Photo by Courtesy to The Alligator | The Independent Florida Alligator
Source: The Independence Florida Alligator
By Peyton Harris
When he entered a house in the Kuikuro village, Micheal Heckenberger was greeted by a smell medley of smokiness, traditional Xingu cooking and excess body paint. Moving through the house was a sensual experience in itself, he said, adjusting to the open circular spaces and side-by-side hammocks.
“You're as likely to hear a flute in the middle of the night as a car honking its horn,” he said.
A UF anthropology professor for over two decades, Heckenberger has authored several books on Amazonian Indigenous peoples as a result of living with the Kuikuro tribe in Brazil for two years.
He was committed to researching the Brazilian Amazon before he even began graduate school, he said. After meeting with indigenous leaders of the Kuikuro — an indigenous group from the Xingu region of Brazil — in 1991, Heckenberger sought to understand their culture and the differences between Latin America and the U.S.
“I was very taken by the place of Indigenous people in the modern world,” he said. “Obviously, ‘save the Amazon’ has been a theme that’s been around for quite a long time.”