazil in the early 1930s, the author skillfully quoted documents and materials, telling interesting historical anecdotes of Europeans in the Atlantic Ocean and America in the Columbus era and the life of early Brazilian colonists. When reading Melancholy Tropical, readers must carefully follow the time-space transition in the book. For example, Levi-Strauss will use several pages of notes describing the sunset at sea to describe the stagnant clouds over the equator observed by navigators. The next chapter is a serious sociological investigation of Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Sao Paulo. After a few pages, it will discuss the human problems caused by the racial system in India and Pakistan. Levi-Strauss skillfully uses the narrative technique of free interlude to make this work have the style of modern novels. He often inserts some essays and poems created by himself into his narrative, and even devotes a chapter to introducing one of his plays. The free combination of these different genres of words is undoubtedly the external feature of modern novels. Random narration and random conversion of different contents and styles have created this fascinating and peculiar style of Melancholy Tropical. A large number of illustrations and photos about the life of indigenous people in the book enrich the works.

Melancholy Tropical is a travel book and autobiography of Levi-Strauss who is engaged in anthropological research. Quite a few words in the book talk about the author's personal experience, such as tasting a maggot that Indians like to eat in Parana; When Kuyaba organized an expedition to cross the plateau, he tried his best to drive away the cattle team; Lost in the dangerous jungle in the dead of night, facing death and so on. When describing these scenes, generally speaking, the author's writing is concise and vivid, which is often exciting. However, unlike ordinary travel notes, Levi-Strauss does not like the exaggerated and bizarre descriptions of primitive people in general travel notes literature, nor does he like the artificial self-description. He believes that such a description is actually a cliche that caters to readers' curiosity and is far from the real facts. Levi-Strauss's first sentence in this book is: "I hate traveling, I hate travelers." His works face the real face of different civilizations and describe the real life of Indians with simple brushwork, which neither distorts nor beautifies. His plain and soothing descriptions of the lives of Kaduweiou, Pololo, South Bikwala and Tubikwasi Indians all have this natural nature. In an objective sense, Melancholy Tropical debunks the wonderful lies about primitive people fabricated by ordinary travelers. Some people say, "This is a travel book that rings the death knell for all travel books", which shows the characteristics of this travel book.

Strictly speaking, the protagonist of this autobiography is not Levi-Strauss himself, but his thoughts. His simple description of Indian tribes is actually the result of serious and sincere thinking by an anthropologist. In Levi-Strauss's view, "any society is imperfect" with certain injustice, numbness and sin, which is the essence of society. A society that is quite barbaric in some aspects may be very kind and humane if considered from another angle; On the other hand, some systems of civilized society may be absurd compared with primitive society. In this book, Levi-Strauss has repeatedly stated that European civilization has not only made great achievements, but also been a great disaster. Levi-Strauss's study of Indians is based on trying to eliminate the prejudice of civilization, which enables him to face all kinds of strange, superstitious and absurd customs with a calm mind and study their basic social functions.

Melancholy Tropical is a landmark work of structuralist anthropology, but the author's point of view is not derived from abstruse theory and boring logic, but is realized by recording ordinary and trivial facts of life. The author regards himself as an ordinary person, neither an explorer nor even an anthropologist. He just experienced and felt with a normal heart, recording things that seem unimportant to civilized people but important to Indians themselves-the sources of their various foods, the leadership role of chiefs, men's sunscreen, women's faces, the attitudes of social members to foreign products and so on. From this pile of trivial things, Levi-Strauss will choose some things to express his thoughts. At this moment, readers will always be attracted by the wonderful ideas summarized by the author from simple facts. For example, during the investigation of the South Bikwala people, the author happened to witness with his own eyes how this indigenous people, including their chiefs, used the pen and paper he gave to write and communicate. After thinking, Levi-Strauss came to the conclusion that the appearance of words "is not used to acquire knowledge, help remember or understand, but only to increase personal feelings and status, or to enhance the authority and status of a certain social function, at the expense of belittling the rest of people or social functions". By observing the chieftaincy and polygamy of the South Bikwala ethnic group, Levi-Strauss denied the traditional sociological theory that the country developed from the family, and affirmed the correctness of Rousseau's "social contract theory", which was equally fascinating. There are many flashes of this idea, which is one of the reasons why Melancholy Tropical is full of charm.

On the other hand, however, in more places, Melancholy Tropical also shows the author's mental confusion and confusion. Levi-Strauss's dilemma is that of anthropologists. The author is sandwiched between primitive civilization and modern civilization, constantly examining primitive Indian civilization and reflecting and analyzing western civilization. In the process of mutual comparison and reference, many problems have emerged, that is, the practical problems faced by human civilization. The efforts to explore these problems and the fruitless ending make Melancholy Tropical both open-minded and cast a layer of melancholy and helplessness. This gives the book a sad tone, thus reaching a literary realm that only a few literary masterpieces can achieve.

Susan sontag, an American literary critic, said The Melancholy Tropics is "a book with strong personal color". Just like Montaigne's essays and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, this is a spiritual autobiography, a personal history showing the situation and sensitivity of all mankind ... a masterpiece ". For public readers, this evaluation is appropriate if a small amount of professional components are removed.

(Yin Dexiang)