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When I did my undergraduate degree, anthropology accidentally became my minor – there were a couple of interesting ethnomusicology papers I wanted to take, and somehow this interest metastisized into several extra courses in social anthropology. It’s not until recently that I’ve begun to appreciate how this introduction to social science has influenced the way I look at the world.

Being in Paris has allowed me to locate some of the source texts from my anthropology courses in their original language. Recently, my book for commuting has been Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. Written in 1954, Tristes Tropiques recounts how Lévi-Strauss became an ethnographer, in particular describing his expeditions into the interior of Brazil while working as a sociology lecturer in Sao Paulo in the 1930s.

Lévi-Strauss in the Amazon in 1935. The baby monkey clinging to his leg accompanied him for months.

It’s an extraordinary book that maintains coherence depite enveloping in one single volume a large helping of biography, philosophical musings on the nature of civilisation and detailed descriptions of the kinship structures of Amazonian clans.

The stories of Lévi-Strauss’s travels in the Mato Grosso and Amazonia are amazing in their own right – real Indiana Jones stuff. In 1935, the Mato Grosso was still so impenetrable it was necessary to take an expedition of 20 men, 40 bullocks and sufficient guns and ammunition to fend off jaguars, snakes and hostile Indians. Half the bullocks died en route.

It’s the little details that are most fascinating: in preparing to travel to meet the Bororo, Lévi-Strauss spent time at the St Ouen flea-market near Paris buying buttons, thread and trinkets to use for trading with a people whose previous contact with Europeans were Jesuit missionaries 50 years earlier.

Threaded into his tale of crossing hundreds of miles of jungle are two parallel narratives – Lévi-Strauss’s fortuitous escape from Vichy France in 1940 (he was Jewish, but managed to get a ticket on a steamer from Marseille to Martinique), and a voyage to newly independent India and Pakistan in 1950, which culminates in a long comparative analysis of the structural features of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

Lévi-Strauss has been criticised by some for spending very little time doing real “field research” – his contact with peoples such as the Tupi, the Nambikwara and the Bororo may not have lasted more than a few weeks in each case, and language difficulties may well have hindered Lévi-Strauss’s comprehension of certain aspects of their societies.

Nevertheless, the work that Lévi-Strauss produced based on this research in Brazil provided the foundation for some of the most important social science work of the century: analyses of human societies based on the shared underlying structures, and his intellecual epic 4-volume Mythologies.

Nambikwara dancer

Elected to the Académie Française in 1973, Lévi-Strauss died in October last year at the age of 100. Tristes Tropiques (also available in English) is a very readable introduction to the writing and ideas of a formidable 20th century intellectual. 50 years on, in an overpopulated world wracked by inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict, Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on the relationships between civilisations, people and their belief systems seem more relevant than ever.

Zanskari women during transhumance (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve decided that Arte is possibly the best TV channel in the world. Last night I happened to stumble across an amazing documentary by Marianne Chaud called Himalaya, la Terre des Femmes.

Marianne Chaud has previously made films about India and wrote her doctorate on popular theatre in the Himalayan Ladakh region. La Terre des Femmes is essentially a work of ethnography, made in 2007 during her long stay in the remote village of Sking in Zanskar valley at 4000m, a region of Kashmir where the culture is predominantly Tibetan.

Barley fields in Zanskar (Image: Paul A. Fagan, Creative Commons)

The film follows a summer in the lives of the villagers. The men have left for the season to find work in distant towns like Leh and Manali, and the women and children remain to herd the yaks, harvest barley and collect grass for animal feed in the coming winter.

Chaud is not just a bystander but an active participant in the film, and grows particularly fond of a 13 year-old sheperdess, who lives on her own with a herd of yaks. In the absence of men, the women speak openly of their life histories, their hopes and fears.

Farmhouse in Zanskar, with winter feed piled on the roof
(Image: bobwitlox, Creative Commons)

What develops is a compelling portrait of a people who live largely isolated from the modern world, and rely on centuries-old transhumance practices to live in such a harsh environment. The nearest town is 4 days walk away. Everyone, from 5 years old to 80 years old, works in the fields every day.

The only intrusion from beyond the valley is the occasional sound of an aircraft high overhead. The sheperdess asks Marianne, “Inside an aeroplane, how many carpets are there?” “Why carpets?“, responds Marianne. “So you can sit down of course!” laughs the sheperdess. In Zanskar, there are no chairs, because there are no trees, and no timber. The shepherdess has never seen furniture, let alone been in an aeroplane.

The Himalayas as filmed by Marianne Chaud are a long way from the “Lonely Planet” images of picturesque monasteries and prayer-wheels we’ve grown accustomed to. La Terre des Femmes is a gentle, human and intelligent film that ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve seen on television for a very long time.