June 9, 2026
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What Is Queer Artist and Explorer Tobias Schneebaum Trying to Tell Us?
by Doniphan Blair
Tobias Schneebaum with his 'mbai' friend in Asmat, New Guinea, in 2001. photo: courtesy Laurie ShapiroPLEASE support our research expenses, rebuilding the cineSOURCE site and more with a one-time or ongoing subscription.
ALL TRIBES HAVE ALWAYS EXCHANGED
goods, services or genetic material with their neighbors. Merchants, shamans and romantics have always travelled, traded or borrowed intellectual as well as physical property. Most of humanity’s most incredible leaps can be traced to this ancient if sometimes secret cross pollination. The exchanges range from humanity’s fundamental symbiosis of hunter-gatherer with farmer, which can also be called country and city, or artist/inventor with soldier/laborer, brains with brawn. It also applies to connections between distant trading partners, starting with the ancient silk and spice routes, accelerating with mail, telegraph and steam ships, and going hyper with the internet, smart phones and texting, which is very popular today across almost the entire Global South.
I wonder what Tobias Schneebaum would think of our current globalized world as well as our queer-friendly, identity-centric zeitgeist, but one which frowns on White people adopting tribal tropes. Sadly, I can’t ask him, since he died in 2005, at 83, but he’d probably have a pithy retort. Indeed, he liked rambunctious repartee and lived most of his life in New York City’s “queer Mecca” of the West Village, which is known for its acerbic queens. He also got fairly famous, first for his surprising run of EIGHT one-man painting shows in the 1950s, at the Peridot Gallery on Manhattan’s East 57th Street, the gallery district of the day, and again in the ‘60s, for living with cannibals.
That’s when he wrote his masterful, lyrical and brief “Keep the River on Your Right," about his time with a tribe called the Harakmbut, or Akaramas, Amarakaire, or perhaps Machiguenga (also spelled Matsigenka), somewhere between 125 miles north and 150 miles northwest of Cusco, Peru.
Famous cartoonist David Levine's drawing of Schneebaum for the New York Review of Books' review of 'Keep the River on Your RIght' in the early '70s. photo: courtesy T. Schneebaum“I splashed along the water’s edge and rolled over and over, back and forth, in and out of the sand,” he writes about his first encounter with deep Peruvian jungle. “I skipped up and down the beach to dry myself, my arms stretched out, breathing deeply the warm, dizzying air, my flesh tingling under the intoxicating stimulation. I became part of the voluptuous orgy, and I luxuriated in it… I feel almost boundless energy and love; I feel capable of all manner of eccentricity, capable of living with and through any inconvenience, any difficulty, that might arise.”
When “Keep the River on Your Right” became a bestseller, Tobias appeared on talk shows and in articles, including one by this author (although I didn’t do my interview until 1983 and it was only published a year later, see it here). When his second book wasn’t as well received, he switched to anthropology, first getting a degree from Goddard College, in Vermont, and then focusing on the Asmat, of Papua New Guinea, which he first visited in 1973. He was still participating in tours there, as the local expert, 25 years later.
He also worked with museums, including the one in Asmat, for which he did the professional cataloging and illustration he learned while getting his degree, but also New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indeed, he consulted on the creation of the Met’s extensive and innovative Michael C. Rockefeller “tribal” Wing, which opened in 1982 and was renovated and reopened to much fanfare in 2025.
As it happened, Schneebaum settled down near where Michael Rockefeller disappeared in New Guinea in 1961. He was initiated into a tribe, in fact, and developed a traditional “mbai” relationship, meaning male best friend and lover, with whom one remains monogamous for life. In addition, his village was not far from where the anthropologist and artist Robert Gardner shot his groundbreaking documentary about the Dani tribe, “Dead Birds” in 1963 (available on Tubi, Kanopy, Prime Video or Apple TV), which provided an incredible window into tribal life at that time.
Schneebaum returned to the limelight with the release of the documentary about him, titled the same as his book but with the provocative subtitle, “a modern cannibal tale.” Made by a brother-sister team, David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro, it won an Independent Spirit Award, which honors indie docs, in 2001, and is available for rent on Prime Video. That success brought Tobias more interviews and the opportunity to speak at film festivals, including one in Toronto, where he responded “Brad Pitt!” when asked who would play him in the feature version of “Keep the River on Your Right”, although Adrien Brody would have been a better simulacrum.
Schneebaum with a Peruvian friend, shortly before he went into the jungle, circa 1955. photo: courtesy T. Schneebaum
“Keep the River on Your Right” remains in print, but Schneebaum the man is largely forgotten, despite the insights and revelations of his adventures, art and books, plus his prodigious research into tribal and gay culture worldwide. Indeed, he visited and/or lived with tribal people from Mexico to India, often in deep jungle or desert, almost always hooking up with the men, who were often fairly open about their bisexuality, or whatever one wants to call it, inside their communities but not to outsiders.
“No one is even aware of the homosexual element in Asmat,” Tobias told me, at the end of our 1983 interview. “I asked in several places. And everywhere they say the same thing: ‘It is forbidden to mention it to a missionary or any outsider.’ I think I am the only one who has ever gotten this information.”
