Loki's Children

'Tristes Tropiques'

Nigel Bruce

• 1 min read
'Tristes Tropiques'
Claude Lévi-Strauss in 2005. Photo: UNESCO/Michel Ravassard

Claude Lévi-Strauss' masterpiece Tristes Tropiques was published in 1955. In it he poses the essential dilemma of any anthropologist or historian and, of course, any scientist too:

Either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts...

Atolls overrun by the sea... Climate change. Reduced to being watchers, like Odin...

Male-Maldives

Top - Nui Atoll, Tuvalu (photo: NASA). Next: a paramecium protist (photo: Barfooz). Bottom: the Maldives capital Malé (photo: Shahee Ilyas).