Digital Tristes Tropiques – TROPIQUES

The EHESS team, coordinated by Emmanuel Désveaux, and the BnF team, whose curator of the collection is Anaïs Dupuy-Olivier, have embarked on a process that should lead to an exhibition of the field notebooks of Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The exhibition will be on show in the Donors' Gallery (on the François Mitterrand site) for two months from 9 October 2025. What makes this exhibition different from the usual Lévi-Straussian exegesis is that it highlights the figure of Dina Dreyfus, who was the first wife of the great anthropologist. In this sense, the exhibition aims to highlight the couple that Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss formed at the time, and their close scientific collaboration both in the field and in academic and institutional circles in Sao Paulo.

The TROPIQUES project has made it possible to fund trips in 2023 to follow in the footsteps of the ethnographers, to cover a large part of the expedition's route in order to collect cartographic and photographic data and to make contact with the descendants of the peoples visited by Claude and Dina. Part of the exhibition will showcase the Kadiwéu documents brought back by the couple (mainly drawings and photographs).

In these circumstances, we think it would be appropriate to invite a delegation from Kadiwéu to this exhibition, in order to highlight the important work that has been accomplished thanks to the financial resources allocated by the ANR. In fact, the aim of this work has been to reconstruct exactly the respective contributions of Dina and Claude, to better understand their intellectual approach, and to reconstruct the Franco-Brazilian institutional context of the period in which they evolved.

Based on the contacts established in the field, it seems to us that this delegation should be made up of three prominent Kadiwéu figures:
• Ciriaco Ferraz, chief of the Alves de Barros village where the descendants of the families who lived in Nalike, the village visited by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Dina Dreyfus, live. He is highly respected by the Ejiwajegi Kadiwéu community for his knowledge and experience of traditional rituals, dances and music.
• Benilda Vergílio, who was born in the village of Alves de Barros and now lives in Campo Grande, the capital of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. She is also a designer and a Masters student in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul. She also works for Brazil's Secretariat of Culture, where she is regarded as one of the leading defenders of the rights of the region's indigenous peoples.
• Creuza Vergílio, from the village of Alves de Barros, is a renowned ceramist among the Ejiwajegi Kadiwéu, who organises relations between the many ceramists and the outside market. She is president of the Association of Kadiwéu Women Artists (AMAK) and has been involved in numerous projects to promote Ejiwajegi art.

As well as giving the delegation access to the Kadiwéu collections held at the musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac and to the documents in the Lévi-Strauss collection at the BnF, their visit will considerably enhance the exhibition. All three are excellent speakers of Kadiwéu, and they would be able to give an account of the language that Claude and Dina studied in their time. It would also be an opportunity to organise guided tours by the locals themselves, as well as lectures on the circulation of ethnographic collections, a theme dear to Benilda Vergílio. In addition, Benilda and Creuza Vergílio's traditional knowledge would make it possible to organise a range of activities alongside the exhibition, such as traditional painting and pottery-making workshops.