The Loneliest Man in the World
The Loneliest Man in the World
A book review of Monte Reel's The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon (2010)
The following was a book review recently submitted to a writing contest and didn’t win. So it goes. The good news is that I can now post it here for you to read, for free. Since I wrote this, Lula da Silva has since won the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, wresting control from the viciously anti-environmental Jair Bolsonaro. This is good news—probably not enough, but it is good news.
The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon
By Monte Reel
Scribner (2010)
Somewhere in the Amazon rainforest a few months ago, the loneliest man in the world stepped into his thatched-grass moluca, took off his penis sheath, laid down in his hammock, covered himself with flower petals, and waited to die. He had to prepare his own funeral. Everybody else he knew was long dead. He must have known that his culture–his language, his religion, his stories of heroic ancestors, his memory of a relative’s stupid jokes, the proper etiquette for entering a moluca or cleaning one’s hands after defecating, everything–was dying right there with him, on that flower-strewn hammock.
The Man of the Hole, as he was called, didn’t know that he was a citizen of Brazil, but for fifteen years his government had been tirelessly protecting his loneliness from incursions by wildcat miners, cattle ranchers, gold prospectors, and cocaine smugglers. His homeland, full of old growth timber and in the middle of prime cattle country, impeded the relentless conversion of the world’s largest forest into mahogany desks and hamburgers.
He needed the protection. We know of at least one attempt on his life, and there is good evidence that his years of loneliness began with the destruction of a nearby village in 1995. Ever since Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) learned of his existence in 1996, they’d been trying to establish friendly relations with him–leaving gifts, greeting him from a safe distance in every Amazonian language they could think to try–but he never spoke back, rejected every gift, and always kept an arrow nocked in his bow around outsiders. He wanted to be left alone.
When he died, there were obituaries in all the major papers. The fact that he died peacefully of old age, on his own land, was a miracle; the fact that he lived most of his life in the most extreme isolation ever recorded, having survived the death of everybody he ever knew and loved, is a tragedy. His whole existence was wonderful, fascinating, and deeply sad, all at the same time. What had we learned, after watching the Man of the Hole over twenty-six years? To find out, I picked up a copy of Monte Reel’s The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon.
Reel, an American journalist based in Buenos Aires, focuses on the decade-long fight by a few determined FUNAI agents to establish legal protection for the Man of the Hole. His story focuses on a group known as the Guaporé Contact Front, a forward operating base for FUNAI agents trying to record proof of the man’s existence.
This seems absurd, but the stakes were high: Brazil has powerful legal protections in place for the Amazon’s native tribes, but is extremely loath to enforce them. At every step of the tribal preservation process, FUNAI faces expensive legal challenges from land developers, cattle barons, mine managers, and right-wing senators who would rather not have reservations carved out of their extensive frontier estates just because an undiscovered tribe happens to be living there. To Brazil’s conservative elites, the 12% of Brazil set aside for natives is already far too much; to concede another thirty square miles of premium cattle country to a single naked savage would be too much, broadcasting to the world that Brazil simply wasn’t serious about economic development. There was a very real risk, then, in the early years of the Contact Front, that somebody would hire a pistolero to make the problem go away for good.
As if hired assassins weren’t enough, the landowners also unleashed their lawyers. If they could cast reasonable doubt on his ethnicity, his ancestral ties to the land, or his permanent settlement of the area, a sympathetic judge could have had the Man of the Hole forcibly resettled, dragged to a strip of unknown jungle or forced to live with a tribe of “relatives” he’d never met in his life. The accusations of the ranchers have to be read to be believed: FUNAI was airdropping Indians into cattle country on purpose to sabotage the economy, or the field agents were blitzed on ayahuasca and mistaking monkeys for men. When photographic evidence proved beyond all doubt that the Man of the Hole existed, the lawyers alleged that he couldn’t be a real Indian because he had a mustache.
Despite the bullshit, obstructionism, and outright death threats, the Contact Front eventually succeeded through determination, care, and good old fashioned anthropological field research. The Tanaru Nature Reserve was established in 2006, and the Man of the Hole lived there for the rest of his life. If you look online, you can find maps of the territory, a vibrant streak of green jungle now surrounded by the sickly yellow of grazing fields. If Tanaru hadn’t been established, the Man of the Hole’s homeland would surely be sitting under several inches of manure right now.
It’s a good story, and Reel tells it well. Unfortunately, The Last of the Tribe often stumbles when it leaves the courtroom and heads for the jungle. Although Reel spent some time in the towns and forests around Rondônia while writing the book, he was never embedded with any of his subjects while the fight for Tanaru was actually unfolding. When you compare his book to those written by authors who spent months and years in the jungles, working alongside their sources–books like Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes or Scott Wallace’s The Unconquered–Reel has relatively little to say of native life in the deep Amazon. He never sits in on ghost ceremonies like Everett does, nor takes crazy jungle drugs with the natives like Scott does.
