Uncontacted tribes

[Duskofdead]

I'm not sure they'd understand that choice. I doubt whoever makes contact will bring along a toilet and a brush to demonstrate. I'm guessing the pitch would be all the wonders of the world followed by a harsh reality of crap and firewater. This is a legal issue that is struggled with a lot in the US in regards to medical treatment. Even when you present all the information people have a tendency to just hear "you'll get better and be fine" especially when they don't have a solid grasp of medical terminology and the like.

Of course society somehow could offer them an aid package during entry. But making society pay for others is a whole different issue you can discuss with Teaos.

Also, likely, you're only giving half of them a choice. The others who wanted to stay will be left in a society that just lost half its membership, and may no longer have the genetic diversity or diversity of skills to survive. Particularily if its the younger members leaving, as is often the case.

Also there isn't any way, really, to shut off the disease issue. Though there are things that can be done to help.

Listen to Sunny. The contact itself can easily spark off a complete destruction of the tribe, no matter how well intentioned you are. I'm not saying put up razorwire around their land and shoot anyone who tries to contact them, but any contact needs to be extremely controlled and cautious. If you simply load these people on a plane and fly them to Chicago or London and start showing them around, you are going to destroy them. I don't know what in history makes you think the result would be different from the last thousand times modern people have done this.

If you need relatively "modern" examples, then go look up the Hmong people on Wikipedia. And they weren't anywhere near as isolated as this newly discovered tribe, but the results were still basically disastrous.

[Graham Kennedy]

Offering people a choice is damaging them? How do you work that out?

The CONTACT ITSELF damages them. Yes, offer them choice, but we're talking years of careful contact with lab-like safety precautions so that someone doesn't slip these people measles or something that causes a 30% fataility rate.

I'm sorry but are you somehow missing the fact that you can't simply send a cellphone salesperson, an electrician, and an architect into a totally uncontacted tribe and start going about modernizing them?

I'm not "missing" it, I'm disagreeing with it. I don't see how the contact itself damages them. I agree that the contact could potentially lead to damaging things, and I'm all in favour of taking precautions to safeguard against that. But the allegation that contact is in and of itself damaging? How so?

[Duskofdead]

Offering people a choice is damaging them? How do you work that out?

The CONTACT ITSELF damages them. Yes, offer them choice, but we're talking years of careful contact with lab-like safety precautions so that someone doesn't slip these people measles or something that causes a 30% fataility rate.

I'm sorry but are you somehow missing the fact that you can't simply send a cellphone salesperson, an electrician, and an architect into a totally uncontacted tribe and start going about modernizing them?

I'm not "missing" it, I'm disagreeing with it. I don't see how the contact itself damages them. I agree that the contact could potentially lead to damaging things, and I'm all in favour of taking precautions to safeguard against that. But the allegation that contact is in and of itself damaging? How so?

I have already told you several times. Read Sunny's post, look up the history of relatively recently contacted and integrated (I use the term loosely-- it usually means making them illiterate janitors or field hands at the very bottom rung of society) South American tribes such as the Yanomamo and various others. Even the ones who have lived in "modern" society for years still die of the flu--- such an attrition rate might not affect a group of tens of thousands, but when you're talking numbers in the dozens or hundreds, over a couple of generations you can cause their complete genocide by wholesale exposure to illnesses they haven't encountered or developed generational immunities for. Look up the native Hawaiians (relatively peaceful contact still nearly obliterated them), look up the Hmong.

Sorry Graham but history is not on your side on this one that some sort of good, progressive, beneficial utopian esque "uplifting" of these people through contact is possible, plausible or likely. If western civilization stays true to form it would flood these people with anthropologists, linguists, medical researchers, kill off half of them with unintentionally introduced diseases, and then leave. The remainder will then be incapable of self-sufficiency and wind up at the very bottom rung of whatever country is closest and suffer a second wave of deaths from depression, poor living conditions and no medical care, alcoholism and poverty.

But hey, four generations later the 0.1% of people still carrying the bloodline in the region will have cellphones and college educations, so that's a win right?

[Graham Kennedy]

I have already told you several times.

No, you have not. You've listed examples of contact that led to bad results. That is NOT the same thing as saying that contact is in and of itself a damaging thing, which is what you claimed.

[Duskofdead]

I have already told you several times.

