May 30, 2008: Uncontacted Indigenous People

[Shawnee123]

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, what apple? I'm too stupid to get the apple thing. Do you eat it?

Oh, and HUH?

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, what apple? I'm too stupid to get the apple thing. Do you eat it?

Oh, and HUH?

Newton's apple? You didn't get the implied physics argument there? How do we know physics will work the same every time?

I'm sorry, were you not taught science in school?

What analogy would you like me to use?

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Coign

Newton's apple? You didn't get the implied physics argument there? How do we know physics will work the same every time?

I'm sorry, were you not taught science in school?

What analogy would you like me to use?

Sarcasm. Heard of it?

Here's an analogy you can use:


Newton beat the living fuck out of Coign because Coign was such an unprecedented asshole. This led the way to further research into assholiness and the subsequent smack-down of t-dub wannabe trolls everywhere. Science IS good.

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Sarcasm. Heard of it?

Here's an analogy you can use:


Newton beat the living fuck out of Coign because Coign was such an unprecedented asshole. This led the way to further research into assholiness and the subsequent smack-down of t-dub wannabe trolls everywhere. Science IS good.

I apologize for calling you a bible-thumper in my original post. I just hate it when people use what they DON'T KNOW as their basis argument.

It smacks of religion and gets me riled up and I tend to lash out a bit harder than I normally would.

Go ahead and call me an asshole. I deserve that. A number of my comments were.

But don't call me wrong unless you KNOW something I don't.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Coign

I apologize for calling you a bible-thumper in my original post. I just hate it when people use what they DON'T KNOW as their basis argument.

It smacks of religion and gets me riled up and I tend to lash out a bit harder than I normally would.

Go ahead and call me an asshole. I deserve that. A number of my comments were.

But don't call me wrong unless you KNOW something I don't.

Whatever. T-dub.

[DanaC]

I assume that to start them on the road to civilization WILL make their life better. Why do you want to keep them working, sick, and ignorant? Because history tells me that is what they are.

First off, as I have already said in earlier posts: given their isolation and lack of material wealth the chances of them being able to partake in much that civilisation has to offer are actually quite slim. Secondly, because they are hunter gatherers and therefore have to work a great deal, does not mean they will automatically be happier. They will almost certainly concieve of work differently to the way you or I do as they are operating from a different (in fact profoundly alien) mentalite. Consequently the perceived burden of work will be different. It is unlikely that they will spend eight to ten hours a day doing the same thing every day, that is something they may consider burdensome in the same way I would consider having to find water burdensome.

You are pulling out historical agreement where none exists. It is the nature of historians to argue and find flaws with each others' theses. How detailed are your case studies? Are they from archaeological studies, in which case they are blurred by the lack of detailed records and the vast swathes of blank and unlit terrirtory. Are they from recently observed cultures, in which case the observation is through modern eyes.

We. Do. Not. Know. How. Happy. They. Are.

In what way am I making 'HUGE assumptions' by stating that we do not know enough about these uncontacted people to make assumptions about them?

[DanaC]

First `face-to-face' contacts are estimated to lead to the death of between a third and half of the population within the first five years (Hill and Hurtado 1996), sometimes more.

From

The dilemma of contact: voluntary isolation and the impacts of gas exploitation on health and rights in the Kugapakori Nahua Reserve, Peruvian Amazon

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9..._4_045005.html

Most of the women and children had fled into the forest, he said, and those that were left had painted their bodies, taken up arms and appeared to be on a "war footing".

Experts believe that the hostile response is a clear indication that they understand that contact with the outside world spells danger. Across the border in Peru, similar tribes are being driven from their lands by aggressive oil and mining interests and illegal loggers.

Peru's President, Alan Garcia, has openly questioned the existence of uncontacted tribes. Meanwhile, evidence of the destruction of the forest has been piling up down river in the Brazilian state of Acre, where barrels of Peruvian petrol have washed up along with debris from logging operations. "What is happening in this region [of Peru] is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna, and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilised' ones, treat the world," said Mr Meirelles.

