Word: shamanism
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...Yanomami are the celebrities of the rain forest. No tribe on the planet is more lauded, defamed, protected, exploited and fought over. Best sellers chronicle their warlike savagery. Missionaries convert them. Gold miners massacre them. And TV movies zoom in on their loincloths and painted faces, their shaman magic and hallucinogenic habits...
Besides his monkey business, Van Roosmalen specializes in medicinal plants (he even apprenticed to a shaman of the Kamayura tribe) and in rain-forest conservation. He knew he wanted to do fieldwork when he studied primates in Holland. There Van Roosmalen clashed with his university professors over the value of observing lab monkeys. "It was like putting a child in a cage and drawing conclusions about all Homo sapiens," he huffs...
Branding is, well, a hot trend largely due to Fakir Musafar, 69, a former ad executive who calls himself a shaman and devotes his life to bod-mod, along with other more fantastic practices like O-Kee-Pa, a mystical Native American body-suspension ceremony. Musafar started a California state-licensed branding school in 1992 and has spread his philosophy through a website and a quarterly magazine called Body Play. He claims that branding is now administered by some 50 people in the Western world and could hit the mainstream in the way piercing did a few years...
...native medicine men in the Amazon rain forest, Davi relies on hallucinogenic powders to reach the spirit world, but this leader of the Yanomami Indians also wields a more modern means of communication: a two-way radio. When an otherworldly voice squawks through the speaker, Davi wraps up his shaman's crown of toucan feathers, dons uncomfortable city clothes and walks to a clearing in the forest, where a four-seater plane awaits, propellers revving...
This is brisk, epic storytelling. Like a shaman in a village circle, the film spins the old saga, made familiar in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books and nearly 50 films, but with a fresh and affecting power. Now it is a safari into the interior of Tarzan's conflicted soul, where he searches not so much for his mate Jane as for his place in a society of men and apes. Though it would be nuts to predict Lion King-size revenues (that film and its ancillary markets made Disney $1 billion in profit), it is also hard to believe...