Finally, I finished this travelogue and ethnographic classic. There were long, intense and sometimes controversial opinions, spiced by classic British dry wit.

I have been to the Brazilian jungles and spent weeks with natives – although the ones I encountered lived in houses on stilts and all owned an outboard boat engine and a cellphone – and if they lived in a non-flooding area of the Amazon, a motorbike. Times change. I wonder what Claude Lévi-Strauss would say about the modern conversion of a large portion of the Amazon.

(Copenhagen, Denmark; October 2020)