Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65485 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

Grabbing and propelling into the unknown of the deep jungle
It takes you into a world of the so called 'unlearnt' peoples of the amazon. Giving the reader a variety of feelings that relate to the authors' as he describes his adventure and the going ons of his life with the Amerindians. He makes the reader feel like they are right there in the story with him, feeling his pain, excitment and total freedom.

Don't believe everything you read
I see that both the book and the film about Schneebaum have been much reviewed and also much quoted in other literature. One reviewer used the word "incredible" and one reviewer of the film was disappointed that the film seemed to be so much more about Schneebaum and his sexuality than about the people he visited. This isn't surprising.

Readers and filmgoers should be warned that Schneebaum is suspected to be a hoax by such genuine and distinguished anthropologists as Frederick Whitam and Stephen O. Murray. The Latter uses the expression "Mistaking Fantasy for ethnography." And goes on to say, "Reports must not be accepted uncritically, especially when they include explicit disclaimers such as Schneebaum made, are wholly at variance with what is known about neighbouring cultures, and are embedded in what seems to be wish fulfilment." Whitam says it is "preposterous" to imagine anyone walking alone for days in the jungle. In an equatorial forst there would be no such thing as a hardly used path, it would be constantly trodden or else disappear into dense undergrowth within the week (Even in England, an unused path can be overgrown by the end of the summer). What woodcraft or survival skills did he have to enable him to do without the usual complement of guides, interpreters and bearers?

When he does find a community of people, it is remarkable how little interest this "qualified anthropologist" takes in them. Where are the women and children, marriages, kinship exchanges, rites of passage, incest rules? Is there no spirit worship, totems, sacred items? Does he know anything about how they find, cook and serve food, make drinks, treat minor ailments, make fire, clothing or build homes? Do they do anything else at all other than hunt, eat and have sex? Did he learn any of the language? And did he do anything else but contemplate his own navel when he wasn't romping with the boys?

I haven't checked the dates, but the dotty priest with the forgotten mission reads more like an amalgam of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh characters than anybody real, and the long letter left for the author at the end of the book looks exactly like something out of a 19th century epistolary novel where somebody explains all their plans and motivation for no better reason than that the plot requires it.

The photos lend an air of verisimilitude because one assumes the camera cannot lie. All are males, no females or children, and mostly nude, but there is no sign of the penis-strings and nose-ornaments mentioned in the text. One might suspect they are mission Indians who have undressed to go fishing or swimming if not for the camera, know very well what turns the photographer on and are supplying the required full-frontals.

This seems to me the sort of primitivist fantasy a gay American might cook up based on a period of being a hanger-on at a mission station where he heard accounts of the disgusting/horrifying habits from which the local tribesmen were being rescued - fairly ordinary activities if the truth were told, which were quite probably still going on quietly, and with some participation by himself, around the mission. He could have met some less missionised tribesment and packed out these titbits from reading anthropology texts about age-grade homosexual initiation, but didn't learn enough about their way of life to describe it convincingly. The sex scenes reek of wish-fulfilment, unless he is merely glossing over the readiness of some to sell their favours for small gifts as an alternative to stealing. Modern studies of cannibalism usually seem to find it takes place rarely and in a context of high ceremony when it isn't a last-ditch response to the threat of starvation. But there's nothing like cannibalism in the title to sell a book, film or TV interview.

I would lay bets that this is in the long line of faked travellers' tales, of which "The Third Eye" by "Lobsang Rampa" was once a distinguished (and more convincing) example. But Schneebaum could well be the last of its type. As the world has got smaller, and even remote tribes have TV's, there is less room for fakery, although the Phillippines put on a good but short-lived show with the Tasaday. The travelogue type is well on the way to being replaced by the "auobiography of the abused" fake - the life story of the black slave, Australian aboriginal, Bolivian peasant, etc. We haven't yet had the story of the Korean girl kidnapped by the Japanese to be a "comfort woman" but I am sure we will.
Hilary Potts