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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 John Brenkman
Rousseau, Weber, Lévi-Strauss
March 30, 2009
For decades before writing Tristes Tropiques—and for, unexpectedly, even more decades since writing it: he celebrated his hundredth birthday last fall and a couple of years earlier published a hefty volume of recent (!) essays—Lévi-Strauss devoted himself to the rigors of science as a vocation, knowledge as a calling, in a manner quite in keeping with Max Weber’s famous essay “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” Matched with the companion essay “Politics as a Vocation,” “Science as a Vocation” strictly separates fact and value in outlining the specificity of the scholarly or professorial career. With reference to the social sciences and “those types of cultural philosophy that make it their task to interpret these sciences,” the scholar and professor, Weber wrote, must have “the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing...to determine...the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations.” Weber was as uncompromising in stating this principle as Lévi-Strauss was in practicing it before and after Tristes Tropiques. But Tristes Tropiques is something else.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Agnieszka Kajrukszto
On Levi-Strauss
March 25, 2009
Lévi-Strauss writing is at once beautiful and offensive. It is as if he had a multiple personality disorder. In some passages his ego looms so large that it overshadows his opinions, because he disperses his observations as if they were Gospel. But perhaps such is the nature of an autobiographical writing. But underneath it all, is a dreamy humanism, a romantic sadness for lost civilizations, and a deeply felt critique of the modern world.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrew Bast
On Levi-Strauss
March 26, 2009
Maybe I don't get get it. Tristes Tropiques was a massive success for Claude Lévi-Strauss. Yet as I read it, I am struck with arrogance, pomposity, and frankly, a recurring whiff of armchair philosophizing. And this all came after one of the most perplexing opening lines I have ever read, "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions."
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Mehmet Kucukozer
The Weight of History and Philosophy
March 27, 2009
Although several writers come to mind—including Foucault, Said, and Sontag—when reading Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, two authors particularly stand out for me. First of these is Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a book you would most likely find in the travel section. Pamuk paints a city suffering from melancholy as the once great capital of a powerful empire is crumbling under the weight of history around the mid-twentieth century. For both authors, however, the “weight of history” is something that goes beyond simple nostalgia, as when Lévi-Strauss writes of Demra: “Behind the verdant landscapes and peaceful canals lined with cottages can be glimpsed the ugly outlines of an abstract factory, as if history and economics had managed to establish, indeed superimpose, their most tragic phases of development on these wretched victims…” (148). Certainly, Lévi-Strauss is more stark than Pamuk in describing concentrated power within a world system that has come to dehumanize large segments of the global population.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Tina Harris
On Levi-Strauss
March 27, 2009
Tristes Tropiques is simultaneously cynical and purposeful. It is a critique of ethnocentrism, of caste, of colonialism, of the destructive effects of capitalism, and of course as an adjunct to all of this, of travel writing (where, he claims, such critiques are often glossed over). If we are partly complicit in the destruction of other societies by traveling to and writing about them, then how do we go about doing so ethically? How can we anticipate the extent and effects of the power held by any individual reporting about a place?
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