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On 7/20/19 9:06 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the
invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the
serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe
it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all.
In 2006 two Indian fishermen, in a drunken sleep aboard their little
boat, drifted over the reef and fetched up on the shore of North
Sentinel Island. They were promptly killed by the inhabitants. Their
bodies are still there: the helicopter that went to collect them was
driven away by a hail of arrows and spears. The Sentinelese do not
welcome trespassers. Only very occasionally have they been lured down to
the beach of their tiny island home by gifts of coconuts and only once
or twice have they taken these gifts without sending a shower of arrows
in return.
The quote above is from the Economist article that John Imani posted.
I can't say I am surprised that someone writing for the Economist
portrayed the people of North Sentinel as "savage". This year a
self-appointed Christian Missionary was killed by these "savages". Here
is why. They were determined to be free of the real savages who had
decimated their people for the longest time.
The Guardian, Nov. 30, 2018
Sentinel Island's 'peace-loving’ tribe had centuries of reasons to fear
missionary
From the exiled king of Belgium to the Primrose freighter in 1981,
outsiders have regretted contact with the Sentinelese – as have the
islanders themselves
by Michael Safi
After a few days stuck in the reef, a watchman reported seeing a group
emerge from the jungle on the island a few hundred metres away. The
sailor’s relief at the sight of a possible rescue party ebbed as the men
came into view: nearly naked, carrying spears and bows and arrows that
they waved in the direction of the ship.
“Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are
making two or three wooden boats,” the Primrose’s captain radioed to his
headquarters in Hong Kong. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All
crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”
The same tribe killed American missionary John Allen Chau on 17
November. The crew of the Primrose survived. The surging swell repelled
the tribespeople’s boats, while the strong winds kept blowing their
arrows off the mark, according to an account by the author and historian
Adam Goodheart. After three terrifying days – the crew keeping vigil
with pipes, flares and other makeshift weapons – an Indian navy boat
winched the stranded sailors to safety. The Primrose still lies where it
ran aground 37 years ago.
Chau would have seen the ship’s wreckage as he circumnavigated North
Sentinel Island the evening of 14 November, on a boat with five
fishermen whom police say he paid 25,000 rupees (£275) to smuggle him there.
Like the Primrose incident, Chau’s apparent murder as he tried to preach
to the Sentinelese – in breach of Indian law and advice that exposure to
foreign pathogens could kill them – has fuelled fascination with one of
the world’s most isolated communities. And among the most misunderstood,
according to the handful of anthropologists and historians who have
observed them.
Encounters between the tribe, loosely estimated to number 100 people,
and the outside world are a violent catalogue. In 1974, a member of a
National Geographic crew filming a documentary on the island was hit in
the leg with an arrow.
The following year, the exiled king of Belgium reportedly aborted his
visit when a single, armed tribesman emerged from the jungle and waved
his bow at the craft. In 2006, two men looking for flotsam on North
Sentinel ran aground on the sand, and were hacked apart with axes.
Police said this week their bodies were hung from bamboo poles and
displayed to the ocean “like scarecrows”.
Yet those experienced with the Sentinelese reject the idea they are
inherently aggressive. “They are a peace-loving people,” TN Pandit, an
anthropologist who conducted one of the first successful meetings with
the tribe in 1991, told an Indian news outlet this week.
“Their hostility is a sign of great insecurity,” agrees Vivek Rae, a
former chief administrator of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the
Indian territory that includes the Sentinelese home.
Often characterised as a kind of irrational barbarism, their extreme
suspicion of outsiders may be well-founded. “It has been passed down
through generations,” Pandit says.
Centuries ago, the Andaman archipelago was a magnet for Burmese slave
traders who seized members of its four hunter-gatherer tribes and sold
them into slavery in south-east Asia. From 1857, the islands became a
permanent British colony, a prison for those who had taken part in that
year’s Indian Rebellion, the largest armed uprising against colonial
rule on the subcontinent.
“The British embarked on a policy that veered between assimilation,
containment and annihilation,” says Clare Anderson, a professor of
history at the University of Leicester.
North Sentinel Island and the strange death of John Allen Chau
One practice was kidnapping members of tribes and holding them for
several weeks to demonstrate the fruits of British civilisation. Maurice
Vidal Portman, a commander in the Royal Navy, employed the strategy on
North Sentinel Island in 1880, capturing two older tribespeople and four
children he had found sheltering in an inland settlement – the only
residents apparently unable to flee.
The captives “sickened rapidly”, he later wrote, “and the old man and
his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with
quantities of presents”.
The tribes who relented to British rule found themselves devastated by
disease and overwhelmed by contact with alcohol, tobacco, sugar and the
other vices of the settlement. In 1858, the British counted at least
5,000 tribespeople across the Andamans. By 1931, their numbers had
dwindled to 460.
Even to Portman, it was obvious: “[The tribes’] association with
outsiders has brought them nothing but harm,” he told the Royal Society
in London, “and it is a matter of great regret to me that such a
pleasant race are so rapidly becoming extinct”.
During the second world war, the Andamans were a theatre of fierce
fighting and bombing campaigns. PC Joshi, a professor of anthropology at
Delhi University, speculates this could have had an impact on the
Sentinelese. “They must be carrying some of those memories.”
From 1967, Indian government anthropologists set out to patiently win
the trust of the Sentinelese, dropping them gifts of coconuts, bananas
and iron rods. The last of these would later show up in the tips of the
arrows the tribe would periodically fire at the exploring scholars. They
saw it as evidence that the tribe, which is at least 30,000 years old,
was no relic of the neolithic era: their lifestyles could evolve like
those of any other human community.
The gift-dropping expeditions have ceased in the past two decades. The
Indian government’s current policy is to simply leave the Sentinelese
alone. It is influenced partly by the country’s experience with another
Andamans tribe, the Jarawa. In 1996, a Jarawa boy broke his leg while
trying to steal fruit from a modern settlement. He was taken to hospital
and spent five months recuperating. He learned a bit of Hindi and
discovered television. Then he returned to his tribe.
About a year later, the boy led a group of Jarawas out of the forest in
a formal peace overture from the community after centuries of
hostilities. Yet the Jarawa experience is no longer regarded as a
triumph. Diseases such as measles have ravaged the community.
Authorities have been implicated in helping to run “human safaris” in
Jarawa territory. Anthropologists fear they are heading the way of other
contacted Andaman tribes.
“Think of the horrible experience of the Great Andamanese tribe,” says
Kanchan Mukhopadhyay, a former officer with India’s anthropological
survey who served on the islands. “They died en masse. And the Onge
tribe – they don’t hunt or fish anymore. They are totally dependent on
food supplied by the authorities.”
Chau’s misadventure on North Sentinel Island has sparked outrage in
India and reaffirmed the government’s stance. An anthropologist involved
in the American’s case told the Guardian this week there were no plans
to go to North Sentinel to recover his body. “They shoot arrows on any
invader,” the official said. “That is their message, saying ‘don’t come
on the island’, and we respect this.”
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