Speaking of stone-age tribes and their cultures, take a look at this aerial video of an uncontacted tribe in the remote Amazonian rainforest.
Here is the blurb from the BBC:
An isolated tribe living in the Amazon rainforest on the Brazil-Peru border has been filmed for the first time.
Jose Carlos Meirelles, of Funai, said his government agency needs proof of the existence of “uncontacted” Indian communities in Brazil due to the threat posed by illegal logging and mining. They are known as “uncontacted” because they have only limited dealings with the outside world.
The BBC was allowed to film from 1km away using a stabilised zoom lens.
The pictures here are even more stunning – close-ups of the tribes-people; but I can’t reproduce them because of copyright.
It raises so many moral/philosophical questions. Is it right to contact them and ‘interfere’ with their way of life, and open their culture up to exploitation, alien diseases, etc? Is it right not to contact them, and hold them in a kind of cultural bubble? The shots of Meirelles flying over the village remind me of Ed Harris in The Truman Show, sitting in his control room overlooking the artificially constructed town in which Jim Carrey is brought up and observed, like an unknowing contestant in Big Brother.
Harris is far more sinister, because Carrey is literally imprisoned in this artificial world, unaware that the rest of the world is looking in through the hidden TV cameras. But when Meirelles speaks about preserving their freedom I’m not sure if he is truly liberating them or imposing on them a kind of cultural imprisonment. He says:
It’s important for humanity that these people exist. They remind us it’s possible to live in a different way. They’re the last free people on the planet.
I feel very ambivalent. There is a genuine care being expressed for the tribes-people and their way of life, and behind this the knowledge that the often ruthless logging industry is ready to roll in and flatten their entire culture. But the language reveals the mind of a scientist and anthropologist considering what the preservation of this pristine culture offers to us, the rest of humanity; making God-like decisions, literally ‘from on high’, about how to ‘protect’ a people and preserve them in isolation. I’m not judging – I’m genuinely ambivalent about what would be the best course of action.
On the other hand, at the Uncontacted Tribes website, the debate is framed in the terms not of enforced isolation, but of protecting the land from despoliation and of respecting the right of tribes-people to relate to outside cultures on their own terms:
TV presenter Bruce Parry of hit TV series Tribe said, ‘Protecting the land where uncontacted tribes live is of global importance. We have consistently failed to introduce them to our world without inflicting terrible traumas. It is for them to decide when they want to join our world. Not us.’
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘The illegal loggers will destroy this tribe. It’s vital that the Peruvian government stop them before time runs out. The people in these photos are self-evidently healthy and thriving. What they need from us is their territory protected, so that they can make their own choices about their future.
‘But this area is now at real risk, and if the wave of illegal logging isn’t stopped fast, their future will be taken out of their hands. This isn’t just a possibility: it’s irrefutable history, rewritten on the graves of countless tribes for the last five centuries.’
This is another thought provoking post, Father Stephen. For me, the main argument against making contact with such peoples is the purely human one of the danger of wiping them out due to the introduction of diseases against which they have no defence. This was highlighted some years ago when a large number of such peoples fell victim to ‘ordinary’ western illnesses due to their new contact. From an anthropological perspective, it should, perhaps, be accepted that such peoples should be left unhindered to get on with their lives even if the cost of that is that they remain unstudied.
What a timely post!
On the 15th March Jean Liedloff, the American writer of ‘The Continuum Concept’ died. She spent two and a half years deep in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians.
She went on to write this amazing book, which has transformed many thousands of lives. It embraces and promotes the importance of the continuous ‘babe in arms’ stage of motherhood, where mothers are encouraged to naturally nurture their babies at all times by holding, touching, keeping baby close to your body, and at all times responding to every cry and demand. To sleep with the child and breast feed until a child naturally chooses to feed itself and wean itself off of Mummy’s breast milk.
Thanks to this wonderful education passed on from these tribes, I brought up all my children in this way, all be it the twins proved trickier, slings helped. The results are incredibly secure children. Children/adults which in the tribal setting never knew what is was to be hostile and to argue with one another. Our society of course is evidently different.
“The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is. She offered a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and shows us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.”
I for obvious reasons have greatly benefited from Jean L’s experience as have thousands of others, and of course I personally want to see these tribes protected, but on the other hand I want them left undiscovered. So I also have ambiguous feelings, I do not know whether exposing them and telling the world that they exist is a good idea for obvious reason. A hard one this!
http://www.continuum-concept.org/
ambivalent even :O/