This makes Schneebaum the first to document gay activities in New Guinea as well as some of its cannibal practices—first hand, since he was initiated—which required a head. It could either be from a freshly killed member of a neighboring tribe (whom the initiate then replaces, assuming that man’s identity, even going to his village) to one head shared among a group of young men or a sculpture of a head. Sculpture is also a popular practice in New Guinea.
In South America, Tobias was one of the last outsiders to witness cannibalism before the arrival of the missionaries, loggers and miners, with their oppression and environmental destruction but also food supplies and morality, which made eating people unnecessary as well as taboo. Cannibalism continues to be controversial, however, both among Western academics and the intellectual or upper class citizens of countries where it allegedly took place, probably because it was a common Paleolithic practice which we repressed when we got “civilized.”
“I don’t believe we are civilized,” Tobias told me in 1983, after I looked him up in a New York City phone book and cold called him. “Look at what we are doing in El Salvador right now; I don’t see that we are advancing. I would be terrified to walk across Central Park at two o’clock in the morning, whereas I’m not afraid to walk across the jungle at night. The spirits might get me but I am not afraid of the people.”
Schneebaum taking a call in his large, one-bedroom studio in the West Village New York artist building, Westbeth, when I first met him in 1983. photo: D. BlairAs it happened, I’d been hearing about Tobias since I was 15, from my high school sweetheart, Melissa Cooper, whose mother, Pat, knew Tobias from hanging out in Mexico in the 1950s. Toby’s story caused me much consternation, after I ended up in the Peruvian jungle north of Cusco, near Kiteni and where Tobias sojourned with the Harakmbut a quarter century earlier. Even though the people welcomed me, including staying for a week at a small, family-run coffee plantation, where they were so poor they ate only yucca three times a day, "Do they kill people to eat?” I wondered.
Upon my return from South America, I immediately located and inhaled a copy of “Keep the River on Your Right”, which had heard all about from Melissa but neglected to actually read. Naturally, I was overjoyed when Tobias, during our first phone call, invited me to his place in Westbeth, the one-block-square Bell Telephone building in Manhattan's West Village which was converted to nonprofit artists' housing. Not long into our first meeting, I asked him point blank about cannibalism.
"They don’t just grab people," Tobias explained, "It is only practiced under certain, very strict circumstances, which vary depending on tribe." Otherwise, they are quite open and friendly, as he and I had experienced, if sometime shy.
Cannibalism is so controversial, it's existence is still being challenged by some Western anthropologists or officials and intellectuals in the Global South, who insist rumors of “people eating” are mostly or entirely fabricated.
“(E)xcluding survival conditions, I have been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society,” wrote Dr. William Arens, a New York University anthropologist, in “The Man-Eating Myth,” (1979). Arens was briefly a prominent player in the multicultural revisionism sweeping Western academia, starting with Edward Said’s 1978 “Orientalism”, which subjected anthropology to a well-deserved review of racist, colonialist or classicist misunderstanding, bias or invention. “Rumors, suspicions, fears, accusations abound,” concluded Arens, after reviewing the research, particularly of old documents (he did little field work, except in Tanzania, which had no history of cannibalism), “but no satisfactory first-hand accounts.” Evidently, Arens missed or dismissed Schneebaum’s vivid descriptions, even though “Keep the River on Your Right” was the talk of New York a decade earlier.
Cannibalism is a big lie, claimed Arens, invented by tribal enemies to impugn each other, invaders to dehumanize victims, or colonialists to stain their subjects’ humanity. Although those three calumnies are occasionally true, the bigger lie is Arens’ insistence there was almost no cannibalism, given it was fairly common worldwide. Nevertheless, Arens remained a respected authority on cannibalism and taught in or ran the anthropology department at Sunny Brook University, New York, until he died in 2019.
Multicultural revisionism is bigger than ever today, making it doubtful Schneebaum could get a fair hearing, article, biographical book or film, or even gallery show, which could be an interesting assortment of early paintings, later illustrations of tribal life (mostly in Asmat) and tribal art collection, not to mention colorful biography. Toby’s on-location photos blatantly display his alien whiteness, especially when completely naked, although his nudity and calm demeanor among the tribal men, as well as theirs, equally obviously indicate acceptance.
“The jungle either accepts you or rejects you,” Schneebaum notes in the Shapiro documentary, “Did it accept me or did I accept it?”
Schneebaum sits down with Charlie Rose, circa 2000. photo: courtesy C. RoseWhen asked the same question by the once-esteemed interviewer Charlie Rose (see it here) in 2001, Schneebaum blurted out, “I have no idea. I just went, and I did what I wanted to do and I came out… Mostly what it taught me is that I am a baby, that I have not learned anything about how I could survive myself in the jungle… Any of them, anyone of them, could have walked through the jungle with some kind of … knife… They treated me like a child because I couldn’t use the bow and arrow—that was hilarious to them.”
“Toby is one the most extraordinary people I have ever known,” according to his old buddy and fellow Jewish New Yorker, the bestselling author Norman Mailer (also from the Shapiros' movie). “There is such sensitivity and warmth and such timidity and fear in him. On one hand, he’s terrified of a dead mouse yet, on the other hand, he’ll go into the jungle and live with cannibals.”
