Upriver: The Turbulent Life and Times of an Amazonian People by Michael F. Brown (review)
Michael F. Brown moved to Huascayacu, a community in the Ri ́o Alto Mayo region of northeastern Peru, in 1976. Then a graduate student, Brown was interested in Huascayacu’s inhabitants, the Awaju ́n, whom outsiders have called Aguaruna. Like other members of the Jivaroan linguistic family who defend that space where Andes and Amazon mingle, the Awajún have met centuries of encroaching indigenous, European, and Latin American rivals, empires, nations, and capitalists with a firmness that enemies color into caricature. Most famously, as Brown notes, earlier practices of harnessing enemies’ power by smoking their heads into fist-sized tsántsa were “instrumental in turning the Jívaro into icons of primitivism for the West” (43).