Hands off

When I was about thirty years old, I stumbled upon a copy of American anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum's 1969 memoir Keep the River on Your Right.

It's gripping reading.  It recounts when Schneebaum, himself around thirty at the time, made his way down to Peru on a Fulbright Scholarship, looking for uncontacted tribes to study.  He was staying in a village in southern Peru when he spoke to one of the village leaders about his quest.  The leader basically told Schneebaum, "Yeah, you go into the jungle, they're there."

Schneebaum asked, so how could he find these people?

The elder replied, "Go into the jungle, keep walking, keep the river on your right.  They'll find you."

So Schneebaum did.

He was gone, and completely incommunicado, for almost two years; his family and friends presumed his death.  But then he showed back up, stark naked, wearing body paint.  He'd essentially gone native.  Keep the River on Your Right describes his time amongst the Harakmbut people, who speak a linguistic isolate -- a language that seems to be unrelated to any other known language -- and with whom he'd been accepted, even participating in their sexual ceremonies and ritual cannibalism.

Schneebaum received some criticism for what amounts to a major violation of the Prime Directive.  Although his memoir is fascinating, it brings up an interesting question.  Sure, people have rights (or should -- actions being taken by the United States government lately are making it terrifyingly clear that not everyone believes this).  But do cultures have rights?  Schneebaum didn't give the Harakmbut people a choice, he sort of just showed up one day.  The cultural knowledge certainly flowed both directions.  Did he violate the culture's rights by contaminating it with our own?

Of course, if the answer is yes, it brings up the followup question of how you determine what cultural contact is allowable.  Even having the Harakmbut see him changed them; they now know there are other people out there, who don't look, speak, or behave like they do.  It reminds me of the poignant and thought-provoking episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation called "Who Watches the Watchers?", where the crew of the Enterprise is forced to intervene when a hidden anthropological outpost on Mintaka III is accidentally discovered by the planet's natives -- who then decide Picard and his crew must be gods.

There are still a number of more-or-less uncontacted groups right here on Earth.  The most famous are the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Island chain, nominally under the jurisdiction of India.  But the Indian government has made it illegal to contact the Sentinelese, or even to land on their island.  Not that prosecution is likely -- the last one who tried, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau, landed on North Sentinel Island in 2018 with the intent of converting the Sentinelese to Christianity, and was promptly handed over to God himself by the expedient of an arrow through the chest.

North Sentinel Island from the air [Image is in the Public Domain]

We don't know much about the Sentinelese.  There are thought to be somewhere between thirty and five hundred of them, but the thick jungle of their home island makes any kind of estimate from the air difficult at best.  The scanty contact they've had with inhabitants of the other Andaman Islands has shown that the languages of the two nearest islands in the chain, Jarawa and Önge, are mutually unintelligible.  It's presumed that Sentinelese must be related to the other languages in the island chain -- and so belong to the Ongan language family, itself an isolate group -- but without any real data to go by, this is just a guess.

So we're left with a mystery.  Just horning in and hoping for the best, like Schneebaum did with the Harakmbut, is seriously not recommended for the Sentinelese.  And as I asked before, would it be ethical to do so even if it wasn't likely to lead to you getting turned into a pincushion?  History is replete with examples of contact between two cultures of unequal power that have ended up going very badly for all concerned.  Colonialism rightly occupies a horrible spot in the chronicles of humanity.  The Indian government -- wisely, in my opinion -- decided that the Sentinelese's right to self-determination superseded any considerations of curiosity, scientific study, missionary zeal, or even a desire to help.

And that's where we have to leave it.  There are people whose existence as a living culture would be threatened by our attempts to come in and "improve" things.  We here in the technological, industrialized West have done immeasurable damage by our arrogant assumption that the way we do things is the best, and of course everyone would be better off if they just acquiesced and did it our way, too.

Sometimes the best you can do is to keep your mouth shut and your hands off.

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