Born in 1922, Tobias grew up in a poor, conservative Brooklyn Jewish community and once studied to be a rabbi. But he soon began travelling, first to Manhattan, where he went to school, became an artist and partially came out, and then the world. He attended Stuyvesant, Manhattan’s famous public high school, and then City University of New York, where he majored in math as well as art and graduated in 1943. Immediately drafted, he served as a radar repairman in the U.S. Army in Indiana until the end of World War Two.
Upon return to New York, he studied briefly with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1947, before moving to Mexico for three years. There he painted, hung out with beatniks and literati but also, increasingly, local people and tribal members. until he had some sort of epiphany about "queer jungle adventures.” Acting on that dream, he went to Chiapas. Mexico’s southernmost state, met members of the Lakadone tribe, and spent months in their jungle villages.
On the basis of his Mexican paintings, he started showing in the Peridot Gallery but also won a Fulbright in 1955 to paint in Peru. After hitchhiking 6,000 miles from New York (it’s possible, I did it 23 years later), he lived with the Harakmbut for seven months, where “he slept with his male subjects and claimed to have joined the tribe in cannibalism on one occasion,” as it was delicately phrased back in the day.
In point of fact, as “Keep the River on Your Right” details, Toby happily joined his Harakmbut friends' adventures in the jungle hunting and with sex—the men lived largely separately in the men’s house—but did nothing of the kind concerning cannibalism. Indeed, he had no idea that his group’s ritual chanting, touching together of penises, and race through the jungle prefigured a mass murderous raid on a neighboring jungle village, killing all the men and kidnapping the women and children.
Author, artist, anthropologist and incredible adventurer Tobias Schneebaum, circa 1999. photo: Lacy Atkins, courtesy SF GateTobias was completely shocked during the melee and froze. Although he only ate a few bites of human flesh, when offered it by his friends, which he felt obliged to accept, he was totally traumatized. Those few bites were the great regret of his life, especially on his death bed, I was told by his last boyfriend, Joel Singer, a filmmaker now living in Bali.
Toby's cannibalism was especially poignant since he may have eaten a small amount of his friend, whom he met at the last missionary outpost before the jungle, who was called Manalo in the book, which does have name changes and some condensation and novelization. After Tobias went into the jungle, following “keep the river on your right,” a local's directions to the Harakmbut village, Manalo was inspired and ended up with a neighboring tribe.
Quite a few people over the years have quit civilization and “gone native,” as the saying goes. Often associated with the romantic movements of the 1800s or the 1960s, that call of the wild was quelled by modernism, high-tech revolutions and conservative counterrevolutions. Nevertheless, versions of it continue today, from events like Burning Man, in the Nevada desert, or Carnaval, in Brazil, to our planet’s outer limits and empty quarters, the jungles, mountains and deserts where people still live closer to earth and tribal ways, even though some use outboard motors, smart phones or satellite dishes. It’s tough to find where the wild things, looking at a GPS in an air-conditioned four-wheel drive, but they're still out there, often just a few hundred yards off the road or down the beach from the hotel or at a bonfire on the edge of town.
Sigmund Freud took going native as an affront, a rejection of civilization, although his own grand project of integrating modern sensibilities and animal drives is essentially the same. Indeed, his disciple, Carl Jung, endorsed tribal life and wisdom, but Freud diagnosed “primitive” people as “neurotic” in “Totem and Taboo” (1913). He also exclaimed “astonishing” the notion that “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and... we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions,” (“Civilization and Its Discontents,” 1930, p9).
Despite Freud's defrocking, he did pioneer the study and socialization of two patently primitive but still-beloved activities, sex and dreams, which inspired many of the native-goers of his day. Moreover, he honestly conceded that “the mechanisms of the neuroses...threatened to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men,” and that “the subjugation of the forces of nature... HAS NOT INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF PLEASURABLE SATISFACTION which they might expect.” (“Civilization”, p22, my emphasis).
Tobias Schneebaum talks with a friend, in a Papua New Guinea tribal community, circa 1984. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumHence the escapees. So many, in fact, Tepe Kahok, an indigenous Brazilian friend of mine, told me that all his neighboring tribes in his Xingu region of south-western Brazil had at least one White member and one even had a French chief. The French fled civilization in droves after reading “The Savage Mind” (1962) by Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist who lived with tribal people in north-eastern Brazil. His research proved their language, grammar and usage was as sophisticated as the supposedly civilized.
Going native is not as easy or romantic as it looks. Untold adventurers, artists and dreamers have gone down to defeat, delirium or death in their quest for that idyll. France’s most famous civilization-quitter, Arthur Rimbaud, returned from Yemen loaded with slave-trader gold but not a single new poem, only to confess to Catholicism and keel over, age 33. More recently, Chris McCandliss, of the “Into the Wild” fame (the excellent book by Jon Kracouer, 1998, and pretty good film by Sean Penn, 2007), wandered into the Alaskan outback inspired by the highest of principals but inadequate experience and proceeded to starve and poison himself to death. That betrays the explorer's credo, “Live to tell the tale"—bring back the research!
