Getting to Know Waiwai tells the story of Alan Campbell's encounter with the Wayapi people in a remote area of the Brazilian Amazon Forest, by looking back from a century into the future to consider the destruction of a way of life, and what will be left for these people as the devastation of the rainforests proceeds.

Dealing with ethnographic themes such as material culture and ecology, relationship terms and naming, political power and morality, myths and cosmology, shamanism, birth precautions, cultural change and ethnic survival, Alan Campbell examines the complexities of anthropological theory in a way which is accessible at the most introductory level, without losing any of its subtlety. He presents the cultural description of the Wayapi society in the context of the impact of the encroaching outside world.

In doing so he addresses the complex questions of contrast between elegiac sadness for a lost culture and a romantic yearning for an imagined past, the nature of fieldwork as a personal relation, and the difficulties inherent in translating indigenous languages and interpreting other cultures.