Saudades Do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir

Claude Levi-Strauss, internationally known as a brilliant and sometimes controversial anthropologist, is also a skilled and sensitive photographer. "Saudades do Brasil" - "nostalgia for Brazil," from the title of a musical composition by Darius Milhaud - presents 180 of the more than 3000 photographs Levi-Strauss took in Brazil between 1935 and 1939. While serving as professor of sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, the young ethnographer made expeditions among the natives of Mato Grosso and Southern Amazonia that resulted in numerous publications, most notably "Tristes Tropiques". Most of these photographs are published here for the first time. Levi-Strauss begins his photographic memoir in Sao Paulo, then a frontier city rapidly changing to an industrial metropolis, a city with "a singular beauty, due to breaks in rhythm, architectural paradoxes, contrasting shapes and colors." The rest of the photographs chronicle Levi-Strauss's expeditions among the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and other tribes - "the last escapees from the cataclysm that discovery and subsequent invasions had been for their ancestors". His pictures capture the Amazonian landscape, the people, and their activities, social lives, and ceremonies. Informative captions by Levi-Strauss enhance the ethnographic and human interest of his photographs. "Saudades do Brasil" will be of interest to anthropologists, photographers, and readers concerned with a part of the world that is geographically remote but globally significant.