Let's be honest, the idea of bands of uncontacted hunter-gatherers roaming the dense foliage of the Amazon fascinates inherently. Erudition, insight and elegant prose are hardly necessary. All the same, John Terbrogh brings all three to the latest edition (April 5) of the New York Review of Books. His review of Scott Wallace's The Unconquered offers a pleasant excursion through the work, his own experiences in, near, and around the Brazil’s “exclusion zone” (areas akin to First Nations reservations – federal land set aside for indigenous peoples, though in this case, those peoples remain unaware of the deal), and through the history of uncontacted peoples policy in Brazil.
Lucidly structured and informative, the piece reads smoothly, at least until its final section, where he ponders how we ought to proceed with regards to the 4 500 or so human beings who’ve had no introduction to modernity. Despite a deep history of disease and disaster for their predecessors – a story he tells himself so well, just paragraphs earlier – Terbrogh stands firmly on the side of some kind of assimilation or integration. Although he admits the complexity of the question in terms of practicality, he comes down in a straightforward manner. The case, he says is a moral one:
This is a question of values and some of my anthropologist colleagues would say yes. But the morality of this question has to be considered in the light of our own cultural origins. Once upon a time, the ancestors of each and every one of us lived in a premodern culture. Those cultural origins have now been completely erased from our collective memory. Do any of us regret the loss of this memory? Would any of us prefer to return to our ancestral condition, rather than to live in the modern world? Few, if any, would say yes. To live in isolation is to live a short, hard life in the absence of modern medicine and in complete ignorance of history, geography, science, and art.
To my admittedly biased way of thinking, the modern world offers a vastly richer existence—intellectually, culturally, physically. Not only do we live nearly twice as long on average, but we are able to travel, to experience the accomplishments of a cultural history that goes back three thousand years, and to savor the best creations of a highly diverse global cuisine.
It’s easy to see the truths of his argument, particularly when he asks us to compare our own lives to those of our ancestors. Of course we have clean running water, sanitation, and the ability to step into a metal tube and cross oceans through the air, among many other things all of which certainly feel better than their opposites probably would. But I get a little queasy when he equates those physical comforts with a "richer" existence. Yes, it's sort of wonderful that I can digitally hit "publish" on the top of this screen and have these words potentially read by strangers in Iceland and that I can have the food of India brought to my door by simply switching tabs and hitting another digital button.
The wonder of those feats comes couched in a set of languages and experiences (the kinds of narratives he notes) that offer meaning to those who can place themselves within them. Making sense of "hitting publish" or "switching tabs" would barely make sense to computer users from twenty years ago, let alone to those without a sense of the computer, or electricity, or written language. Our lives feel richer than theirs because they are ours. We'd be in a tough spot if we were to concede otherwise; argue against narratives in history all you want, but at the end of the day we make sense of our world by placing ourselves at the end of them.
Which is why it strikes me that the moral case can't be so simple, that in fact it is as complicated as the practical questions would be. The people Terbrogh and Wallace describe live existences of near total paranoia; everything outside is total enemy, to be fought or fled as needed, always to the fullest extent. Even if (a huge "if" itself) we might protect their bodies from our germs, how might we justify the jar to their psyches we'd impose? What moral case must be made for robbing men of all meaning? How ought we balance those costs against the seemingly obvious physical benefits of modern life? How much does it matter that less conflicted farmers or developers might get there first?
A correct answer, in moral, practical, and political terms seems unfathomable, far more complicated than the three paragraphs Terbrogh offers. One gets the sense that by the time we've hashed it all out, the 4 500 will either all be gone or living next door.
No comments:
Post a Comment