Mário de Andrade’s and Lévi Strauss’ ethnological tours

Abstract

In the mid 1930s, Mário de Andrade and Claude Lévi Strauss were together taking part in several tours round the countryside of São Paulo state. These experiences were identified in Tristes Trópicos as “Sunday ethnography” By then both were apprentice ethnologists. This paper seeks to highlight elements of approximation and distancing between two perspectives of the same and also contradictory Brazil, which still predominantly rural is already emptied of indigenous peoples, who were the main interest of Claude Lévi Strauss’ research.