Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss

                                                      

  

  “Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in color, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession. For this audience, platitudes and commonplaces seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles…”

Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

According to Claude Levi-Strauss, our perception of the explorer has shifted. We tend to dismiss the writer who constructs his narratives based on books or articles previously read and are progressively more drawn to the experienced adventurer. The adventurer who narrates and brings back physical testimonies of his expeditions is much more appreciated by a society looking for “ lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in color.”[1] The artifacts that the adventurer brings back from his journeys further contribute in recollecting the expedition. The common eye considers the stories and artifacts brought back by those explorers to be more authentic than the “plagiarized” narratives written by the inexperienced writers. Levi-Strauss in highlighting the thrill that arises from nonfiction narratives and visual recollections demonstrates that our society has been undergoing a shift in perception due to the way that the information is presented to its audience. Claude Levi-Strauss through his critic of the common traveler, who uses photographs and other artifacts to impact his audience, demonstrates how new media has reshaped our interaction with our environment.

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[1] Levi-Strauss, Claude. Foreword. The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel. By Andrea Barrett. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. N. pag. Print.