This is especially worrisome when so much of the book is spent speculating on what life must have been like for the Man of the Hole. How did he make his tools and shelters? How did he hunt for his prey, or grow his crops? How did his methods compare to other isolated tribes? I couldn’t shake the feeling that an author with more experience with the muck and malaria of the deep jungle would be able to provide deeper, more convincing answers than Reel. Nothing in The Last of the Tribe matches the kind of direct reports of pre-contact Amazon living you get in other books, like Scott Wallace’s conversation with an old Matis tribesman in The Unconquered:
“Before, Matis thought the big airplanes were our dead ancestors—xokeke,” he said. He pointed straight up, indicating the space far beyond the treetops. “We saw them pass waaaaaaay overhead. And we said, ‘There go our ancient ones.’” Like the Txikão, the Matis believed the ear-splitting Piper Cubs were some kind of large, scary birds. “We thought: It must be a powerful demon. Did we do something to provoke it?” He repeated the word in Matis: binkeke.
The Matis were shocked, Wallace adds, to learn that not only did the jetliners carry tourists and businessmen instead of ancestral spirits, but that they were also much larger than those binkeke Piper Cubs.
These are the stories that can only come from sustained contact with subjects and their lives over many months and years. The difference is starkest in Reel and Wallace’s coverage of Karapiru, whose story most closely resembles the Man of the Hole. Karapiru was a member of the Awá tribe who survived ten years alone in the jungle after an ambush annihilated his family. Reel tells much of the story through the perspective of the FUNAI agent who found Karapiru, lingering on his fish-out-water shenanigans in the agent’s high-rise apartment. Wallace tells the same story through interviews with Karapiru himself, focusing on his grief, curiosity, and good humor, with more attention paid to how Karapiru survived and how he felt. What he felt, alone in the jungle, is more important for comparisons to the Man of the Hole than what any FUNAI agent’s theory.
The impression you get, comparing The Last of the Tribe to similar books, is that as much as Reel wants to tell the story of the Amazon’s last truly isolated people, he frames too much of their story through the perspective of the Brazilians. It is the only book in English to focus entirely on the Man of the Hole, but it should not be the only book you read about isolated tribes.
It’s important that authors get these stories about uncontacted tribes right, because pretty soon, there won’t be any. Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential administration has actively encouraged the bulldozing of the Amazon for years, and global warming is causing more fires and more droughts to happen more often throughout the whole jungle. When habitats collapse like this, isolated tribes face two options: retreat further into the jungle, or else come out and ask the white men for food and shelter. Eventually, they’ll run out of jungle. The Akuntsu and Kanoe, the Man of the Hole’s neighbors, only emerged from the jungle in the 1980s because they were starving, sick, and no longer able to care for themselves after the runoff from mining and cattle ranching destabilized their ecosystem. Our world is quickly encroaching on the few thousand isolated natives left in the Amazon. If they can’t keep living off the land, they will either die out, or else become dependent on the money and manufactured goods of the modern Brazilian economy, suffering the same impoverishment that has already impacted hundreds of tribes across the country.
This transition cannot be stopped, but it can be managed, and must be managed well in order to minimize losses of life and culture. Even then, much will be lost. Whatever helps these people ensure the survival of their languages, culture, and children is better than extinction, but every time a tribe emerges from the forest begging for medicine and food, something wonderful and strange is lost, forever. Before long, there won’t be anybody left who looks at a jetliner and sees a vessel for the spirits of the ancestor gods, and humanity is worse for that.
I think this is why the Man of the Hole matters. It is easy, these days, to imagine metaverses and Martian bases, but incredibly hard to imagine communes and revolutions. Our own culture seems to offer up a thousand futures for liberal technocracy, ten thousand widgets we can manufacture to keep employment high, a million shows to binge-watch in seclusion, but only a handful of alternatives to any of this. I find it enormously soothing to remind myself, in the midst of this, that here on our planet knit together with fiber-optic cables and eight-lane superhighways, with subway trains rattling below and satellites buzzing above, that somebody else is out there, deep in the jungle. As I get up in my apartment, he wakes up in his moluca. As I cook a bland breakfast and dress for a job I don’t like, he is stringing his bow, tugging on the jaguar gut string to check its tautness. I curse at the news on my car’s radio, which gets more infuriating by the day; he praises ancestral gods whose names will never be written down, and whose powers keep the world in a state of perfect balance. He is not better than me, but he is different. He is not a model to emulate, but he is a reminder of other lives, other gods, other worlds. He doesn’t need me at all, but I need him desperately.
Updates and Archives
Next week I’ll be travelling, but I am trying to have a post ready to go. If you missed it the first time around, last year I wrote another book review, this one about The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist by Reviel Netz and William Noel. I’m quite proud of it.
And that’s it for this week. Happy reading!