Are we really sure these are… people? They COULD be hairless talking monkeys that have learned to use primitive tools and build shelters for themselves. A bunch of zoos would pay a fortune to have them caged up for display.
“Uncontacted” means that we don’t know about them, not that they don’t know about us. They see airplanes, they trade with guys who wear tee-shirts, and they hear stories about things that happen elsewhere. They know there are other people out there with a different lifestyle and different stuff. While their picture of us is no doubt hazy, they don’t think we are aliens or sorcerers. Some are probably curious, but most don’t spend a lot of timethinking about distant cultures- much like us.
It’s a mistake to think their culture is somehow a pure unchanging thing. It has been changing and evolving as long as our own. Their lives today are different than they were 100 years ago. They probably think kids today are too sassy. Anyway, location aone is a give away. People don’t live in forests unless they are pushed there. They have probably been indirectly adapting to modernity for some time.
When they are contacted, their culture won’t “disappear.” It will change and adapt again. Culture is simply what people do, not some thing that exists on its own. They will figureout what is worth preerving and what isn’t.
By forceing them into contact (which they have already rejected), you are gving them the “gift” of being the poorest of the poor in the world’s most unequal country, without the language, political organization or vocational skills to have a chance. That’s a pretty shitty thing to do to people just to satisfy your own curiousity. Sure, it will happen eventully. But I see no reason not to let it happen on their own terms.
You make a fair relativistic point here. But it’s demonstrable cultural change is, on average, glacially slow in hunter-gatherer societies from a post-industrial Western point of view. 100 years ago my ancestors were subsistence farmers who got a fair chunk of their daily calories directly from the forest, not all that different from the last “uncontacted” tribes of today. My life is utterly, fundamentally different from that, while the H-G life hasn’t changed all that much in the same time, even if metal pots, machetes and even third-hand shotguns have replaced ancestral technologies and awareness of the outside world has permeated the ancient cosmologies. These guys still grow and kill their own food, live in self-made shelters, cook on open fires, crap in the woods, drink from a stream, day in, day out.
Yes, and so could you. There’s plenty of open country in the United States where you could live that exact same lifestyle.
Even sven has the correct idea. The difference between an “uncontacted” group, and their contacted next-door neighbors isn’t that great. It’s not like these people have been living in a bubble for the last 500 years. Just because these guys haven’t been visited by a white man doesn’t mean they’re isolated from everyone.
No, I couldn’t. I don’t have the necessary skills or knowledge to revert back to a hunter-gatherer-gardener way of life, no matter how much open country there’s out there, since the cultural change over the past century or so has been so fast here. Similarly, a member of the “uncontacted” tribe has none of the specific skills to lead a post-industrial Western life (as hinted at by even sven). Both of us have the physical and mental potential to adapt to each other’s realities, but only one of us would promptly die if forced into a Stone Age existence.
I would love a link to that thread.
I agree. Leave them alone. While I love modern love and whatnot, they’re probably healthier than we are and enjoy their lives. There’d be more harm to bring them out and uproot everything they know.
That’s kind of arrogant you assume they don’t have some type of history, even if it’s oral. :dubious:
They could have a vast written history.
What? My point was that we should go in and write down their history and make sure it doesn’t get disappear when the inevitable happens and they get bulldozed by vanishing habitat and the march of time. I know they have a history. I value that history. I want to preserve their history more than I want to preserve their current way of life, which is probably not going to survive to see the next century.
Do they have a written language? Unlikely, but possible. If they do, let’s find out while there are still people around who can read it, unlike, say, Rongorongo, where all the people who could read that script died off before anyone bothered to care.
Though I may be an amature anthropologist, I don’t think there is any knowledge that is worth taking away someone’s choice to aquire. It’d be nifty to know this stuff, for sure. But these are real people, with hopes and dreams and wishes and fears. There is no academic manuscript in the world that is important enough to justify bringing changes of this level upon people against their wishes. Let them continue to choose, and be ready to learn what you can when you can when you can do that in a fully consentual way.
Adding to the store of human knowledge is great, but adding to the store of human dignity, while less sexy, is more important.
That’s counter-intuitive, especially in the area we’re talking about, which is basically all forest or mountainside. I’m curious where this idea comes from? I’ve always thought of humans as primarily forest or sea-side dwellers.
Have they rejected it? I’m not sure you realize how utterly remote these areas are? Not sure what level of familiarity you’re coming from. They do see planes, as pictured, but they have less reason to understand what they represent than we do for a UFO.
Also you are assuming that they trade with surrounding groups. I’m not sure that’s true either. Other groups told researchers that they exist, but it took years to prove that they did. It’s not like somebody could say “Oh yes, they make these distinctive blue-red-blue patterned necklaces that we trade for fish . . .”
To play Devil’s advocate for a moment. Are they happy because they don’t know what they are missing? There are wonderful things about modern life too you know. They’ve never heard a symphony, or tasted toast with butter. A million sensations and ideas are completely unavailable to them.
There may be a yearning artist among them with no access to paint or even a drawing tablet. Enormously beautiful creations may right now be washing away in the rain after having been drawn in the ground with a stick.
For all we know their village is ruled by a mean little family of tyrants, and the concept of equality has never been introduced to them. They may be survivng day-to-day and telling stories of a mythical savior who will come to free them from this evil family.
Not everyone who is poor is miserable. There are immigrants in my area who are amazed that they have only to walk next door to use a telephone. It’s a 6-7 mile walk from their previous homes. And the concept of never being sick from the water, never having to plug your nose and force yourself to drink (which they did 3 months of the year at home) is amazing to them. To have this miracle of clean water gushing effortlessly from a tap? Stunning! Wonderful! They can’t imagine how anyone could be unhappy here!
And how many of those tribe members would have gladly given up anything you could name if they knew if would have kept their 1st, 4th, and 7th babies alive? Or to live free of the parasites that keep them in a constant state of pain and exhaustion, but don’t quite hamper their ability to stay alive and procreate?
These technologies were created to solve very real and heartwrenching problems. Granted we have a lot of “stuff” that we don’t need, and we make ourselves miserable over not having the same “Stuff” other people do. But when I slipped a disc in my back, I was very glad that a cell phone was where I could reach it, and a gasoline powered ambulance got me to a hospital quickly, and a doctor knew what he could/couldn’t do to help me without hurting my baby, and medicines were available to manage my pain. . . What would the same injury mean to these villagers? A life of dependency at best?
That’d be nice if they were going to get these things. But nobody is coming with paintbrushes and buttered toast and orchestras and deworming medicine. I’m not one to call many places hellish, but deep rural Brazil for indigenous people is pretty hellish- Few government social services, high alcoholism and drug use, few jobs above the sort of farmwork where you live in a shed with 50 men and work all day to send the family you never see barely enough to repair their tin shack, high rates of random violene and organized crime, and most importantly, very little hope. And it’s going to be several generations before that starts getting better.
If you really want to help people, the people already living in these conditions need clinics and schools and cultural centers and roads and markets. There is no shortage of need out there. There are millions of recently displaced indigenous people who can make good use of anything you have to offer. Why ignore them to “help” the one group of people who haven’t asked for a single thing?
I find it odd that some posters are claiming that leaving “uncontacted tribes” be would surely lead to their destruction and genocide. They’ve been living where they are for hundreds if not thousands of years so they know how to survive. Like even sven has pointed out, life for indigenous people generally isn’t that great once they have been introduced to “civilization”. They often occupy the bottom rung of the social hierarchy in the society and become mired in poverty. Also, as she pointed out, many groups certainly know societies exist outside of their tribes. If they want to integrate with the rest of the society, they will choose to do it. Otherwise, I think they should be left alone.
For those who want to know their language and culture: is spying on them an option? We have already started doing so with flybys, but modern surveillance equipment is getting very small and very mobile. In a couple years, couldn’t we just fly in a couple insect-shaped cameras with microphones to learn about them? The experts already seem to have an idea about what their language will be like. Maybe we can get a lot recorded without them ever knowing that we’re there.
You realize you’re responding to a post about preserving their oral history, right?
The latest news isn’t good.
I read about this. How thoroughly depressing. These guys have been quietly going about their business for aeons, and then within months of being discovered they’ve been attacked in the name of drugs. Welcome to civilisation, savages! :rolleyes:
Apropos Far Side cartoon.
I was reading a bit more about this and ran across this site that has the actual high-quality video that was the source of the stills that are familiar to anyone who read the original story.
It’s pretty amazing stuff watching it in video. The recent developments make it even more moving than it already is.
Definitely check it out:
I very much doubt that these people are “uncontacted”.
In the first place, the Amazon region has been explored for over 100 years. Moreover, traders and rubber tappers have been roaming the region for decades before. So it is highly unlikely that these people have never seen europeans before.
Second, the Brazilian Government has an agency (FUNAI) that attempst to keep track of (and protect) the aboriginal inhabitants of the Amazon region-I’d expect they knew all about them.
Should these people be “helped”? I don’t know…but I do know that the Amazon basin is no “Garden of Eden”-the place is full of bugs, poisonous snakes and insects, plus some pretty horrible diseases (Chagas disease, and river blindness, to name a few). Many of these people don’t live past 40-and a slight cut can get infected within hours, leading to gangrene and death.
And despite all the nice stories about the native shamans and miracle plant/cures, most of the local remedies don’t work very well. Many of the children have big, distended bliies-the result of worms and parasitic infections.
From the perspective of freedom, however, I think the researcher is absolutely correct. Their land needs to be protected, and the choice left up to them to make contact or not, for whatever reason.