5-31-08, 9:00 am
Yesterday evening I logged onto the internet in order to check my web mail, and was caught off guard by a Yahoo! News article concerning the “uncontacted tribe” that has been discovered near the Brazil-Peru border. How exciting! My first reaction was a sense of wonder that truly uncontacted tribes could exist in today’s world, along with a deep sense of curiosity. As a sociologist in training, I would love to learn everything that there is to know about these people. But I realize, quite soberly, that they need ethnographers about as much as they need missionaries and foreign diseases.
Nevertheless, the aerial photographs taken by officials from Brazil’s Indian affairs department, FUNAI, are quite amazing. Thatched houses and what looks like communal living spaces are visible, along with common implements such as a basket filled with a white material, most likely cotton. We can also see the obviously perturbed inhabitants of those dwellings. One photograph is particularly striking: It shows two men, covered in red-orange pigment, assuming stances of self defense and aiming their bows at the plane as it flies overhead.
From my very first glimpse at these pictures I felt haunted, and have remained affected throughout today. There is something strangely disjunctive and postmodern, to be sure, about seeing these images on my computer screen as I listen to the new Portishead album on my iTunes player, delivered to me from the remote Amazon in high definition, nigh-instantaneously. Something intangible is lost in this one-way communication and leaves a spectral trace. The aura surrounding the “exotic” is shattered by information traveling across continents at light speed, in a way that Walter Benjamin might appreciate were he alive today. I look at the people in these photographs, poised for war, and realize that we are members of the same human family, and yet there is such a great cultural chasm between us. But there is still more that makes these images haunting.
These people are in imminent danger, from illegal logging and other threats caused by the expansion of capitalist markets. I am familiar with the damage that has been wrought on other Amazonian tribes by imported disease, mining operations and ranching. There are horror stories about gold-diggers invading Yanomami territory in Venezuela and Brazil, leading to bloody massacres in the name of profit. Without doubt, a full-scale genocide against the indigenous peoples of the Americas has been underway since Columbus first sailed into the Caribbean, and continues unabated in various guises. My fear is that these newly “discovered” people will be the next victims. The photographs seem like a ghostly foreshadowing of a death that’s sure to come - they are ready-made for a sterile museum wall, where they will hang as relics of a world we let slip through our fingers. Unless, that is, our civilization takes a radically different turn.
Uncontacted tribes expert, José Meirelles, who works for FUNAI and was onboard the flight, says that “What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilised’ ones, treat the world.”
I couldn’t agree more. The perilous situation to which Meirelles refers highlights the contradictions of capitalist globalization. Although these tribal people seem to be as far “outside” the global market as one could possibly get, they are being impinged upon by corporations that want to extract the tremendous resources of the Amazon, and convert the forest into farmland. Despite their avoidance of outsiders, these indigenous people are inside the capitalist world system, which today has no real “outside.” And even though they seem to be separated from us by a fathomless cultural and technological gap, our fates are thoroughly intertwined; we are truly linked in a global system. They are dependent upon the Amazon rainforest to meet all of their material needs, but we are dependent upon it as well. Often referred to as the “lungs of the world,” the rainforest produces over 20% of the world’s oxygen and is home to 1 in ten of the world’s species. The burning of vegetation in the Amazon releases large amounts carbon stored in the plants, contributing significantly to the greenhouse effect which is changing global climates.
The survival of their home is key to our own survival. Reversing our path of mindless destruction could allow their continuation. Haunting images of people far away, frozen on my flat computer screen, silently testify that we are really one world and one humanity. It’s time we act that way.
For more information on the movement for tribal peoples, visit http://www.survival-international.org/home
