- The Power of Parks
The Anthropologist and His Old Friend, Who Became a Jaguar
Among the Matsigenka tribe in Peru's Manú National Park, a difficult death can sometimes lead to a dangerous afterlife.
Glenn Shepard looks like a lot of white men who have spent many years in the tropics: handsome, but his skin looks older than his eyes. Along with the tan, in nearly three decades of living and working as an anthropologist among the Matsigenka tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, he’s acquired the tropical ability to remain calm in the face of long, unexpected delays, mishaps, and accidents. He keeps telling me to go with the flow.
We’re in a motorized canoe on our slow way to the Matsigenka village of Tayakome—unreachable by any road, deep in the heart of Manú National Park in Peru. (Read all about Manú and the Matsigenka in the June 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine.)
The Manú River is shallow and the color of chocolate milk.
