an interesting article

Here’s an interesting article about some “uncontacted” tribes of indigenous people in Brazil. Officials there think that there are perhaps 68 such tribes that, they say, have chosen to have little or no contact with outsiders. In part such a decision is understandable, for the immediate result of such contact in the past has often been devastating epidemic disease and sometimes violent conflict with unsympathetic Brazilians conducting illegal timbering or mining operations.
An organization called Survival International estimates that there are about 100 tribal groups worldwide that have made a similar choice. My question: To what degree can such a choice be an informed one? In terms of the intellectual and informational gulf separating the options, it might be compared to asking a three-year-old to decide on his funeral arrangements.
Thirty-five or so years ago some anthropologists announced their discovery of a “lost tribe” of primitive people living in the Philippines. The Tasaday, as they were called, numbered only a couple of dozen and were said, loosely, to have a Stone Age culture – living in caves, gathering wild foods, and using only the simplest of tools, which notably included no weapons. The announcement provoked a great sensation in the West, and it took almost no time for various self-appointed spokespersons for the Tasaday to proclaim what ought to be done for or about them. It was perfectly clear to a great many of these bien pensants that what the Tasaday needed above all was to be protected from contamination by the 20th century.
It was proposed that the region around the Tasaday caves be declared a reserve, off-limits to outsiders (except, of course, for anthropologists). In this way the Tasaday could continue to preserve their idyllic lifestyle, which seemed to consist of lounging about, eating frogs and grubs and wild fruits, and, above all, remaining innocent of the very notion of conflict. And, not so much discussed in public, in this way, too, the anthropologists would have a nicely convenient exhibit to visit and study and opine about, a place where, as Roger Sandall has written, they might “vainly rummage about in the great ragbag of primitive cultures, seeking means of personal redemption or models for their political or ideological hopes.”
Setting aside the subsequent and still unresolved controversy over whether the Tasaday were genuine or a hoax, what is interesting about the case is the casual assumption by so many inhabitants of developed nations, anthropologists and laymen alike, that this primitive life was in some mysterious way superior to their own. The idea of the “noble savage,” invented largely by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a reaction against the sometimes smug rationalism of the Enlightenment, has persisted in a variety of forms. Perhaps the most seductive of them is the “children of nature,” which so enchants sentimentalists and which the supposedly peaceful Tasaday so easily epitomized.
The discovery of the Tasaday, it’s worth noting, followed by only a few years the brief efflorescence of hippie culture. One branch of that culture followed a similar pattern of peaceful foraging, though in an urban setting and with an extension of the meaning of “foraging” to include panhandling. Another branch looked to the land and fostered communes that tended to favor 19th century costumes while trying to reinvent medieval agriculture.
It may well be that the Age of Aquarius is already sunk sufficiently into the past to seem quaintly primitive and thereby attractive to modern youth of a certain Romanticist turn of mind – no cell phones, no iPods, no FaceTube. Such is the speed of change in our day. What seems not to change is the proclivity of certain privileged types to exercise their freedom of choice to relinquish, or at least to affect disdain for, their good fortune, and at the same time to presume to take over that same choice for others. Plans for the Tasaday reserve collapsed in the morass of Philippine politics, but I’m confident no one ever asked the tribe if it would like to live in a zoo.
And these cousins of ours in Brazil – to what purpose, exactly, do we encourage their remaining in the Stone Age while we await news from our chemistry laboratory on Mars?