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Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes

117 points by Libertatea 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
otoburb 12y ago
Well, that's one misconception I harboured that's now been corrected. It makes sense upon reflection that uncontacted tribes knew far more about outsiders than the other way around, but I never thought that most of their fear was due to prior killings or disease through both uncaring and caring encounters.
- colefichter 12y ago
  > I never thought that most of their fear was due to prior killings or disease through both uncaring and caring encounters. It's even worse than that. I recently read Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday. In it he describes just how violent inter-group affairs can be among pre-industrial societies. Globally, the default is typically to kill anyone from another group before they have a chance to do the same to you.
  - Polish_Dan 12y ago
    Yes, truth be told no one cares if a tribe dies. The only reason why we all have some peace is because we agreed to be educated by mainstream standards and adopt mainstream ideas. Doctors and missionaries carry disease. Is there any standard setup to ensure these international travelers are clear of disease before they contact villagers in Africa, the Americas, Asia - say a 3 month wait period between inter village visits? I doubt it, because we view doctors as being good and trust them, and in the case of UN Aid workers grant them immunity.
xenadu02 12y ago
tl;dr: It seems inevitable that any group of humans too long cut off from the majority of humanity is destined for destruction once contact is re-established due to cultural shock, unscrupulous or illegal activity, but chiefly by diseases against which they have no natural immunity. Second: a bunch of formerly uncontacted people have been interviewed after contact was made and none of them indicated a desire to abstain from the evil outside world or to preserve their way of life... They were merely afraid and/or lacked appropriate opportunity for contact. Further, none of them were wholly unaware of life outside their small isolated villages/reserves; people gossip and even the most isolated peoples have some knowledge of the rest of humanity. Best we can tell this process is inevitable. The article has some suggestions for minimizing the damage but by and large there is little anyone can do despite the best intentions unless we were to forcibly isolate these people and prohibit them from making contact.
- jchrisa 12y ago
  At least in the mean time we can try as best as possible to learn from them, before their cultures are forgotten. So much of what we assume is standard operating procedure is deeply made-up. Seeing how other folks do things is a way to learn.
  - jonah 12y ago
    This and ideally leave them with the space and privacy to maintain (or not) contact with other groups on their own terms.
RevRal 12y ago
God I hate how much that can be perceived as an animal welfare issue. Not "Oh fuck, there are groups of people on Earth in danger of going extinct."
mturmon 12y ago
This fascinating story has been making its way through the science community for a few weeks. Here's a report from July 11: http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/07/uncontacted-tribe-brazil-emerges-isolation http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/07/uncontacted-t... (Abstract only, main report is behind a paywall.) And the recent update: http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncontacted-tribe-receive-proper-medical-care http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncont... The last paragraph reveals how serious the lack of medical attention can be: "In the mid-1980s, a group of Yora tribespeople who made contact with loggers in their region in the Peruvian Amazon were first infected by influenza and later came down with pneumonia and other secondary infections. Without antibiotics, “the old people died and all the young kids died,” Hill says. A subsequent study by medical anthropologist Glenn Shepard of the Paraense Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, revealed that some 300 people died, between 50% and 60% of the population." It's a tragic illustration of one of the points of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
dbbolton 12y ago
Wikipedia has a pretty interesting article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_people The Sentinelese (mentioned in the OP) are somewhat special in that they actually attack any other humans that come near the island.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  The Sentinelese also have the unique(?) advantage of living on a very isolated island with no significant exploitable resources of interest to others: https://goo.gl/maps/0xTek https://goo.gl/maps/0xTek
templeos2 12y ago
You'll want to tell them that God talks from His temple, a 64-bit operating system with a compiler I wrote.
allworknoplay 12y ago
Oh, BBC. Did anyone else notice their persistent use of "Indians"? Kind of hilarious.
- thatswrong0 12y ago
  You'll even find extremely knowledgable American history professors who use the term to describe Native Americans. Their graduate students, however, will tell you separately that they want and expect you to use more politically correct terms instead. Just has to do with the times.
  - RK 12y ago
    In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people"). Here's what Wikipedia says: * The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups
    - _delirium 12y ago
      A late-'90s Russell Means polemic against "Native American" (along with the fact that it got quite a bit of agreement) has been somewhat influential in that respect: http://www.nemasys.com/ghostwolf/Native/wai.shtml http://www.nemasys.com/ghostwolf/Native/wai.shtml
  - facepalm 12y ago
    So even if they live in Brazil, you are supposed to call them Native Americans? That seems a bit weird to me.
    - insertnickname 12y ago
      Brazil is in America.
aaron695 12y ago
TL;DR; We still have human zoos. Contrary to popular belief, living in these societies would not be a fun experience. Well if you're a strong man happy to live to 50 they might be ok. To bad if you're a women. But we allow them to continue by actively prohibiting people from helping them purely for our rich persons entertainment.
- lambdaphage 12y ago
  Paleolithic culture is a genuinely mixed bag. Not as bad as almost everyone thinks, but worse than the rest think. I would put 1850 as my over-under for the year that neolithic culture provided an improvement in average quality of life. The problem with being a foraging people is that farming peoples can push you off the nicer land, as the article corroborates. Over millenia, foraging probably got to be a worse deal. It is far from clear, though, that living as a hunter gatherer isn't fun. Reports from the 18th and 19th centuries mention the scandal that when white farmers were captured by indigenous tribes, they hardly ever wanted to go back. Foraging beat farming in terms of qalys, it seemed.
  - beloch 12y ago
    Studies of the ǃKung San, who were recently hunter-gatherers living in a rather marginal environment, showed that they could get by doing far less work than farmers. The work they did do was strenuous. For example, they practiced persistence hunting. However, on average they had a lot more leisure time. Being a hunter-gatherer was probably an even sweeter deal before farmers and ranchers gobbled up all the prime real estate. Interestingly enough, the recent history of the !Kung shows that settling down and joining the rest of civilization does not always benefit the fairer sex. !Kung society was much less sexist before contact than it is now, as the surrounding peoples they are now in contact with are not exactly the most egalitarian. Most archaeologists consider egalitarian social structure to be typical of hunter-gatherer societies, with rigid hierarchical structure being an innovation resulting from settlement. Consider the concept of being "rich" for example. In a nomadic pastoral culture, wealth might be owning a big herd. In a sedentary culture, wealth might take the form of housing or accumulated items. A hunter-gatherer does not own animals and has to carry everything he/she owns around. A hunter-gather's abilities are his/her wealth. There are plenty of "civilized" places on Earth today where being poor is basically hell. There's ceaseless toil, no power or freedom, pollution, violence, poor nutrition, and no real access to the wonders of modern medicine that most of us are aghast at the thought of doing without. I'd far rather be among today's last few hunter-gatherer tribes than an immigrant worker in UAE or Qatar.
drpgq 12y ago
One thing I found interesting about the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus were claims that there were some tribes more advanced around the Amazon than many would commonly think. Of course after first contact, who knows what exactly happened to the people in the area. It has never been exactly well developed even today.
billpg 12y ago
We used to live like this. Eating organic food, getting lots of exercise, dying in our 20s...
- Karawebnetwork 12y ago
  Those people don't all die in their 20s. It's harder to get past 20, but once you did, you could live up to 70 if not more. There wouldn't be elders otherwise.
- HNJohnC 12y ago
  That's a common misconception, childbirth deaths brought down the average.
ejk314 12y ago
'Pururambo' is a documentary available on Netflix about visiting uncontacted tribes like this, if anyone is interested.

