Tobias Schneebaum, explorer

Tobias Schneebaum, a New York writer, artist and explorer who in the 1950s lived among cannibals in the remote Amazon jungle and, by his own account, sampled their traditional cuisine, died Tuesday in Great Neck, N.Y. He was in his mid-80s and a longtime resident of Greenwich Village.

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his nephew Jeff Schneebaum said.

In 2000, Mr. Schneebaum was the subject of a well-received documentary, "Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale," which follows his return to the Amazon and to Indonesian New Guinea, where he also lived.

Mr. Schneebaum came to prominence in 1969 with the publication of his memoir, also titled "Keep the River on Your Right" (Grove Press). The book, which became a cult classic, described how a mild-mannered gay New York artist wound up living among, and ardently loving, the Arakmbut, an indigenous cannibalistic people in the rain forest of Peru.

Publishers Weekly called the memoir "authentic, deeply moving, sensuously written and incredibly haunting." Other critics dismissed it as romantic, solipsistic and undoubtedly exaggerated.

In 1955, Mr. Schneebaum, then a painter, won a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Peru. There, he vanished into the jungle and was presumed dead. Seven months later, he emerged, naked and covered in body paint.

As a young man, Mr. Schneebaum was part of New York's flourishing bohemian scene. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art with the renowned Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and was gaining recognition for his abstract paintings.

But as a gay man and a Jew in 1950s America, Mr. Schneebaum felt, he often wrote afterward, that there was nowhere he truly belonged, so he began to travel.

In 1955, he accepted the fellowship to Peru, where he heard about the Arakmbut. (In his memoir, Mr. Schneebaum calls it by a pseudonym, the Akaramas.) The Arakmbut, whose home was several days' journey into the jungle, hunted with bows, arrows and stone axes. No outsider, it was said, had ever returned from a trip there.

"I knew that out there in the forest were other peoples more primitive, other jungles wilder, other worlds that existed that needed my eyes to look at them," he wrote in "Keep the River on Your Right." "My first thought was: I'm going; the second thought: I'll stay there."

To his relief, the Arakmbut welcomed him. To his delight, homosexuality was not stigmatized there: Arakmbut men routinely had lovers of both sexes. Mr. Schneebaum spent the next several months living with the tribe in a state of unalloyed happiness.

One day, he accompanied a group of Arakmbut men on what he thought was an ordinary hunting trip. They walked until they reached another village. As he watched, his friends massacred all the men there. In the ensuing victory celebration, parts of the victims were roasted and eaten. Offered a bit of flesh, Mr. Schneebaum partook; later, he wrote, he ate part of a heart. It was an experience, he later said, that would haunt him for years. He left the Arakmbut shortly afterward.

"Keep the River on Your Right" caused a sensation when it was published. Anthropologists were aghast: Ethnographers were not supposed to sleep with their subjects, much less eat them.

Some critics doubted Mr. Schneebaum's story, though he maintained it till the end of his life. From the documentary, it is clear he did live among the Arakmbut, but the filmmakers left the issue of cannibalism unresolved.