“Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale.”

— Claude Lévi-Strauss , book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 9 : Guanabara, p. 86
Context: Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also — for better or for worse — takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the…" by Claude Lévi-Strauss?

Claude Lévi-Strauss 35

French anthropologist and ethnologist 1908–2009

Related quotes

“Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about "us"; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Commencement address at Barnard College (May 1979) as quoted in Ms. magazine (September 1979)

“The quantity of action is the product of the mass of the bodies times their speed and the distance they travel. When a body is transported from one place to another, the action is proportional to the mass of the body, to its speed and to the distance over which it is transported.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

“Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.”

Bob Newhart (1929) American stand-up comedian and actor

“[The Reform Party is] also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

“How many women does one need to sing the scale of love all the way up and down?”

Georg Büchner Leonce and Lena

Act I.
Leonce and Lena (1838)

“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

As quoted in Benjamin Franta, "On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming, ', 1 January 2018.
Context: At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5.
But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.