In November 1968 I arrived in the Vaupés territory of Colombia planning to study beliefs and practices related to disease and curing in a Northwest Amazon tribe. I originally intended to work with the Tikuna, south of the Vaupés, but conversations with anthropologists Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and Alicia Dussan de Reichel after my arrival in Colombia convinced me that the Tikuna were too acculturated for the study I really wanted to do. I turned to the Vaupés region, which had the additional advantage of being the focus of a number of ongoing research projects, including Reichel-Dolmatoff's own work with the Barasana and Desana.

After arriving in Mitú, the airstrip town on the Vaupés River that is the administrative seat of the Vaupés territory, I spent about three weeks making canoe trips and flights in small airplanes to various settlements. Realizing I had to locate myself quite far away from Mitú and the Vaupés River, I then took a missionary plane south to Monfort on the Papurí River and soon after went on a ten-day visit with some Desana Indians to a small, nucleated village on Caño Virarí, which, however, was still too acculturated for my purposes. It became clear during this frustrating but valuable period of orientation that I really did not want to compromise in terms of acculturation level, and I reconciled myself to the inevitability of settling in an extremely isolated community reachable only by a long canoe trip.