May 30, 2008: Uncontacted Indigenous People

[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.

[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.

[Shawnee123]

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

[Coign]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Whatever. T-dub.

Well then what the hell is a T-Dub?

I thought it meant The Dubba as in the President Bush. Insults mean nothing if your target does not understand what the hell you are saying.

Or as it was put to me eariler.

SPEAK ENGRISH!

[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]

I think Coign was mistaking everyone else for my post below.(Health care, etc.) I think it was prophetic of me to point out the mindset of those who want to civilize these folks, because they know what's better for the natives. They don't need someone taking care of them, anymore than we need someone telling us what's best for us.

Originally Posted by spudcon

They will probably live their lives to the fullest, as long as their chief forces them to wear seat belts and helmets. And as long as every member pays the Tribal Witch Doctor General one buffalo for Universal Health Insurance.

__________________
We laugh at honor but are shocked to find traitors in our midst. -- C.S. Lewis

[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.