On my many trips to Central and South America (1977-2020), I met a few women and many men headed down the "primitive" path, and I’ve heard or read of dozens there and elsewhere. Even as the future explodes with new gadgets, services and perspectives, some machine made, as well as horrific political problems, the wild is still out there being traversed by thousands of off-road world travelers, AWOL NGOers, gone-native anthropologists, or romantic wanderers living with new friends or family in the Earth's recalcitrant regions.
But few have done it quite like Tobias Schneebaum, who travelled through scores of lands, visited dozens of tribes and lived with a half a dozen, arguably making him one of history's great anthropologists. This is especially true given, unlike Margaret Meade, he didn’t show up with 50 cases of gear and completely disrupt village life (although he certainly did somewhat). Schneebaum started as an amateur and never relinquished that lightly intrusive perspective, although he went on to write a half a dozen books, three about his decade plus in New Guinea.
After I interviewed him in 1983 and published the piece in a Portland, Oregon alternative monthly and two gay weeklies, one in Miami, the other Paris, I got a better understanding of cannibalism. It's complicated, of course, but by talking with Tobias, reading his books and doing some research as well as viewing the documentary “Keep the River on Your Right” and interviewing one of its filmmakers, Laurie Shapiro, I was able to parse some answers. One one hand, there has long been cannibalism in desperate circumstances, notably shipwrecks, which increased with trade and exploration, was popularized in paintings and publications, and continued until the late 19th century (when steam power enabled rapid rescue), broadly imprinting it in our consciousness and culture.
On the other, tribal people used cannibalism for population control and magic. Practices can be divided into three basic genres: 1) population control, 2) extensive rituals, which served to limit populations but also initiate young men, accrue power and connect villages—with practices ranging from headhunting neighboring men to eating some of deceased elders— and 3) power struggles between shamans, who hunted enemies and ate their livers or other organs. In Peru, Tobias witnessed the first level; in Asmat, New Guinea, he participated in the second; and on his extensive journeys across the less-developed world, he undoubtedly heard about the third.
Schneebaum with another close friend in Asmat, New Guinea, circa 2000. photo: courtesy L. ShapiorAs I become a nominal friend of Tobias—we exchanged holiday cards—and well versed on his work, I came to consider him a renaissance man, a mentor even. This is not only for his admirable ability to go native with panache, artistry and kindness but to return to New York and achieve that ever-elusive future-primitive balance: paying the rent, going to the opera or talking to people, personally or through the media, about what it was like to live with tribal folk, all while saving up for his next trip, which he did over and over until he was 78.
Journeying back in 2000 with Laurie and the film crew to the Harakmbut region was tough on Toby, even frightening, and he turns to the camera on one occasion and says, “The filmmakers are trying to kill me!” But their visit to New Guinea was a joyous reunion with his community and especially his mbai. In Asmat, Scheebaum seemed to resolve the ancient conflict not only between modern and tribal life but what Freud calls the superego and the id. Or it can be regarded as the division between what neurologists classify as the brain’s new frontal and reptilian back lobes or left and right hemispheres, or what Friedrich Nietzsche characterized as the cool intellect of Apollo and hot emotion of Dionysus.
Unable to avoid our basic brain topology, this Apollo-Dionysis division has raged for centuries: the theologists against the enlighteneds in the 18th century, which became the Darwinists and the Christians in the 19th, which boils down to the romantics and rationalists duking it out. This corresponded to divisions between expressionist-formalist in the early 20th century, beatnik against square in the 1950s, jocks versus heads, as the schism was called in my high school in the 1960s, and finally — where we stand today — the culture wars which started in the 1980s: multicultural relativists against unicultural classicists.
Starting in the ‘60s, French structuralists like Jacques Derrida, building on Levi-Strauss but also Jean-Paul Sartre, finally proved, in theory at least, that whatever one conceived of as culture, be it French or Harakmbut, was legitimate, given the obvious, irrefutable fact: consciousness in the mind of the beholder. The ability of Muslim extremists to suicide themselves for a paradise with 72 virgins proves the immensity of mental powers, which can be used for fascism or fun, mass murder or mutual benefit.
Given the linguistic sophistication of so-called primitive people, they can easily adopt any technology they find useful and can afford, a development balance they've been exploring since "first encounter," often starting with fishing hooks. I learned this from the coffee farmer I sat next to, on a massive, motorized dugout canoe, headed back upstream from the Harakmbut region to near Cusco. When I mentioned the seemingly expensive fare charged by the hot-shot, mirrored-sunglass-wearing captain, my neighbor told me the old way of using donkeys was much more worse. As it happened, we were just passing a fellow farmer struggling along the river's bank with six ladened donkeys, at whom he pointed. “Donkeys can be bastards,” he explained, “and you have to feed them all year long.”
Schneebaum enjoyed doing interviews even though his life experiences were shocking and sometimes provoked attacks by interviewers, circa 1975. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumSimilar positive evaluations of civilization by Harakmbut or their neighbors appear in the Shapiros’ film. When asked whether they preferred life in the jungle or today, living as poor Peruvians, in tiny, tin-roofed houses, they were of two minds. We liked hunting in the jungle, the men said, but these new machetes are very useful. The woman also enjoyed collecting herbs and other native ways but liked the new clothing.
