Uncontacted

A few weeks ago, this photograph was released by a team of surveyors flying over an isolated corner of Amazonia. It appears to show three painted people - two of whom are aiming bows at the plane - surrounded by a small village and dense jungle. In and of itself, the photo is unremarkable, but the unwitting subjects are members of one of the few "uncontacted tribes" remaining on Earth.

Uncontacted people are indigenous tribes who, out of fear or out of pure chance, have never had formal, documented contact with Western civilization. Although it is difficult to know exactly how many of such groups exist today, they tend to be clustered in two geographic regions: anthropologists estimate that there are around 70 in the Amazon basin alone, and a handful in the most remote regions of Papua New Guinea. Since they have never been contacted, their stories are difficult to tell; for the same reason, we don't even know the tribes' names or what languages they speak. Establishing relations is exceedingly difficult, as they do not have immunities to the basic ailments of the Western world such as the common cold; furthermore, contact often proves to be met with extreme violence, perhaps part of the reason these tribes have been able to stay isolated for so long.

In Brazil, some 90% of Amazonian people were killed off during the two-century long incursion of European rubber companies into the remotest regions of the jungle. It is thought that some of these uncontacted groups today are descended from the hearty individuals who survived the industrialist onslaught and were driven deep into isolation. These negative historical encounters may have led to social taboos against contact with outsiders. There is also a chance that, by luck, certain of the most heavily forested areas of the basin have simply never been touched by Western civilization - these tribes continue to live their lives just as they have for thousands of years, virtually oblivious to the outside world.

It is amazing to contemplate: as we scuttle about in our cars typing messages quickly on our Blackberries, there are people in the world who have never known any of the accoutrement of Western civilization. It's an easy fact to forget - in 2008, it is natural to assume that every last corner of the planet has been explored, every last native people subjugated under the umbrella of nation-states and monolithic religions, given the option of "civilization" vs. "savagery." Contacting new tribes is so 1492; today's world is entirely the world we as a culture have created for ourselves. Indeed, most of the people of the Earth now abide by the Western paradigm: ethnic/linguistic groups form their own nations, economies are modern, and technologies like the television and cell phone have penetrated into even the poorest sectors of the globe. Uncontacted people, those not sharing in the bounty of the Western dream, have been proverbially "left behind."

There are a number of adventure guides who specialize in taking moneyed Western tourists deep into the jungle to contact uncontacted tribes. According to a recent interview on Talk of the Nation, these organizations are often really competitive with one another; one guide boasts of having contacted seven tribes in his life. Indeed, for every individual and organization out there that wants to keep these habitats intact so that these people can continue going about their business undisturbed, there are people who view them as benighted and deserving of all the same technological and cultural perks that sustain us in the developed world. The surveyors who took the photo above are associated with a department of the Brazilian government that oversees the protection of these people - they were out there visiting because illegal loggers have been pushing dangerously close to the tribe's region. But counteracting do-gooders like this Brazilian agency are two forces: the destruction of the Amazon, which is continually putting pressure on uncontacted tribes; and a booming international adventure travel industry that brings pampered rich people into the forest to search for "natives." What an exciting vacation to talk about at the next corporate board meeting: "over the break, I trekked through the Amazon rainforest and met a group of people who have never before seen a white man! How exotic!"

To me this controversy is a no-brainer: OF COURSE we shouldn't be pulling these people from their habitats and introducing our diseases to them. But listening to the NPR program on the topic, as well as checking out the blogosphere and the mainstream media, I realized that there is still a surprising level of ignorance and cultural arrogance out there. One caller asked the preservationist guest, "Why haven't these people evolved?" The guest expertly handled the question by talking about how these tribes are perfectly evolved for their habitat and how we can't equate lack of technological sophistication with a lower stage of evolution, but the point had been made, and I think that many people share the caller's sentiments. Reviewing the comment board at boston.com, here are few enlightened contributions:

Stop staring at us or we'll let send the dogs!

We should give them tv's and guns!

Throw an empty Coke bottle out the window.

IF the plane was forced to land there, I give the pilot, mmmm....maybe enough time to unbuckle the seatbelt before they lop his head off and boil it for dinner.

Out of the 136 comments on the board, I could find only a handful what were not mocking, ethnocentric, and dismissive. Strange that people so passionately defend the same industrial Western paradigm that has led to extreme social inequality and the wholesale destruction of our planet. As a National Geographic writer on NPR mentioned, we still have not figured out a way to develop the Amazon without completely destroying it. These people have lived there for thousands of years in relative harmony with their environment, and many "civilized people" have the audacity to criticize their way of life and pray that Western culture moves in quickly to make them whole?

Just some food for though (and not a boiled head).