Keep the River on Your Right by Tobias Schneebaum

Keep the River on Your Right by Tobias Schneebaum

The author of the classic Keep the River on Your Right here tells the remarkable story of his four years among the Asmat of New Guinea, a jungle-dwelling people rumored to have killed Michael Rockefeller. Instead of ferocious cannibals, Schneebaum found a regal, loving, gentle people who freely accepted him and initiated him into a way of life no outsider had ever seen before. Adopted into an Asmat family in the village whose people were said to have killed Rockefeller, he crossed the boundaries into another culture and another age, learning secrets no other outsider had been allowed to see before. But it wasn't until Schneebaum met Akatpitsjin, a handsome married man with five children, that he entered the erotic world of the Asmat, when the two became exchange friends' and lovers, a practice basic to the sexual life of the village.

Schneebaum's encounter with the Asmat ultimately became something more intimate and liberating for him than the mere discovery of tribal secrets. He confronted himself. His odyssey is as much the record of a journey into himself as it is a unique and sensitively observed account of a vanishing society, written with a shimmering sensuality that has no equal in the literature of anthropology or self-confession.

Tobias Schneebaum is the author of Where the Spirits Dwell, Wild Man, and Keep the River on Your Right. From 1973 to 1983 he was assistant to the curator of the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Since then he has lectured widely and curated several exhibitions on Asmat art. Schneebaum is the subject of a documentary film, Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, by siblings Laurie and David Shapiro. It premiered at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in April 2000, where it received the Critic s Choice Award.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780802131331
ISBN 10	0802131336
Title	Keep the River on Your Right
Author	Tobias Schneebaum
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Avalon Travel Publishing
Year published	1994-01-12
Number of pages	184
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.