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Amazon (Paperback)
Dennison Berwick
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R473
Discovery Miles 4 730
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Determined to experience the mighty Amazon for himself, Dennison
Berwick travelled alone for more than year in a small canoe along
major rivers and unnamed tributaries. At night he slung a hammock
between trees in the forest, surrounded by all the noises of
creatures active in the darkness. He walked for a week to reach the
source of the Amazon in the snow-capped Andes in Peru; got lost in
the forest; took hallucinogenic ayahuasca and ended his adventure
by trying to convince an angry hunting party of Yanomami Indians
that he was not a gold-miner attempting to rob them. Praise for
"Amazon" ..".not just another travel book. (The author has) a sharp
eye, an inquisitive nose and boundless compassion for the river
dwellers..." Environment Brazil ..".as much a fascinating and
timely record of the people of the rainforest as it is the story of
a personal quest. The Traveller. "Berwick's vision...is acute."
Country Life
Yanomami men and women tell their own stories of their contact with
the outside world, especially the decimation brought by an illegal
invasion of goldminers since 1987 and the challenges they now face
in contact with Whites. This book is the only one reporting from
the Yanomami point of view about the attempts by the Brazilian
government and gold miners in late 1980s to destroy them, the
upsets in the cosmos caused by extracting gold from the earth, and
their valiant resistance and fight for survival in the Amazon rain
forest. Extract from the Introduction, "There is nothing inevitable
about the destruction of tribal societies. What is happening today
to the Yanomami in the Amazon, and to many other peoples worldwide,
is the deliberate theft of land and killing of people, as has
happened wherever Europeans have landed on foreign shores.
Apologists seeking to explain this subjugation as the unhappy
consequence of "evolution" or "progress" are only giving themselves
excuses; conquest by these forces is our own killing-machine by
another name. The statistics for mass deaths of indigenous peoples
since 1492 are often quoted but worth repeating. An estimated 3.5
million people lived in tribal societies in the area of South
America known today as Brazil; only about 250,000 survive. Dozens
of tribes have become extinct and others have been devastated. For
example, the Nambiquara along the southern watershed of the Amazon
numbered 20,000 people when first visited by Europeans in 1909. By
1970, only 6OO Nambiquara were left alive in a reserve 0.5 per cent
of the size of their traditional land. I arrived in the Amazon for
the first time in 1986 with all the usual preconceptions of a
liberal education; I believed the deaths of tribal societies were
tragic but inevitable. The stronger (subconsciously understanding
this to mean superior) forces from one society had won over the
weaker. It has happened throughout history by force of arms and by
force of trade. Tribes, being primitive (of coarse meaning only
less developed), fell apart when shaken up by the arrival of
Europeans. Armed resistance only emphasized the superiority of our
weapons over tomahawks or bows and arrows. Like millions of other
fair-minded Europeans, I believed the social progress that came
from contact with the Whiteman inevitably meant the destruction of
the tribal Indians of South America. Indians in contact with
Europeans are drawn irresistibly into the Whiteman's camp - begging
for food or tools proves the superiority of our culture for it can
supply items the Indians want; in time, they wear our clothes, pray
in our churches, buy our radios and abandon their war paint and
feathers. Disease can speed up this implosion, but the process of
social evolution continues and, inevitably, the Indian disappears.
This is what I believed and it is a lie." ..".He has a refreshing
lack of pretension. As an added bonus, Savages is beautifully
written -- there's a rythmn to Berwick's prose that takes the
reader gently through the book." Sue Sutton, Globe & Mail.
An enchanting portrayal of rural and urban northern India along the
banks of her holiest river, stretching from the Bay of Bengal up
into the Himalayas. The pilgrimage took seven months. Dennison
Berwick writes, "I wanted to make a great walk, to set off with no
prospect of ending for months. I wanted to see the land that had
fired the British imagination for generations. I wanted to travel
at the pace of rural India, where four out of five Indians live,
and to walk in the footsteps of the peasants. And why the Ganga? I
was searching for answers to one question: How could a river also
be a goddess? For millions of Hindus, the river Ganga is the
physical expression of the goddess Ganga; bathing in her waters is
both spiritual ritual and necessary ablution. We have learned so
well in the West to separate sacred from secular that the very
notion of their being indivisible, like the Ganga, seems absurd.
However, the Native Indians of Canada have a saving. 'Never judge a
man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins, ' and this was
something I took literally. I was determined to wear village
clothes, eat local foods, adopt local customs for washing and
toilet and as much as possible speak the language. I felt that
meeting India's people and walking through her villages and beside
her most sacred river was the only way to learn about the country.
Perhaps then, I thought, I might begin to understand something of
the relationship between the Ganga and her devotees and might find
answers to my question.
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