3 ms·

Do isolated tribes generally want to stay isolated? There certainly are examples of tribes forcefully isolating themselves, such as the baduy dalam in indonesia

by mantap 7y ago

Do isolated tribes generally want to stay isolated? There certainly are examples of tribes forcefully isolating themselves, such as the baduy dalam in indonesia. However in many cases it's the reverse, and tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money, and it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history.

CaptArmchair 7y ago
> However in many cases it's the reverse Beware of generalization. > tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money Beware of switching cause and and effect. Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? > it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history. That's projection. And it's not even "our past", so that would be cultural appropriation. If anything, the developed world isn't a homogeneous society of like-minded individuals either. Most ethnological collections in Western museums don't have anything to do with Western culture, beyond the fact that these objects were taking out of context out of sheer curiosity. There's an ongoing discussion to return objects to traditional communities, or what's left of them, as they carry particular cultural value. It's a debate which is hugely controversial because it forces us to recognize that our Western sense of "progress" hasn't benefited other cultures in absolute terms. Case in point: Read Heart of Darkness and wonder why Ben Affleck's present endeavour to film that book is making certain European countries quite uncomfortable.
- mantap 7y ago
  > Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? Yes, absolutely. Without either hospitals or contraception, it's quite common for women to have lost multiple children in their life. Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it.
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    > Yes, absolutely. No, not even close. Pre-modern tribes don't even have language or concepts that define "hospital" or "contraception". If you don't have ideas, it's improbably that those will emerge out of themselves. The fact that it happened in our Western world wasn't a wilful act. Society didn't wake up one day thinking "let's build a hospital". Our present situation is the result of hundreds of years of evolving thinking and so having those concepts today is more attributable to happenstance then anything else. It's incorrect to assume that any human tribe can and will come up with those ideas all by themselves and somehow "want them because that's what they want". I stand by my comment. > Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. Of course. Nobody is debating that. We're debating the biased notion that "progress" - Western modernity - is the primary and only way how to solve this; and - more importantly - the underlying, false, assumption that "progress is by definition good". A slew of researchers, philosophers, politicians, writers, artists,... have moved on from that point of view since the 1940's and shown that this is a naive way of thinking. It's called "Post-Modernism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism > It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it. Of course it is. We're not debating that either.

by mantap 7y ago

CaptArmchair 7y ago

> However in many cases it's the reverse Beware of generalization. > tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money Beware of switching cause and and effect. Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? > it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history. That's projection. And it's not even "our past", so that would be cultural appropriation. If anything, the developed world isn't a homogeneous society of like-minded individuals either. Most ethnological collections in Western museums don't have anything to do with Western culture, beyond the fact that these objects were taking out of context out of sheer curiosity. There's an ongoing discussion to return objects to traditional communities, or what's left of them, as they carry particular cultural value. It's a debate which is hugely controversial because it forces us to recognize that our Western sense of "progress" hasn't benefited other cultures in absolute terms. Case in point: Read Heart of Darkness and wonder why Ben Affleck's present endeavour to film that book is making certain European countries quite uncomfortable.

mantap 7y ago
> Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? Yes, absolutely. Without either hospitals or contraception, it's quite common for women to have lost multiple children in their life. Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it.
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  > Yes, absolutely. No, not even close. Pre-modern tribes don't even have language or concepts that define "hospital" or "contraception". If you don't have ideas, it's improbably that those will emerge out of themselves. The fact that it happened in our Western world wasn't a wilful act. Society didn't wake up one day thinking "let's build a hospital". Our present situation is the result of hundreds of years of evolving thinking and so having those concepts today is more attributable to happenstance then anything else. It's incorrect to assume that any human tribe can and will come up with those ideas all by themselves and somehow "want them because that's what they want". I stand by my comment. > Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. Of course. Nobody is debating that. We're debating the biased notion that "progress" - Western modernity - is the primary and only way how to solve this; and - more importantly - the underlying, false, assumption that "progress is by definition good". A slew of researchers, philosophers, politicians, writers, artists,... have moved on from that point of view since the 1940's and shown that this is a naive way of thinking. It's called "Post-Modernism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism > It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it. Of course it is. We're not debating that either.