117 points by Libertatea 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Well, that's one misconception I harboured that's now been corrected. It makes sense upon reflection that uncontacted tribes knew far more about outsiders than the other way around, but I never thought that most of their fear was due to prior killings or disease through both uncaring and caring encounters.

colefichter 12y ago
> I never thought that most of their fear was due to prior killings or disease through both uncaring and caring encounters. It's even worse than that. I recently read Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday. In it he describes just how violent inter-group affairs can be among pre-industrial societies. Globally, the default is typically to kill anyone from another group before they have a chance to do the same to you.
- Polish_Dan 12y ago
  Yes, truth be told no one cares if a tribe dies. The only reason why we all have some peace is because we agreed to be educated by mainstream standards and adopt mainstream ideas. Doctors and missionaries carry disease. Is there any standard setup to ensure these international travelers are clear of disease before they contact villagers in Africa, the Americas, Asia - say a 3 month wait period between inter village visits? I doubt it, because we view doctors as being good and trust them, and in the case of UN Aid workers grant them immunity.

xenadu02 12y ago

tl;dr: It seems inevitable that any group of humans too long cut off from the majority of humanity is destined for destruction once contact is re-established due to cultural shock, unscrupulous or illegal activity, but chiefly by diseases against which they have no natural immunity. Second: a bunch of formerly uncontacted people have been interviewed after contact was made and none of them indicated a desire to abstain from the evil outside world or to preserve their way of life... They were merely afraid and/or lacked appropriate opportunity for contact. Further, none of them were wholly unaware of life outside their small isolated villages/reserves; people gossip and even the most isolated peoples have some knowledge of the rest of humanity. Best we can tell this process is inevitable. The article has some suggestions for minimizing the damage but by and large there is little anyone can do despite the best intentions unless we were to forcibly isolate these people and prohibit them from making contact.

jchrisa 12y ago
At least in the mean time we can try as best as possible to learn from them, before their cultures are forgotten. So much of what we assume is standard operating procedure is deeply made-up. Seeing how other folks do things is a way to learn.
- jonah 12y ago
  This and ideally leave them with the space and privacy to maintain (or not) contact with other groups on their own terms.

