In this book, George Mentore explores a variety of themes associated with Waiwai sociability, their thoughts, how they feel about themselves, and their situation in the so-called modern world. The Waiwai are an Amerindian society located on both sides of the Brazil–Guyana border, comprising approximately 2,000 individuals of whom the majority live on the Brazilian side. Mentore, who has been working in the region for 25 years, primarily focuses on the Waiwai living in the village of Sheparaiymo, situated in southeastern Guyana.

In the initial pages of the book, the author clearly establishes his particular perspective. Born in Guyana when it was still a British colony, and identified on his birth certificate as a “Black, Native of British Guiana,” Mentore feels that his inheritance endows him with a special sensitivity to approach this ethnographical work about a group of people with whom he shares a common history. On the basis of that premise, he vindicates subjectivity not merely as a means of approaching social reality but also as an object to be described within that reality.

Following that introductory exposition, specific chapters of the book address topics ranging from the presence, in circular time and space, of individual aspects of Waiwai social life to giving and generosity, and they include considerations of shamanism, kinship, ecology, and so on. Mentore describes multiple aspects of social life within different production contexts, combining empathy and dense descriptions with more classical ethnographical analyses, even introducing quantitative data. Among the themes covered, the notion of “body” and the intimately associated notion of “embodiment” occupy the core of Mentore’s reflection. In this area, Mentore offers some interesting hypotheses. For example, he suggests that because visual memory interacts with knowledge and because body adornments can be associated with visual memory, one can infer that, for the Waiwai, body adornments express certain knowledge. Still more significant, for the Waiwai, this knowledge is the result of a perceptive experience of the world, particularly attributable to visual capacity. Thus, with the analysis of the perceptive properties of the Waiwai body that he presents, through the description of the notion of “ewri ekatï” (which he translates as “spiritual vitality of the eye”), Mentore illustrates how vision opens the way to experience, which gives shape to knowledge.

The author addresses many other issues; however, it is hard to establish the overall intellectual project that Mentore pursues in this work, beyond a sensitive description of Waiwai aesthetics, through the analysis of disparate elements. The phenomenology that he appears to recur to, conceived more as a description of what takes place rather than as a methodology to find complexity, produces interesting writing, some of which is even inspiring, but it is unable to account for the integrating social axis. Unfortunately, the phenomenal reality, conceived as a flow of events, is too complex to approach without an explicit methodology.

Despite these critical observations, the book—the result of years of work and several attempts by Mentore to find the adequate tone to reflect the sensitivity that he wants to portray—is a reference for scholars interested in this region, which has contributed so much to the ethnography of the lowlands of South America. With this text, Mentore also offers readers a beautiful example of combining anthropology with the memory and firsthand experience of colonialism.