When I visited a Brazilian tribal village, Aldeia Pataxo, on Bahia’s central coast, for a week in 1980 and another in 2004, I was surprised to find it had evolved into a healthy tribe from a sleepy, impoverished community, which had only immigrated to the area a century earlier and could barely fish the ocean. Quite a few residents were riding motorcycles, a few were going to college or working with the Brazilian Indian agency FUNAI, many were selling beads and carvings in Caraiva, a tourist town four miles away, and some were doing dance performances, four times daily during the tourist season. This transformation brought much better food, housing and medical, not to mention cold beers or Brazil’s famous soap operas, delivered by the village's many satellite dishes.
On my last visit, Aldeia Pataxo was still being served by two shamans. Indeed, my traveling companion, an Indigenous person from Chile registered with the Mapuche tribe, visited one a couple of times for some life coaching and found it quite helpful.
We all have to decide where we stand between Apollo and Dionysus, civilization and tribe, and where freedom of religion meets freedom of action? How do we balance our basic urges, deepest dreams and practical needs? Civilization's discontents used to be starry-eyed romantics or jaundiced-eyed cynics but now they include vicious fascists or radical Islamists trying to topple Western Civilization altogether. Finding that sweet spot between allowing radical multiculturalism while defending individual liberties and the other many tools, conveniences and luxuries of Western Civilization could greatly benefit by taking a new look at Tobias Schneebaum.
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Posted on Jun 08, 2026 - 10:14 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Tobias Schneebaum with his 'mbai' friend in Asmat, New Guinea, in 2001. photo: courtesy Laurie ShapiroALL TRIBES HAVE ALWAYS EXCHANGED
goods, services or genetic material with their neighbors. Merchants, shamans and romantics have always travelled, traded or borrowed intellectual as well as physical property. Most of humanity’s most incredible leaps can be traced to this ancient if sometimes secret cross pollination. The exchanges range from humanity’s fundamental symbiosis of hunter-gatherer with farmer, which can also be called country and city, or artist/inventor with soldier/laborer, brains with brawn. It also applies to connections between distant trading partners, starting with the ancient silk and spice routes, accelerating with mail, telegraph and steam ships, and going hyper with the internet, smart phones and texting, which is very popular today across almost the entire Global South.
I wonder what Tobias Schneebaum would think of our current globalized world as well as our queer-friendly, identity-centric zeitgeist, but one which frowns on White people adopting tribal tropes. Sadly, I can’t ask him, since he died in 2005, at 83, but he’d probably have a pithy retort. Indeed, he liked rambunctious repartee and lived most of his life in New York City’s “queer Mecca” of the West Village, which is known for its acerbic queens. He also got fairly famous, first for his surprising run of EIGHT one-man painting shows in the 1950s, at the Peridot Gallery on Manhattan’s East 57th Street, the gallery district of the day, and again in the ‘60s, for living with cannibals.
That’s when he wrote his masterful, lyrical and brief “Keep the River on Your Right," about his time with a tribe called the Harakmbut, or Akaramas, Amarakaire, or perhaps Machiguenga (also spelled Matsigenka), somewhere between 125 miles north and 150 miles northwest of Cusco, Peru.
Famous cartoonist David Levine's drawing of Schneebaum for the New York Review of Books' review of 'Keep the River on Your RIght' in the early '70s. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumWhen “Keep the River on Your Right” became a bestseller, Tobias appeared on talk shows and in articles, including one by this author (although I didn’t do my interview until 1983 and it was only published a year later, see it here). When his second book wasn’t as well received, he switched to anthropology, first getting a degree from Goddard College, in Vermont, and then focusing on the Asmat, of Papua New Guinea, which he first visited in 1973. He was still participating in tours there, as the local expert, 25 years later.
He also worked with museums, including the one in Asmat, for which he did the professional cataloging and illustration he learned while getting his degree, but also New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indeed, he consulted on the creation of the Met’s extensive and innovative Michael C. Rockefeller “tribal” Wing, which opened in 1982 and was renovated and reopened to much fanfare in 2025.
As it happened, Schneebaum settled down near where Michael Rockefeller disappeared in New Guinea in 1961. He was initiated into a tribe, in fact, and developed a traditional “mbai” relationship, meaning male best friend and lover, with whom one remains monogamous for life. In addition, his village was not far from where the anthropologist and artist Robert Gardner shot his groundbreaking documentary about the Dani tribe, “Dead Birds” in 1963 (available on Tubi, Kanopy, Prime Video or Apple TV), which provided an incredible window into tribal life at that time.
Schneebaum returned to the limelight with the release of the documentary about him, titled the same as his book but with the provocative subtitle, “a modern cannibal tale.” Made by a brother-sister team, David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro, it won an Independent Spirit Award, which honors indie docs, in 2001, and is available for rent on Prime Video. That success brought Tobias more interviews and the opportunity to speak at film festivals, including one in Toronto, where he responded “Brad Pitt!” when asked who would play him in the feature version of “Keep the River on Your Right”, although Adrien Brody would have been a better simulacrum.