RevRal 12y ago

God I hate how much that can be perceived as an animal welfare issue. Not "Oh fuck, there are groups of people on Earth in danger of going extinct."

mturmon 12y ago

This fascinating story has been making its way through the science community for a few weeks. Here's a report from July 11: http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/07/uncontacted-tribe-brazil-emerges-isolation http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/07/uncontacted-t... (Abstract only, main report is behind a paywall.) And the recent update: http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncontacted-tribe-receive-proper-medical-care http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncont... The last paragraph reveals how serious the lack of medical attention can be: "In the mid-1980s, a group of Yora tribespeople who made contact with loggers in their region in the Peruvian Amazon were first infected by influenza and later came down with pneumonia and other secondary infections. Without antibiotics, “the old people died and all the young kids died,” Hill says. A subsequent study by medical anthropologist Glenn Shepard of the Paraense Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, revealed that some 300 people died, between 50% and 60% of the population." It's a tragic illustration of one of the points of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel.

dbbolton 12y ago

Wikipedia has a pretty interesting article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_people The Sentinelese (mentioned in the OP) are somewhat special in that they actually attack any other humans that come near the island.

jpatokal 12y ago
The Sentinelese also have the unique(?) advantage of living on a very isolated island with no significant exploitable resources of interest to others: https://goo.gl/maps/0xTek https://goo.gl/maps/0xTek

templeos2 12y ago

You'll want to tell them that God talks from His temple, a 64-bit operating system with a compiler I wrote.

allworknoplay 12y ago

Oh, BBC. Did anyone else notice their persistent use of "Indians"? Kind of hilarious.

thatswrong0 12y ago
You'll even find extremely knowledgable American history professors who use the term to describe Native Americans. Their graduate students, however, will tell you separately that they want and expect you to use more politically correct terms instead. Just has to do with the times.
- RK 12y ago
  In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people"). Here's what Wikipedia says: * The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups
  - _delirium 12y ago
    A late-'90s Russell Means polemic against "Native American" (along with the fact that it got quite a bit of agreement) has been somewhat influential in that respect: http://www.nemasys.com/ghostwolf/Native/wai.shtml http://www.nemasys.com/ghostwolf/Native/wai.shtml
- facepalm 12y ago
  So even if they live in Brazil, you are supposed to call them Native Americans? That seems a bit weird to me.
  - insertnickname 12y ago
    Brazil is in America.

aaron695 12y ago

TL;DR; We still have human zoos. Contrary to popular belief, living in these societies would not be a fun experience. Well if you're a strong man happy to live to 50 they might be ok. To bad if you're a women. But we allow them to continue by actively prohibiting people from helping them purely for our rich persons entertainment.

lambdaphage 12y ago
Paleolithic culture is a genuinely mixed bag. Not as bad as almost everyone thinks, but worse than the rest think. I would put 1850 as my over-under for the year that neolithic culture provided an improvement in average quality of life. The problem with being a foraging people is that farming peoples can push you off the nicer land, as the article corroborates. Over millenia, foraging probably got to be a worse deal. It is far from clear, though, that living as a hunter gatherer isn't fun. Reports from the 18th and 19th centuries mention the scandal that when white farmers were captured by indigenous tribes, they hardly ever wanted to go back. Foraging beat farming in terms of qalys, it seemed.
- beloch 12y ago
  Studies of the ǃKung San, who were recently hunter-gatherers living in a rather marginal environment, showed that they could get by doing far less work than farmers. The work they did do was strenuous. For example, they practiced persistence hunting. However, on average they had a lot more leisure time. Being a hunter-gatherer was probably an even sweeter deal before farmers and ranchers gobbled up all the prime real estate. Interestingly enough, the recent history of the !Kung shows that settling down and joining the rest of civilization does not always benefit the fairer sex. !Kung society was much less sexist before contact than it is now, as the surrounding peoples they are now in contact with are not exactly the most egalitarian. Most archaeologists consider egalitarian social structure to be typical of hunter-gatherer societies, with rigid hierarchical structure being an innovation resulting from settlement. Consider the concept of being "rich" for example. In a nomadic pastoral culture, wealth might be owning a big herd. In a sedentary culture, wealth might take the form of housing or accumulated items. A hunter-gatherer does not own animals and has to carry everything he/she owns around. A hunter-gather's abilities are his/her wealth. There are plenty of "civilized" places on Earth today where being poor is basically hell. There's ceaseless toil, no power or freedom, pollution, violence, poor nutrition, and no real access to the wonders of modern medicine that most of us are aghast at the thought of doing without. I'd far rather be among today's last few hunter-gatherer tribes than an immigrant worker in UAE or Qatar.

drpgq 12y ago

One thing I found interesting about the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus were claims that there were some tribes more advanced around the Amazon than many would commonly think. Of course after first contact, who knows what exactly happened to the people in the area. It has never been exactly well developed even today.

billpg 12y ago

We used to live like this. Eating organic food, getting lots of exercise, dying in our 20s...

Karawebnetwork 12y ago
Those people don't all die in their 20s. It's harder to get past 20, but once you did, you could live up to 70 if not more. There wouldn't be elders otherwise.
HNJohnC 12y ago
That's a common misconception, childbirth deaths brought down the average.

ejk314 12y ago

'Pururambo' is a documentary available on Netflix about visiting uncontacted tribes like this, if anyone is interested.