May 30, 2008: Uncontacted Indigenous People

[Shawnee123]

I'm not going to respond to coign, except...poopyhead!

[Shawnee123]

A hundred, coign? Cite?

I never quoted any actual "statistics" if that's what we can call your arbitrary "hundred." Some science guy.

[DanaC]

Hooray!

Actually Coign nobody compared you to Bush.

[Shawnee123]

I said you were President Bush?

You are seriously demented. Don't start anything you can't take. And yes, at the risk of sounding like a troglodyte, you started it.

Take your balls and go home.

[Shawnee123]

Poopyhead!

[DanaC]

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.

Except the assumptions you are talking about don't relate to accepted truths in the scientific world, they relate to highly disputed areas. Anthorpology may be a science but it's a social science. It is not the same as chemistry and impirical evidence is much more difficult to come by for many areas of the field. How do you gather empirical evidence about people's attitude to sex, for example? How do you gather empirical evidence about people's happiness? What evidence you can gather is passed through two human filters: the subject and the observer. Unless you are measuring the raw data of birth rates and disease frequency then you are dealing with an evidence type that is difficult, some would argue impossible, to quantify in as reliable way as one can quantify the dimensions of an atom.

Anthropology and history share many characteristics. There is a good deal of crossover. The use of the word theory in physics may denote a solid assumption. The use of 'theory' in social sciences bears more resemblance to it's use in the humanities. Much less about assumption and more about conjecture and hypothesis.

[Coign]

So let's put this in quantifiable knowns and use a short-term view of the situation.

Do we attempt contact in a controlled friendly manner and attempt to warn or possibly relocate them, or do we allow loggers to decide that they should just shoot them on sight because they are a hostile force in a land they want to illegally log in the middle of a location that does not have a law enforcement?

[DanaC]

According to that article I posted earlier, they are exhibiting behaviours that in geographically close tribes means a 'war footing'. This suggests they are telling us they don't want us to contact them.

As I said earlier in the thread, I do not know if the right answer is to contact them or not. Even in a 'controlled' manner, contact can bring hidden dangers to those contacted. One of the lessons that can be learned from history on this score, is to expect things not to go as planned.

[Shawnee123]

Aha! I get it now. Coign works for the logging industry. I'm really not being facetious.

[Aliantha]

I am saying that there are benefits to be gained from connection with the rest of society, benefits that a slight of geography has denied these people. It's incredibly condescending to choose for them, that they ought to be preserved in their present state, without those benefits.

Choosing to contact them is taking away their right to live their life as they see fit. They are a group of people who've learned to live under difficult circumstances. They're obviously able to make important decisions and one of them must be to keep to themselves for whatever reason. They'd only have to travel a few hundred miles to find other civilizations, but they haven't. That's a choice they made as a people. What gives us the right to take away that choice?

Bringing modernism to indigenous people under the guise of 'it's for their own good' or 'they'd be better off' or 'save their heathen souls' even, is not a good enough reason to disturb a culture.

With regard to cultures that've been introduced to modern society there are many who try to hold onto their traditional way of life, but it just doesn't seem to happen. In all cases, once a tribe is contacted by the outside world, their culture is forever tainted. It's like opening pandoras box. Once it's done it's done and you can't close it again.

Haven't we learned by now that indigenous cultures historically do not thank us for bothering them...taking their land...interrupting their lives?

[spudcon]

P.S. poopyhead.

[Cicero]

They will thank us some day for robbing them of their heritage and stealing all of their valuable resources...oh wait......no.

Really. It's not what we could do for them, it's what they can do for us, isn't it? Is not having that Nike t-shirt really going to kill them, and rob them of everyone else's poor decision to look like an idiot?

They won't be dying in a car accident any time soon....

Imagine the guilt of pulling them out of the jungle only for them to die in a train wreck a month later. Wouldn't you suck then?

[spudcon]

Can't argue with that, Cic.

[Undertoad]

Imagine the guilt of not contacting them and having them die of dysentery or simple infection. That's the 99.9999% more likely scenario.

Oh you've written off that guilt for cultural preservation! Good for you.

[DanaC]

The record on contacting such tribes suggests that the dangers of wiping them out in a handful of years is higher than the risk of them simply dying out uncontacted. The very fact that they've successfully avoided the modern world without dying out of dyssentry or simple infections suggests that they're doing fine without us.