As far as the argument of contact or no contact, I don't have an answer but I think the issue is that contact often destroys the culture rather than helps it grow and evolve. I have read some things that indicated native americans lost in part because they adopted guns and abandoned bows. They lacked the means to make or money to buy the type of oil that would work in cold weather and used lard instead, which firms u…
Lawrence of Arabia? Might as well cite Tarzan comics.
Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
271–280 of 378 posts
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#272This is blowing my mind. Do I understand this right? There are people living in the forests of Brazil that have no idea about the modern world?!
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#273Did this shatter anyone else's perception of how well-connected we are, as a species?
The existence of isolated social groups isn't a mind-blowing concept to me, but not something I think about daily either. Does a new awareness of the exception to the rule really change your perception of how interconnected most of humanity is? Maybe I'm reading too much into this comment, but something about it seems to imply that being disconnected from the global network is a bad thing. Though I myself am a highly…
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
from their faq ( http://www.uncontactedtribes.org/articles/3109-questions-and... ): "uncontacted tribes will have seen aeroplanes on numerous occasions. The idea that this damages their self-image and/or spiritual beliefs belongs in the realm of fiction, and is based on the false supposition that their cultures are fragile. Experience shows that such peoples are in fact robust and well able to adapt to outside goods…
I have to call BS on this. It may not "hurt" them, but it does influence/effect them. It has to. Going way back to my anthro classes, all primitive cultures crafted religious beliefs as survival mechanisms, to pass down stories and things that would benefit future generations etc etc. It was also a way to explain what they couldn't explain but still experienced (weather, natural disasters...) and this would fall into…
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#275In my opinion they would have left their forrest a long time ago if they where really curious to seek out what was beyond it. The fact that they stay, indicates to me that they are happy with the way life is.
Curiosity only has a little to do with it. Maybe the curious ones left and never returned. That doesn't mean those that remain enjoy their lives.
I mean, I could be wrong and they're the happiest people on earth, but I bet some penicillin could make their lives even better.
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd want to be left alone - give one example of colonialism that worked out well for indigenous people, and I'll maybe change my mind.
Ok. India is now an "important" country. Burgeoning technologically and culturally, what it received from Britain was access to the intellectual firestorm of the Enlightenment. Hindu thinkers were involved in the formation of Universalism, the idea that all religions were different aspects of the same thing and could be united. Of course, it cost them the pain of the Pakistan-India divide, the struggle of Gandhi, and…
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're talking about human trafficking/sex slaves? It's already illegal. I leave that up to the cops.
I hope he was talking about something a little more subtle, like the fact that we have so many Hispanic people here without citizenship and have therefore created a sort of lower subservient class. But probably not, slavery's a bit too strong a term unless there's a somewhat-mitigating "wage" in front of it.
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/mar/03/farmworker-slaver... and http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/modern-day-slavery-m... are some articles about recent situations in Florida.
There's also domestic servant slavery and even factory worker slavery, such as the slaves that are imported to US Territory Saipan to work in Chinese owned garment factories. (http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-01-22/news/17677080_1_garmen...) Workers there are raped by managers, kept in guarded chained enclosures, and have to undergo forced abortions when they get pregnant from the rapes.
There's also legal slavery, such as prison labor, which is explicitly permitted under the Constitution, although many legal experts believe that it actually has to be part of the sentence as punishment for the crime, and not just something that applies to all prisoners without a judge's approval during sentencing. To simplify things we'll skip those as being "OK" slavery since some believe there is legal justification for it even when not part of sentencing. Don't want to confuse the issue.
By slavery we mean you are not free to leave and you are not paid wages for your work. Many workers in the US are even shackled up and beaten.
Gosh look I even just now found a new book on Modern American Slavery.
http://www.amazon.com/Nobodies-Modern-American-Global-Econom...
Of course there was also slavery of black people in the US that lasted until the 1940s. Oh, didn't know about that? http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/
Most people prefer not to know why the goods and food they buy are so cheap.
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#278Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism. There…
"Our way of life is better." The fact that this has so many upvotes /really/ lowers my high opinion of the HN readership.
I doubt many of us would desire to live in an uncontacted tribe. People in uncontacted tribes spend most of their time getting food to avoid starvation. Sometimes they get injured or ill, but they don't have painkillers or medicine. Sometimes a kid gets appendicitis. They don't have surgery, so the kid dies. Sometimes a child is born with a cleft palette. Charities do this procedure in developing countries, but in uncontacted tribes the child is deformed for life.
Based on evidence from other tribes, they're almost certainly a patriarchal society. Sorry girls, you can't be leaders when you grow up. You'll have to have birth children without painkillers or medical supervision. (Oh and there's no birth control.) Breech baby? Tough luck. And don't get attached to your kids early on; infant mortality is pretty high.
Granted, their quality of life isn't going to be great even if they're contacted. And arguing on the Internet isn't going to change the outcome of this situation. But our way of life is better. There are very few places on earth where quality of life is worse than an uncontacted tribe. The list is pretty short: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and a couple other countries. Eventually, even those failed states will progress, whereas the uncontacted tribes won't.
Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe
#280You know that Golden Rule?" Not the one that VCs quote, but the one that goes "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" We should think about that when we choose how to deal with uncontacted tribes. It may be that one day another intelligence will need to decide how to deal with us, and on that day I hope we can say, "Yes, we used to have a habit of massacring technologically inferior peoples we encounte…
We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism. There…
Certainly there probably is an optimal way to go about contacting a tribe like this and "bringing them up to speed" with the rest of the world, and I admit that there probably isn't a single person on this earth who actually knows what that optimal way is. But to deny these people even the chance at a better life because we're busy hand-wringing over how it will affect their culture is terrible.