Schneebaum with a Peruvian friend, shortly before he went into the jungle, circa 1955. photo: courtesy T. Schneebaum“Keep the River on Your Right” remains in print, but Schneebaum the man is largely forgotten, despite the insights and revelations of his adventures, art and books, plus his prodigious research into tribal and gay culture worldwide. Indeed, he visited and/or lived with tribal people from Mexico to India, often in deep jungle or desert, almost always hooking up with the men, who were often fairly open about their bisexuality, or whatever one wants to call it, inside their communities but not to outsiders.
“No one is even aware of the homosexual element in Asmat,” Tobias told me, at the end of our 1983 interview. “I asked in several places. And everywhere they say the same thing: ‘It is forbidden to mention it to a missionary or any outsider.’ I think I am the only one who has ever gotten this information.”
This makes Schneebaum the first to document gay activities in New Guinea as well as some of its cannibal practices—first hand, since he was initiated—which required a head. It could either be from a freshly killed member of a neighboring tribe (whom the initiate then replaces, assuming that man’s identity, even going to his village) to one head shared among a group of young men or a sculpture of a head. Sculpture is also a popular practice in New Guinea.
In South America, Tobias was one of the last outsiders to witness cannibalism before the arrival of the missionaries, loggers and miners, with their oppression and environmental destruction but also food supplies and morality, which made eating people unnecessary as well as taboo. Cannibalism continues to be controversial, however, both among Western academics and the intellectual or upper class citizens of countries where it allegedly took place, probably because it was a common Paleolithic practice which we repressed when we got “civilized.”
“I don’t believe we are civilized,” Tobias told me in 1983, after I looked him up in a New York City phone book and cold called him. “Look at what we are doing in El Salvador right now; I don’t see that we are advancing. I would be terrified to walk across Central Park at two o’clock in the morning, whereas I’m not afraid to walk across the jungle at night. The spirits might get me but I am not afraid of the people.”
Schneebaum taking a call in his large, one-bedroom studio in the West Village New York artist building, Westbeth, when I first met him in 1983. photo: D. BlairUpon my return from South America, I immediately located and inhaled a copy of “Keep the River on Your Right”, which had heard all about from Melissa but neglected to actually read. Naturally, I was overjoyed when Tobias, during our first phone call, invited me to his place in Westbeth, the one-block-square Bell Telephone building in Manhattan's West Village which was converted to nonprofit artists' housing. Not long into our first meeting, I asked him point blank about cannibalism.
"They don’t just grab people," Tobias explained, "It is only practiced under certain, very strict circumstances, which vary depending on tribe." Otherwise, they are quite open and friendly, as he and I had experienced, if sometime shy.
Cannibalism is so controversial, it's existence is still being challenged by some Western anthropologists or officials and intellectuals in the Global South, who insist rumors of “people eating” are mostly or entirely fabricated.
“(E)xcluding survival conditions, I have been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society,” wrote Dr. William Arens, a New York University anthropologist, in “The Man-Eating Myth,” (1979). Arens was briefly a prominent player in the multicultural revisionism sweeping Western academia, starting with Edward Said’s 1978 “Orientalism”, which subjected anthropology to a well-deserved review of racist, colonialist or classicist misunderstanding, bias or invention. “Rumors, suspicions, fears, accusations abound,” concluded Arens, after reviewing the research, particularly of old documents (he did little field work, except in Tanzania, which had no history of cannibalism), “but no satisfactory first-hand accounts.” Evidently, Arens missed or dismissed Schneebaum’s vivid descriptions, even though “Keep the River on Your Right” was the talk of New York a decade earlier.
Cannibalism is a big lie, claimed Arens, invented by tribal enemies to impugn each other, invaders to dehumanize victims, or colonialists to stain their subjects’ humanity. Although those three calumnies are occasionally true, the bigger lie is Arens’ insistence there was almost no cannibalism, given it was fairly common worldwide. Nevertheless, Arens remained a respected authority on cannibalism and taught in or ran the anthropology department at Sunny Brook University, New York, until he died in 2019.
Multicultural revisionism is bigger than ever today, making it doubtful Schneebaum could get a fair hearing, article, biographical book or film, or even gallery show, which could be an interesting assortment of early paintings, later illustrations of tribal life (mostly in Asmat) and tribal art collection, not to mention colorful biography. Toby’s on-location photos blatantly display his alien whiteness, especially when completely naked, although his nudity and calm demeanor among the tribal men, as well as theirs, equally obviously indicate acceptance.
“The jungle either accepts you or rejects you,” Schneebaum notes in the Shapiro documentary, “Did it accept me or did I accept it?”
Schneebaum sits down with Charlie Rose, circa 2000. photo: courtesy C. Rose“Toby is one the most extraordinary people I have ever known,” according to his old buddy and fellow Jewish New Yorker, the bestselling author Norman Mailer (also from the Shapiros' movie). “There is such sensitivity and warmth and such timidity and fear in him. On one hand, he’s terrified of a dead mouse yet, on the other hand, he’ll go into the jungle and live with cannibals.”
