'Tristes Tropiques' is an account of Claude Levi-Strauss' travels from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he came across changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man.

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Levi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Levi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.

Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for the CBC, Claude LEvi-Strauss, one of the world's greatest living thinkers, offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology...