This is why you’re confused. It isn’t that “we’re not allowing them contact with the outside world”. It’s that we’re not sending off expeditions to the jungle to say hello to every tribe we notice in an aerial photograph. We aren’t doing a damn thing to prevent them from contacting anyone. We’re just not sending anyone to contact them. What’s so important about sending a government representative to let them know…what? They already know that the outside world exists, we don’t have to send someone to their tribe to learn their language just so he can tell them all about the outside world.
Lucky for me I don’t believe that then.
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No, I don’t.
You’re expectation of what is my idea is wrong.
Then good thing I don’t think that.
I don’t know, but generally people have at least the option of going an offering if they want. When asking the question of whether someone “should” remain uncontacted, implicit in that to me is the assumption that even if in reality nobody would otherwise care to there’ll be efforts to prevent anybody who hypothetically might want to.
I’m not saying that these people live horrible lives (physically or sociologically). Simply that it is in the fringes of the possibilities that I find the question interesting rather than saying that since this is the best decision to make it has no moral difficulties.
Apparently you see no gray areas, and that’s fine. Not sure why it requires you telling me what I believe so that you can claim it is stupid.
It doesn’t affect the ethical part, but the practical part: we have limited resources compared to already existing problems already, who open up another area instead of solving the existing problems first?
Esp. since these people are living now rather happy compared to the contacted tribes. Saying that we should help the existing contacted tribes first before adding another group does make practical sense.
I talked about natural herbs, which is different from “natural” knowledge, whatever you mean by that. In addition, history of medicine shows that the reason poeple died from infections was both lack of knowledge of hygiene because of popular, but wrong, theories, and lack of antibiotics. Since bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, that’s not golden bullet anymore, either.
So instead of one child suffering from gangrene, the result of contact could be the whole tribe dying from multi-resistant bacteria.
At government level, usually, because it’s the government that enforces the ban - by putting out soldiers or police to keep gold diggers and similar away.
I don’t know where you get your romantic notions from of a plane flying above, seeing a wounded child, and landing to help, when the reality is that gold miners and tree loggers have demonstratbly poisioned the rivers and killed natives in the Latin American jungles (both contacted and uncontacted), not to forget raping the women to get some sex while infecting them with various diseases.
If an actual kind-hearted doctor would be flying across an uncontacted tribe, he’s usually on his way to help a group of people who we know need his help, who don’t have their own way of life that could be messed up since they are already part of modern culture. So doing his job instead of messing up an additional tribe is the best way of helping.
Sorry if that doesn’t make sense.
It’s only not morally clear if you start with false assumptions. In the real world, both scientists and aid workers say it’s in the best interest to keep those tribes shielded from the modern world and let them live their own way of life.
You sound like those “well-meaning” people in the 19th century who were convinced the only way to help Native Indians was to take their children away to missionary school to turn them into cultural whites, so they could live in modern society and not in the “backwards” way on the reservation, since white culture was so obviously superior to the primite indian ways. The missionaries used brutal pedagogic approach to destroy everything indian in the kids, causing traumatic damage to them, and without caring that in the end, non-whites were still second-class citizens in society.
In Australia, there was even a breeding program to make Aborigines extinct by mating the lighter-coloured ones with whites.
Today, both of these approaches are recognized as deeply arrogant and paternalistic, and instead people who work with Aborigines and Indians have finally started to listen what they want. And they want to keep their own culture as much as possible, not become apples or coconuts.
That’s decided differently in Europe or the US because of the different values assigned to different rights: the US values the parent’s rights absolute (one of the reasons for not signing the UN convention on children’s rights); in Europe, the rights of the children are considered overriding the parents in certain cases.
They are not the parallel because they involve “brainwashing” and because a cult/ sect is quite different from a tribe.
Are you an American? Maybe you should start applying universal human rights in your own country first, like ending torture and death penalty. And before treating gangrenous wounds in children half a world away, you could treat all of your citizens that can’t afford health insurance.
You may have noticed that universal human rights are not generally enforced with power - we don’t invade North Korea or Somalia to feed people there. Part of that is common sense that it would end badly; but part is also the repeated observation in history that starting a war is not the way to help people, no matter what US propaganda and Hollywood claim to.
I feel that part of your confusion comes from lack of historical knowledge, maybe you should read a bit about contacts between whites and Indians and Aborigines. It was disastrous for the contacted the overwhelming amount of time.
And it’s not “people in power” who decide that, again, to repeat, it’s scientists (who know their history, the sociology and psychology of what contact does to cultures and people) and actual aid workers, who see the effect of contact on existing contacted tribes, who turn to the govt. and say “please keep these people safe”, not the govt. describing ethics to the people below.
You don’t sound like you believe that going by your arguments so far.
The only people I can think off who are against the protection of uncontacted tribes are those who want to exploit them in some way - sell them something, use their knowledge without return, or the criminals doing their business in the jungle who dislike soldiers preventing their doings. (Though I doubt they would post on message boards).
Do you hear paternalistic or dehumazing comments from people who know what they are talking about or from people who don’t?
Really? Where? The nature parks in the US are quite open to visitors; and for African and South American countries, making money from tourists gawking is often the only way to keep those animals alive and valuable for the local population.
People not on CNN have more differentiated definitions for uncontacted. For many tribes, third-level contact - that is, contact with other tribes who have contact with civilsation - exists. Some have also had contact with criminal miners or loggers or an occasional salesman.
I don’t know anybody who thinks like that. Aid workers see how devasting contact was for other tribes; sociologists know from history how terrible the loss of your own culture is.
And “leaving an existing working culture intact” does not have anything to do with “running off to live in the woods in their underwear”. Once a culture and a way of life has been destroyed, you can’t bring it back (often the woods to live in have been destroyed, too). Either you meet weird hippies or you have strange preconceived notions about the motivations of other people.
Again, where do you get the knowledge of motives from you so blithely ascribe to to other people?
Do you know the basics of sociology and psychology? How do you imagine, if we find a truly uncontacted tribe, that is, no third-level contact at all, that we “present the opportunity” to them? Just marching up as white man to release them from their terrible life (while ignoring that they have been happy and content so far) will be a major shock to those tribes who had no knowledge of the outside world. And you can’t take that knowledge away again.
Assuming that every uncontacted tribe is better off is not fair. Assuming every uncontacted tribe would be better off if in contact is also not fair. Making the individual decision, people who do have the knowledge (and don’t believe your insinuations) tend to err on the side of caution.
There’s still a lot of contact going on, if that eases your mind, because the Brazilian and other govt. have so much else on their plate that cops or soldiers to patrol the jungle to keep tribes safe from scum are not high on their priority list, so there are regular reports of whole villages wiped out by a disease transmitted from a miner; rivers poisioned; people hooked on alcohol through unscrupolous salesmen etc.
I find it strange that everybody questions and besmirches the motivations of the scientists and aid workers who clamor for a ban on contact, but nobody questions the motives of the criminals who do the contacting already.
If there are efforts, yes, it is to protect the tribes. You don’t seem to know the damage that one camp of gold miners or one group of loggers can do to a small tribe that has little contact or experience with the way of the white people. We know this not from some weird hypothetical, but from documented cases.
If you don’t believe they live in squalor, why do you bring up such horrible scenarios of starving, wounded children, mistreatment of females and similar?
The arguments you are bringing for your position of “let’s contact them they would be better off” come from a certain position. We try to explain to you why reality is different, and you turn around and say “But I don’t believe any of that”. well maybe you shouldn’t have argued that way then.
And it’s rather disingengious to accuse us of not seeing any gray while ignoring all the real-life explanations given to you.
But if you insist on making the issue ethically complicated by ignoring practical reasons, science, history and real life - then go ahead and make it grey.
They die of the flu in droves evidently. Over thousands of years our ancestors developed natural immunity to the influenza virus; not the case with them.
In people without influenza immunity like us; they will die in literally hours.
Who are you to decide that their current way of life is what is best for them? Knowledge is not a poison. If you’re so confident that they would choose their current lives, approaching them openly and honestly and offering them the choice will make them no worse off than they are now. But if they would leave… how is denying them the ability to make that informed choice in any way the more ethical option?
The irony is that the people who would be best suited to the role of emissary are also the ones who are most opposed to it.
What exactly do you mean, “offer them a choice”? They aren’t going to be moving to Sao Paulo any time soon. This ain’t a country mouse/city mouse scenario.
Suppose you send an anthropologist to contact them. What exactly is the anthropologist going to “offer” them?
There are already half a million indegenous people in Brazil who live in the jungle but have some contact with the outside world. The fact that there are a couple dozen people in the world who haven’t had an opportunity to talk to a white man isn’t exactly a tragedy that must be fixed immediately.
There are already plenty of kids in contacted tribes with gangrenous wounds who aren’t getting any treatment. There are plenty of women in contacted tribes that are essentially slaves. There are plenty of men in contacted tribes who practice traditional warfare and kill each other. There are plenty of people in contacted tribes who have choice to move to Sao Paolo and live on the streets, except they’d be dead of disease and starvation in months.
Again, these people live in a poor third world country. So their options aren’t live in the jungle or move to Beverly Hills. They are dirt poor people living in a dirt poor country.
Yes, it is. Have you read accounts of what the Indians, both North and South, who have been contacted felt like, as their culture crumbled around them?
I’m not claiming that these are Roussean gentle natives; but telling them that in the culture of the white man, people kill each other over possessions, or are paid to kill; that the single most important value in US society is not how good a person somebody is, or how happy, but how much money and stuff they have; that people believe they can own things like water and land, and have others pay for water - all these concepts are mind-blowing to them.
For comparison, take somebody in the US who has lived in a cultural bubble, like a fundie Christian, and put them onto a secular university campus. These people would also be better off if they learned a different way of life, wouldn’t they?
Or are you proposing that the people who contact these tribes only give the fairy-tale Hollywood version of how wonderful the white man’s land of USA is, where everybody can get rich, but omit how many people starve on the street?
If knowledge is not a problem to people who are innocent in some regards - do you also tell 6 -year old children about murder and sex? Or do you believe that knowledge can change people, and can’t be undone?
It’s more ethical because it’s less arrogant to assume that our current culture is so superior. It’s more ethical because it’s based on listening what already-contacted tribes say about their experiences, and on what indirectly-contacted (contact with other tribes, but not white men) say.
If you have respect for what the people of the tribe wish, you leave them alone. Everything else is disrespectful - and yes, that attitude of us knowing better than those primitives what’s really best for them, that attitude is paternalistic.
Best suited? I don’t understand what you mean with this. Do you mean people who are opposed would make better emissaries because they have a good background and understanding of Indian cultures? Should the fact that they are opposed because and despite this knowledge not give a clue?
No, I mean they’d make better emissaries because a Prime Directive loving Luddite that lacks the power to pick his first choice (zero contact, ever), will at least recognise my goal (contact that maximises the benefit and minimises the risk to the tribespeople [not their culture]) as the least-bad alternative, and so can be trusted to work towards that goal.
Excellent posts, Lemur.
Basically it goes like ths:
- “Uncontacted” tribes know plenty about the outside world, via contacted tribes.
- “Uncontacted” tribes are not exceptionally different than contacted tribes in the same area in terms of social mobility, economic position, human rights, etc.
- For whatever reason, these tribes have chosen to actively avoid contact with “the wider world.”
- It’s a particularly bad time to force the issue. Brazil has next to no capacity to provide them with legal protection or social services. Maybe some decades from now Brazil will have effective programs for ensuring indiginous people keep control of their land, get police protection from smugglers and gangsters, have access to healthcare and education and (most importantly) have an economic place in society puting them on good economic footing that will last for generations. But Brazil has none of this. Brazil has basically nothing to offer these people except pain.
- So respect their choice and leave them alone.
But what are you offering the tribespeople? Full-ride college scholarships to UCLA? Hospitals? Airplanes and automobiles? Electricity and wi-fi in every hut?
They aren’t going to get any of that from contact. They’ll get machetes and a few packs of antibiotics and some surplus t-shirts.
As I said before many times, it ain’t like this is a unique situation. We have actual examples of interaction between indigenous Amazonian tribes and the larger Brazilian world. It hasn’t worked out so well. If you’re really so hot on helping out indigenous people, how about you start out with the people that are already in regular contact with the outside world? There’s no shortage of them. You think the, say, Yanomamo are doing so much obviously better for themselves because they have regular contact with missionaries and anthropologists and mining crews?
Here’s a list of people that need their lives improved: List of indigenous peoples of Brazil - Wikipedia
Just because they know people live in other places in the world, doesn’t in any way mean they know “all about the outside world.” I certainly wouldn’t pretend to know the best way to go about showing the outside world to natives…but I do know simply sending some guy in there to do a few hand signals about cities in far away places doesn’t constitute any real explanation of what the outside world really consists of.
I’d argue with that. Context means a lot.
To somebody who has never seen a modern city and whose technological exposure might be a laptop or airplane flying overhead, what kind of satisfactory explanation can you give that makes any sense about cities crammed with millions of people? You have to start somewhere, and those hand signals may actually be the best way.
Why do they need a detailed explaination of a lifestyle on the other side of the world that has nothing to do with their lives? Are we also going to make sure that everyone in the west has full comprehension of their lifestyles?
They likey have a similar knowledge of the outside world as similar contacted tribes. In my experience, that usually means they know there are people with a lot of resources, they live in big houses, they have machines that do everything, they really like cars and they are funny looking. The details of how it all works is a bit hazy, but they don’t worry about it any more than you worry about, say, the daily life of Mbororo cow herders. They’ve got enough on their minds without thinking about people they have nothing to do with.
Hospitals and technology don’t impress them unless they have a chance of getting access to these things. It’s really not that compelling to know that somewhere someone has medicine to cure that infection you are dying of. Sure, it’s kind of neat. But unless you actually have a chance of getting that medicine, it’s not really game changing info. In fact, it’s kind of a slap in the face.
Again, being “uncontacted” doesn’t make them all that special in this regard. I’ve had Cameroonian villagers happily inform me that America is a nice city in Paris, Canada is somewhere in Noth Africa probably near Libya, Osama Bin Laden is just some guy and it’s confusing as to why the US is so against him, the US is dangerous becaus of its vampire problem, and that Jesus sent Obama to fight the Chinese. And these are people who listen to 50 Cent and watch Prison Break. Most of the world doesn’t have a deep penetrating knowledge of the Western world, and for the most part it doesn’t really seem to bother them.
There is a great project that paints giant maps on walls all over the world. It’s a big hit with Peace Corps volunteers who are sick of explaining that America is not a part of France. If you really want to teach people about life in the west, maybe you could donate a few buckets of paint to that instead of bugging a bunch of people who have mde it pretty clear that whatever we are trying to sell, they arn’t interested.
To understand why our technology and lifestyle simplt isn’t all that important to people in remote parts of poor countries…
Picture if Bill Gates and Carlos Slim decided to do a little outreach and expose people to new ideas about wealth. So, they run some workshops or something for the general publiv. They talk about how having a personal trainer and a cook with training as a nutrtionist has really helped them stay fit. They discuss how to make money with hedge funds and high-nd tax loopholes. They get in to the logistics of traveling by private jet and mention that adding internet access has really helped them get more work done en route. They talk about how much you can learn by inviting prominent authors and professors over for dinner.
This information may be a little interesting in a “gee whiz” kind of way.You may find some of it useful. But for the most part, when you get bak to your suburban home and middle class life, it really doesn’t affect you one way or another to know that people out there have access to neat stuff that makes them healtier, richer and smarter.
Then the do-gooders’ time would be better spent working out what would be useful and what wouldn’t, instead of whining about doing it at all.
Just as one example, could providing a layman’s understanding of germ theory protect them from infections?
Why do people keep mentioning white man? Are Brazilian anthropologists white? Are Brazilians considered white?
At least in the case of many uncontacted tribes in Peru (although they freely cross into Brazil and Bolivia) they have repeatedly made it clear - through there contacted “cousins”- that they wish to remain alone, so it’s a matter of respecting their wishes.
This, however, puts them in greater danger regarding drug tafficker, human traffickers and illegal foresters.
Not without also providing access to safe drinking water, antibiotics, sterile bandages, etc. Germ theory itself is pretty useless. Heck, we can’t even get our own doctors to wash their hands. It’s the infrastructure that we designed using germ theory that made the difference. Even them, ir’s mostly a city thing. We got in trouble by moving in to cities where our waste, drinking water, animals, etc. got all mixed up with each other leading to rapidly spreading infections courseing through densely packed cities. Small groups of extremely rural people are not going to enefit from it on the scale that industrial revolution Europe did.
Again, these groups “contacted” neighbors have the same health needs. One billion people lackaccess to safe drinking water. Billions of people still give birth is dirt-floor huts with no sanitation at all. If you want to protect people from infection, these people are begging for it. You’d jave work for the rest of your life. Why do you only want to provide these great services to the one population that isn’t asking you for anything at all?
Maybe you could make the local contacted tribes lives so prosperous, healthy and happy that the uncontacted tribes are lured out. I’d be all for that.