Born in 1922, Tobias grew up in a poor, conservative Brooklyn Jewish community and once studied to be a rabbi. But he soon began travelling, first to Manhattan, where he went to school, became an artist and partially came out, and then the world. He attended Stuyvesant, Manhattan’s famous public high school, and then City University of New York, where he majored in math as well as art and graduated in 1943. Immediately drafted, he served as a radar repairman in the U.S. Army in Indiana until the end of World War Two.
Upon return to New York, he studied briefly with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1947, before moving to Mexico for three years. There he painted, hung out with beatniks and literati but also, increasingly, local people and tribal members. until he had some sort of epiphany about "queer jungle adventures.” Acting on that dream, he went to Chiapas. Mexico’s southernmost state, met members of the Lakadone tribe, and spent months in their jungle villages.
On the basis of his Mexican paintings, he started showing in the Peridot Gallery but also won a Fulbright in 1955 to paint in Peru. After hitchhiking 6,000 miles from New York (it’s possible, I did it 23 years later), he lived with the Harakmbut for seven months, where “he slept with his male subjects and claimed to have joined the tribe in cannibalism on one occasion,” as it was delicately phrased back in the day.
In point of fact, as “Keep the River on Your Right” details, Toby happily joined his Harakmbut friends' adventures in the jungle hunting and with sex—the men lived largely separately in the men’s house—but did nothing of the kind concerning cannibalism. Indeed, he had no idea that his group’s ritual chanting, touching together of penises, and race through the jungle prefigured a mass murderous raid on a neighboring jungle village, killing all the men and kidnapping the women and children.
Author, artist, anthropologist and incredible adventurer Tobias Schneebaum, circa 1999. photo: Lacy Atkins, courtesy SF GateToby's cannibalism was especially poignant since he may have eaten a small amount of his friend, whom he met at the last missionary outpost before the jungle, who was called Manalo in the book, which does have name changes and some condensation and novelization. After Tobias went into the jungle, following “keep the river on your right,” a local's directions to the Harakmbut village, Manalo was inspired and ended up with a neighboring tribe.
Quite a few people over the years have quit civilization and “gone native,” as the saying goes. Often associated with the romantic movements of the 1800s or the 1960s, that call of the wild was quelled by modernism, high-tech revolutions and conservative counterrevolutions. Nevertheless, versions of it continue today, from events like Burning Man, in the Nevada desert, or Carnaval, in Brazil, to our planet’s outer limits and empty quarters, the jungles, mountains and deserts where people still live closer to earth and tribal ways, even though some use outboard motors, smart phones or satellite dishes. It’s tough to find where the wild things, looking at a GPS in an air-conditioned four-wheel drive, but they're still out there, often just a few hundred yards off the road or down the beach from the hotel or at a bonfire on the edge of town.
Sigmund Freud took going native as an affront, a rejection of civilization, although his own grand project of integrating modern sensibilities and animal drives is essentially the same. Indeed, his disciple, Carl Jung, endorsed tribal life and wisdom, but Freud diagnosed “primitive” people as “neurotic” in “Totem and Taboo” (1913). He also exclaimed “astonishing” the notion that “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and... we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions,” (“Civilization and Its Discontents,” 1930, p9).
Despite Freud's defrocking, he did pioneer the study and socialization of two patently primitive but still-beloved activities, sex and dreams, which inspired many of the native-goers of his day. Moreover, he honestly conceded that “the mechanisms of the neuroses...threatened to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men,” and that “the subjugation of the forces of nature... HAS NOT INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF PLEASURABLE SATISFACTION which they might expect.” (“Civilization”, p22, my emphasis).
Tobias Schneebaum talks with a friend, in a Papua New Guinea tribal community, circa 1984. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumGoing native is not as easy or romantic as it looks. Untold adventurers, artists and dreamers have gone down to defeat, delirium or death in their quest for that idyll. France’s most famous civilization-quitter, Arthur Rimbaud, returned from Yemen loaded with slave-trader gold but not a single new poem, only to confess to Catholicism and keel over, age 33. More recently, Chris McCandliss, of the “Into the Wild” fame (the excellent book by Jon Kracouer, 1998, and pretty good film by Sean Penn, 2007), wandered into the Alaskan outback inspired by the highest of principals but inadequate experience and proceeded to starve and poison himself to death. That betrays the explorer's credo, “Live to tell the tale"—bring back the research!
On my many trips to Central and South America (1977-2020), I met a few women and many men headed down the "primitive" path, and I’ve heard or read of dozens there and elsewhere. Even as the future explodes with new gadgets, services and perspectives, some machine made, as well as horrific political problems, the wild is still out there being traversed by thousands of off-road world travelers, AWOL NGOers, gone-native anthropologists, or romantic wanderers living with new friends or family in the Earth's recalcitrant regions.
But few have done it quite like Tobias Schneebaum, who travelled through scores of lands, visited dozens of tribes and lived with a half a dozen, arguably making him one of history's great anthropologists. This is especially true given, unlike Margaret Meade, he didn’t show up with 50 cases of gear and completely disrupt village life (although he certainly did somewhat). Schneebaum started as an amateur and never relinquished that lightly intrusive perspective, although he went on to write a half a dozen books, three about his decade plus in New Guinea.
