Page - 36 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

36 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage Intriguingly, during his first journey inland, and with an eye which had been trained on the sea before, the future ethnographer transposes the sea view also onto solid ground, and applies an almost maritime field of vision to the landscapes he describes. Sea voyage and land travel seem to be of one long sliding movement, absorbing and recording the vagaries of travel – frequent break downs of trucks and long delays – and the slow changing environments, vis- tas and landscapes (Lévi-Strauss 1970: 189-192). This maritime rhapsody on land – including also riverine boat travel – is replayed with rich photographic material in the much later pub- lished Saudades do Brasil (Lévi-Strauss 1995), constituting almost a counterpoint to the elegiac description of a sunset – taken directly from his notes written on board (and published in a section, entitled ‘Shipboard notes’, Lévi-Strauss 1970: 66-73). “At twenty to six in the evening the sky in the west seemed encumbered with a compli- cated edifice, horizontal at its base, which was so exactly like the sea that one would have thought it had been sucked up out of it in some incomprehensible way, or that a thick and invisible layer of crystal had been inserted between the two. (…) Meanwhile the sun was gradually coming into view behind the celestial reefs that blocked the view to the west; as it progressed downwards inch by inch its rays would disperse the mists or force their way through, throwing into relief as they did so whatever had stood in their way, and dissipating it in a mass of circular fragments, each with a size and a luminous intensity all its own.” (Lévi-Strauss 1970: 68 – 69). These poetic ‘shipboard notes’ in Tristes Tropiques are the surviving part of what Lévi-Strauss intended to be a ‘vaguely conradian novel’ (Debaene 2014: 177), and as a whole, Tristes Tropiques is regarded as an important work of literature. It is a prime example of the ‘second book’ which according to Vincent Debaene (2014: 3) is the distinctive feature of french anthro- pology for most parts of the 20th century, where scholars would famously publish a scientific monograph followed (or in some cases preceded by) a work with literary ambitions. This liter- ary, ‘second’ book, however, was decidedly not a travelogue, or travel book, but rather a book about travelling that was explicitly fighting the stereotyping and cheaper forms of depictions of alterity inherent in such literature, as Lévi-Strauss made very clear in the opening pages of Tristes Tropiques (1970: 17-18, Debaene 2014: 199). 4 Literary ambitions apart, in more prosaic (and indeed structural ) terms, of course, the sea voyage is not restricted to the sea, but preceded and followed, in fact preconditioned by a range of other travels and formalities. These include dealing with port authorities, immigration and health officials on land which were common in the age of massive sea travel, described in considerable detail by Lévi-Strauss in chapter 2 ‘On Board Ship’ of Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss 1970: 23-30; – here as the trials and tribula- tions of getting safe passage to the US fleeing Nazi persecution), and surface also in immigrant accounts to which I shall turn now. 4 I am grateful to George Marcus for having pointed me to Debaene’s book.