>>10524
The people who say they're a tribe of Atheists haven't even read the first page of his book where he talks about spirits. The author never said they were a tribe of Atheists, at least not in his book which I have read. (I skipped over a lot of the linguistics rambling.)
Btw, you know what surprised me is I've actually toured Manaus, PV, seen the mixing of the waters, and therefore gone up at least a handful of the same rivers he talked about. (I thought he would be so far in the boonies he wouldn't mention any place I'd visited as a tourist, but reading familiar names made it feel less remote.) Of course, I thought my vacation at the eco resort was as fake as Disneyland, especially since it included a tour of a "authentic Indian village" complete with dancing and plastic chairs, and apart from the dancers they wore Western clothing except for the kids. It took hours to get there by boat, and I assumed they had all been Westernized in the region. I might have asked better questions if I had done any research, except I had little interest in South America or the Amazon at the time, and spent most of the vacation in a state of paranoid ethnocentrism, avoiding certain foods, eyeballing evey stranger as a potential pickpocket, and trying to ensure that not a single mosquito landed long enough to give me Malaria.
It's surprising how the pictures, like of half naked people running down wooden sidewalks on stilts look like things I saw. The book's descriptions of boats, and vendors along the river, and the animals fit. It has made it believable that there really was a frontier with barely contacted tribes somewhere past where I was sheltered, and beyond the boats that we rode on.