After I interviewed him in 1983 and published the piece in a Portland, Oregon alternative monthly and two gay weeklies, one in Miami, the other Paris, I got a better understanding of cannibalism. It's complicated, of course, but by talking with Tobias, reading his books and doing some research as well as viewing the documentary “Keep the River on Your Right” and interviewing one of its filmmakers, Laurie Shapiro, I was able to parse some answers. One one hand, there has long been cannibalism in desperate circumstances, notably shipwrecks, which increased with trade and exploration, was popularized in paintings and publications, and continued until the late 19th century (when steam power enabled rapid rescue), broadly imprinting it in our consciousness and culture.
On the other, tribal people used cannibalism for population control and magic. Practices can be divided into three basic genres: 1) population control, 2) extensive rituals, which served to limit populations but also initiate young men, accrue power and connect villages—with practices ranging from headhunting neighboring men to eating some of deceased elders— and 3) power struggles between shamans, who hunted enemies and ate their livers or other organs. In Peru, Tobias witnessed the first level; in Asmat, New Guinea, he participated in the second; and on his extensive journeys across the less-developed world, he undoubtedly heard about the third.
Schneebaum with another close friend in Asmat, New Guinea, circa 2000. photo: courtesy L. ShapiorJourneying back in 2000 with Laurie and the film crew to the Harakmbut region was tough on Toby, even frightening, and he turns to the camera on one occasion and says, “The filmmakers are trying to kill me!” But their visit to New Guinea was a joyous reunion with his community and especially his mbai. In Asmat, Scheebaum seemed to resolve the ancient conflict not only between modern and tribal life but what Freud calls the superego and the id. Or it can be regarded as the division between what neurologists classify as the brain’s new frontal and reptilian back lobes or left and right hemispheres, or what Friedrich Nietzsche characterized as the cool intellect of Apollo and hot emotion of Dionysus.
Unable to avoid our basic brain topology, this Apollo-Dionysis division has raged for centuries: the theologists against the enlighteneds in the 18th century, which became the Darwinists and the Christians in the 19th, which boils down to the romantics and rationalists duking it out. This corresponded to divisions between expressionist-formalist in the early 20th century, beatnik against square in the 1950s, jocks versus heads, as the schism was called in my high school in the 1960s, and finally — where we stand today — the culture wars which started in the 1980s: multicultural relativists against unicultural classicists.
Starting in the ‘60s, French structuralists like Jacques Derrida, building on Levi-Strauss but also Jean-Paul Sartre, finally proved, in theory at least, that whatever one conceived of as culture, be it French or Harakmbut, was legitimate, given the obvious, irrefutable fact: consciousness in the mind of the beholder. The ability of Muslim extremists to suicide themselves for a paradise with 72 virgins proves the immensity of mental powers, which can be used for fascism or fun, mass murder or mutual benefit.
Given the linguistic sophistication of so-called primitive people, they can easily adopt any technology they find useful and can afford, a development balance they've been exploring since "first encounter," often starting with fishing hooks. I learned this from the coffee farmer I sat next to, on a massive, motorized dugout canoe, headed back upstream from the Harakmbut region to near Cusco. When I mentioned the seemingly expensive fare charged by the hot-shot, mirrored-sunglass-wearing captain, my neighbor told me the old way of using donkeys was much more worse. As it happened, we were just passing a fellow farmer struggling along the river's bank with six ladened donkeys, at whom he pointed. “Donkeys can be bastards,” he explained, “and you have to feed them all year long.”
Schneebaum enjoyed doing interviews even though his life experiences were shocking and sometimes provoked attacks by interviewers, circa 1975. photo: courtesy T. SchneebaumWhen I visited a Brazilian tribal village, Aldeia Pataxo, on Bahia’s central coast, for a week in 1980 and another in 2004, I was surprised to find it had evolved into a healthy tribe from a sleepy, impoverished community, which had only immigrated to the area a century earlier and could barely fish the ocean. Quite a few residents were riding motorcycles, a few were going to college or working with the Brazilian Indian agency FUNAI, many were selling beads and carvings in Caraiva, a tourist town four miles away, and some were doing dance performances, four times daily during the tourist season. This transformation brought much better food, housing and medical, not to mention cold beers or Brazil’s famous soap operas, delivered by the village's many satellite dishes.
On my last visit, Aldeia Pataxo was still being served by two shamans. Indeed, my traveling companion, an Indigenous person from Chile registered with the Mapuche tribe, visited one a couple of times for some life coaching and found it quite helpful.
We all have to decide where we stand between Apollo and Dionysus, civilization and tribe, and where freedom of religion meets freedom of action? How do we balance our basic urges, deepest dreams and practical needs? Civilization's discontents used to be starry-eyed romantics or jaundiced-eyed cynics but now they include vicious fascists or radical Islamists trying to topple Western Civilization altogether. Finding that sweet spot between allowing radical multiculturalism while defending individual liberties and the other many tools, conveniences and luxuries of Western Civilization could greatly benefit by taking a new look at Tobias Schneebaum.
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Posted on Jun 08, 2026 - 10:14 AM
