Amazonia is the largest extension of tropical rain forest in the world. The dramatic landscape and exuberant nature combine to provide a provocative challenge for those who wish to dominate and control, whether by force, superior technology or an intellectual mapping and classification. At the same time it is a repository of the exotic other, where `savages' still behave in the ways we are led to expect from children's books.

The title of the exhibition, Hidden Peoples of the Amazon, plays on such images: the remote, the inaccessible, one might almost say the world of the European unconscious. It locates Amazonian societies within the framework of our fantasies, connecting them intimately to the world of the forest, to its complexity and supposed fragility. Instead of providing a human perspective on the tropical rainforest, native Amazonian people become another aspect of the forest's alien existence.
The exhibition itself does not however play heavily on this theme, but instead leads us into a real treasure trove of the material culture of Amazonian peoples. Plenty of technical information is provided, and there is something here for everybody: canoes with ornate paddles; blowpipes and arrows; exquisite feather - and beadwork; a wealth of basketry that certainly expands the imagination as to the aesthetic potential of this medium; delicate toys intricately plaited from palm leaf; dance costumes; instruments of music-making, war and of shamanism. The collection built up by the Museum is truly impressive in range and quality.

The pièce de résistance is the reconstructed maloca at the end of the exhibition. This is accompanied by a hand-out of its plan, so that the maloca itself is not crammed with labels and explanations. We enter the Tukanoan longhouse by the men's door and gradually through the shafts of sunlight coming through holes in the thatch we make out the different activities that are going on - the preparation of coca leaf, the grating of manioc. The women's area at the far end is not life-size but modelled to give a perspective of the sunshine out beyond the manioc processing area and women's door. Anyone who has read the ethnography of Stephen and Christine Hugh-Jones will recognize the maloca, its spatial classifications of society and of human activities, the universe in miniature. Museum of Mankind exhibitions tend to be orientated towards school children (in contrast, for example, to most British Museum exhibitions). A visit to Hidden Peoples of the Amazon with an eleven-year old boy indicated that this exhibition certainly has the power to capture a child's imagination. On the other hand, this orientation towards a young audience produces some incoherences in the presentation of the exhibition. These are most marked in the catalogue and in the treatment of history.

The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is beautifully produced by British Museum Publications and lavishly illustrated. However, the major part of the text is a reprint of a section of Donald Tayler and Brian Moser's travel book on the Northwest Amazon, originally published in 1965. Written for the general reader, it gives a vivid, mainly anecdotal, picture of the area: however, it is now outdated. The very title is mistaken: native Amazonian people use the coca leaf, not cocaine. The opinions expressed do not always enhance the exhibition. Indeed they sometimes seriously undermine it. e.g. the following, `the inscrutable nature of the Tukano may in part be due to his addiction to cocaine...they often appear listless and resigned'! Rather than this, it would have been better to extend the brief chapters written by Elizabeth Carmichael and Stephen Hugh-Jones. Indeed, given the extremely high quality of many of the objects on display, a real catalogue and guide to the exhibition might have been provided.

In the exhibition itself, the most serious and damaging gap lies in the treatment of history. The last section, treated as somewhat of an after-thought, is devoted to the past of Amazonia and the possible future of native people. Unfortunately the theme of change is treated in terms of Discovery, Exploration, Anthropologists and the clearing of the forest. The dominant image here is the Highway: there is a large and dramatic photograph of a native man astride a motor-bike. It is undeniable that the recent construction of highways into Amazonia and the destruction of large areas of forest have been topics of popular concern, but they do not represent the beginning of Amazonian history. The whole exhibition manages to avoid any mention of the centuries of river trading and urbanization in Central Amazonia, and there is not one single photograph of the river from which the area takes it name. The vast network of rivers that cover the Amazon Basin have been of more than symbolic importance to native people: they were and remain highways of contact, trading and change. The assumption of the exhibition is that those people who live furthest from the major rivers and show least superficial evidence of European contact are the most authentic expression of Native Amazonian culture. This ignores the real history of both these and the apparently less `traditional' societies, and equally excludes the possibility that native people can and do both resist and accommodate themselves to their changing circumstances. But the truth will out: one object on display is a hammock with a featherwork representation of the flag of Brazil (this is shown without any explanation).

It seems then that we have yet to move beyond the opinion of the great Brazilian writer Euclides Da Cunha that Amazonia, `that eternal steambath', is the `land without history'.

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