After a decades-long political battle, indigenous groups now have their land rights protected under Brazilian law. The London-based charity Survival International is leading calls for Peru to act in accordance with international law and protect the tribes on its territory.

Survival's Fiona Watson, who recently returned from the region, said that Indians fleeing over the border into Brazil could be driven into conflict with uncontacted tribes already living there. "It is clear from this photograph that they want to be left alone," she said.

Encounters with the outside world are typically fatal for these tribes, who have no defences against the common cold and other commonplace diseases. "The groups are often fragments of much larger tribes that were overrun in the past and have died from disease or at the barrel of a gun," said Miss Watson.

The experience of the Akunsu tribe in neighbouring Rondonia, contacted a little over a decade ago, is not unusual. Today, only six members of the tribe survive. All relatives, they cannot marry and the group is expected to die out within a generation.

From the Independant article about the tribe in this thread.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...774.html?r=RSS

[HungLikeJesus]

Why is it that if the indigenous people are spending their days hunting and fishing, that's work, but if we spend our days hunting and fishing, that's vacation?

Ah, perspective.

[DanaC]

Why not? Why can't that person know that if he hasn't read and been taught and learned that primitive tribes have lower lifespans and higher mortality rates than a more civilized culture?

Who taught you that ? Are you comparing the health and lifespan of 'primitive' tribes with your average New Yorker, or with a more appropriate group, like the poor farming communities that subsist across much of the world (so called 'third world')?

If you are suggesting that they have a lower lifespan than we do then you may have a point, but what is on offer is not our lifestyle, but a few little forays into modernity. If you are suggesting that the poorest 'modern' community is healthier and longer lived than 'primitive' hunter gatherers then you are wrong.

Compare the health and lifespan of settled subsistence farmers with primitive hunter gatherers and you will almost certainly find that the hunter gatherers are healthier, live longer, are more resistant to disease, work less and have a healthier and more nutritious diet.

Though contemporary gatherer-hunters eat more meat than their prehistoric forbears, vegetable foods still constitute the main stay of their diet in tropical and subtropical region (Lee 1968a, Yellen and Lee 1976). Both the Kalahari San and the Hazda of East Africa, where game is more abundant than in the Kalahari, rely on gathering for eighty percent of their sustenance (Tanaka 1980). The !Kung branch of the San search for more than a hundred different kinds of plants (Thomas 1968) and exhibit no nutritional deficiency (Truswell and Hansen 1976). This is similar to the healthful, varied diet of Australian foragers (Fisher 1982, Flood 1983). The overall diet of gatherers is better than that of cultivators, starvation is very rare, and their health status generally superior, with much less chronic disease (Lee and Devore 1968a, Ackerman 1990).

From

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/futureprim.html

[classicman]

Coign meet tw, whats that you are tw? in that case nevermind

[classicman]

lol - great minds think alike

[Shawnee123]

:hugs:

[Coign]

I am sorry. Maybe I am a little slow. You compare me to and/or say I am President Bush.

Your basis for this is that (I'm assuming here because I don't really understand your insult) you are saying Bush promotes taking things on faith and on the contrary I am trying to promote educating yourself and look at things from a reasoning point of view?

Let me break this down even further to really point out the complete dichotomy of this insult.

Lets say taking things on faith is white and taking things on past scientific basis is black.

You insult me by calling my black attiude is the complete opposite and is white?

Then you pat yourself on the back and give high fives to all your friends for an awesome insult.

You know I can't even be insulted by that. I am just really confused as your elation over your clever retort.

You would have hurt my feelings more if you would have called me a poopy-head.

And since this argument has dissolved down into insults that don't even make slightest sort of sense I bid you good day and will stop posting in this thread.

[DanaC]

Because he hasn't been there? Because he hasn't contacted the tribe? But there have been a hundered tribes discovered before and a hundred times it has been the case. But that past history doesn't mean that he knows what the lifestyle is like about these people?

