L'expédition Orenoque-Amazone (1948-1950)

Description

From 1948 to 1950, Alain Gheerbrant led the Orinoco-Amazon expedition, during which he undertook his first crossing of the Sierra Parima. On this occasion, he established the first peaceful contact with the Yanomami Indians, who were then known as the Guaharibos. On his return to France, he published an account of the expedition. Critics praised its great literary qualities and beauty, not 'so much a beauty of picturesqueness, local colour and the unexpected, as a moral beauty' (Claude Roy).

Forty years have passed. The Amazon has become the focus of concern for the new global ecological order, and the Yanomami Indians have become an object of curiosity, even solicitude, on the part of ethnologists keen to observe how a culture can be destroyed by contact with industrial civilisation. Forty years during which, like a river, this book has carved out its bed among thousands of readers who have made this poetic text a landmark work of anthropological literature.

This new edition presents the original text, but with additional notes that take the reader on a double journey into the Amazon of yesterday and today.