No, you have not. You've listed examples of contact that led to bad results. That is NOT the same thing as saying that contact is in and of itself a damaging thing, which is what you claimed.

How do you think diseases are spread? How do you think the social networks, spirituality and social order which bind animistic societies together is broken? By contact.

[Teaos]

Physical contact would drastically change their culture the second they saw people. We gain nothing by going to them so there is no point in doing it.

[Aaron]

Here's a reason. It's likely that the life expectancy and infant mortality of these people is far lower than it would be with access to real medicine. Contacting them could result in fewer dead babies. Reason enough?

That's more than reason enough, if there was a ban on missionaries going to talk to them I'd be all for it.

[sunnyside]

That's more than reason enough, if there was a ban on missionaries going to talk to them I'd be all for it.

Geez did you get beaten by some Babtists or something?

Well there you go I guess Graham/Ken. If you contact them they are going to have somebody try and convert them at some point.

[Aaron]

Geez did you get beaten by some Babtists or something?

My mother-in-law is Catholic and my wife got pregnant before we married, why the fuck do you think I hate religion. It's personally fucked me around and continues to do so.

Oh yeah, I'm also an athiest in a town of 8000+ religious rednecks (there's 8500 people total). Try that for awhile and see how you like it. The nativity scene every fucking xmas and the ginormous cross on the grocery store are a treat as well.

Would you also like me to detail the sexual hangups my wife had to overcome thanks to her religious parents pushing that everything but missionary is wrong despite them having a stack of porn tapes filling an entire dresser drawer?

Well there you go I guess Grahm. If you contact them they are going to have somebody try and convert them at some point.

What good have missionaries ever accomplished? Look what's happening in Africa with aids and the churchs.

[Duskofdead]

That's more than reason enough, if there was a ban on missionaries going to talk to them I'd be all for it.

Geez did you get beaten by some Babtists or something?

Well there you go I guess Graham/Ken. If you contact them they are going to have somebody try and convert them at some point.

There's no need to even turn it into a religious or political point. What this is is a bunch of guys on the net leaning back in computer chairs deciding what would be best for a people they don't know a single thing about. My only concern is for their safety, and you are tossing that concern out the window in any scenario involving casually traipsing into their existence and starting to offer them modern life.

[Graham Kennedy]

I have already told you several times.

No, you have not. You've listed examples of contact that led to bad results. That is NOT the same thing as saying that contact is in and of itself a damaging thing, which is what you claimed.

How do you think diseases are spread? How do you think the social networks, spirituality and social order which bind animistic societies together is broken? By contact.

But once again, it is the diseases and such that are the issue, not the contact. You said that it was the contact itself that is the damaging thing.

[Duskofdead]

But once again, it is the diseases and such that are the issue, not the contact. You said that it was the contact itself that is the damaging thing.

Okay well if it was misunderstood, no, standing in the same room as someone from an indigenous tribe won't make them flop over like a fish out of water and die necessarily. Although I think the distinction you're making is almost semantical. Damage biologically is done via disease from contact, and damage culturally and psychologically is done by interacting with a modern person. The reason anthropologists and such who go to study isolated tribes tend to "work their way in as a member of the community", and act like, talk like the people they're studying and interact with them on their own terms, is because if you simply walk in and say "Hi, I'm Graham, let me show you my digital camera" you have no idea how your actions are being interpreted. You could be fulfilling a prophecy about how the evil god will come as a pale demon with a flashing light in his hand. Or you could be completely intentionally undermining something core to their belief system or spiritual beliefs. You could walk up and start talking to the nearest man, not knowing that a stranger must always speak to the female head of a family first or else bring a curse or death upon the individual. (A lot of matriarchal tribes, including the Cherokee and Pueblo and other well-known names, had their social structures break apart because western visitors or military commanders unerringly spoke only to the men, and got them to sign agreements or give away land, which belonged to women in those societies. Of course ignoring the women and speaking only to the men was something nobody in the 1800's would have given a second thought about.) It's hard to even think of a parallel situation--- what if alien visitors started having negotiations with human children under the age of 13, and excluding everyone else, and got them to sign agreements on behalf of all of humanity, give territory away, or gave them technology no other humans had seen before? The way you handle the contact with a vastly different society can easily have disastrous results, even unintentionally. You watch Trek, that should be old news to you.