If you check the record of such contact you'll find it mainly went pretty badly for the contacted tribes. On the whole they did not march forward into the white heat of technology....

Also, if you think that anthropology has in any way reached a consensus on most of this stuff you are sadly mistaken. There have been near fist fights and decades long feuds over subtle distinctions of societal development in these tribes. There have also been new generations of observers who have brought wholly different techniques and observations to tribes who we previously thought we understood.


[eta] if you went to a convention of those anthropologists who've documented the first contacts you are talking about and tried to tell them any assumptions could be made on the grounds of what they already knew, you'd be laughed out of the building. Just a thought.

[Coign]

Sorry, I said I will quit posting but Dana, unlike Shawnee, is bringing up interesting arguments and ones I can talk about and discuss.

While posting and reading more about this tribe I did come across this article and did want to discuss the ramifications behind it.

Brazil's National Indian Foundation believes there may be as many as 68 "uncontacted" groups around Brazil, although only 24 have been officially confirmed.

Anthropologists say almost all of these tribes know about western civilization and have sporadic contact with prospectors, rubber tappers and loggers, but choose to turn their backs on civilization, usually because they have been attacked.

"It's a choice they made to remain isolated or maintain only occasional contacts, but these tribes usually obtain some modern goods through trading with other Indians," said Bernardo Beronde, an anthropologist who works in the region.

Brazilian officials once tried to contact such groups. Now they try to protectively isolate them.

The four tribes monitored by Meirelles include perhaps 500 people who roam over an area of about 1.6 million acres (630,000 hectares).

He said that over the 20 years he has been working in the area, the number of "malocas," or grass-roofed huts, has doubled, suggesting that the policy of isolation is working and that populations are growing.

Remaining isolated, however, gets more complicated by the day.

Loggers are closing in on the Indians' homeland — Brazil's environmental protection agency said Friday it had shut down 28 illegal sawmills in Acre state, where these tribes are located. And logging on the Peruvian border has sent many Indians fleeing into Brazil, Meirelles said.

"On the Brazilian side we don't have logging yet, but I'd like to emphasize the 'yet,'" he said.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...OgH_wD9105MUG0

I quoted what I felt was pertinent and will agree with Dana that "past" first encounters have a 50% chance of killing off the tribe.

But I think we are all working from partial knowledge here. Which nation is doing the contacting? Have steps been taken to insure a first contact is not going to wipe them out due to a common cold? (Easily prevented in a controlled situation, don't let sick people make contact.) Is it a nation at all making the contact or is it illegal loggers and undesirables that have no interest in the tribe in the first place?

That I don't know. But I am arguing that you need to make that contact. You need to give those people a choice. Give them as much information as they are willing to listen to.

I am all for letting a civilization turned down society and eventually doom themselves if they choose. But we are not the people to say, "Well they would just be better off without us." I say we can not make that life-altering decision for them.

And lastly.

Originally Posted by DanaC

Also, if you think that anthropology has in any way reached a consensus on most of this stuff you are sadly mistaken. There have been near fist fights and decades long feuds over subtle distinctions of societal development in these tribes. There have also been new generations of observers who have brought wholly different techniques and observations to tribes who we previously thought we understood.

You are correct.

Originally Posted by DanaC

[eta] if you went to a convention of those anthropologists who've documented the first contacts you are talking about and tried to tell them any assumptions could be made on the grounds of what they already knew, you'd be laughed out of the building. Just a thought.

You are wrong. That is why anthropology is a science and psychiatry is an art. You CAN make assumptions in science. They are called theories and until disproven they are the way the world works. But you call it a theory because science CAN be disproven and no one debates against that.

Psychiatry on the other hand is an art. There are more exceptions than there are rules.

And although I do hate responding to Shawnee, I actually was shooting for a "low" number when I said hundreds. In this modern day, as the article above states, there thought to be as many as 64 currently uncontacted tribes. And my hundreds were to include tribes since we started gathering information on the unknown neighbor over the hill.