“Forgot that there are other people”: corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences - about the life of non-contact tribes

- Sergey Alexandrovich, the last representative of an Indian tribe, who refused any contact with civilization, recently died in Brazil.

A man known as the Hole Man has died after 26 years of complete isolation in the Amazon jungle.

His entire tribe was exterminated between the 1970s and early 1990s. 

Almost nothing is known about this tribe.

But the main question to be raised is why were these people killed?

This is a serious problem.

Yes, in Brazil and in many other countries there are laws for the protection of local aboriginal tribes.

However, often these laws remain on paper, because large landowners are interested in deforestation and expanding their holdings.

In this they are hindered by non-contact tribes that live in undeveloped territories.

And often provocations are organized against them - simply put, these people are killed.

The police must respond to such crimes, but they are often bribed by the masterminds of the crime.

However, some of these tribes still survived.

So, in Brazil there lives a tribe that was nicknamed "flecheiros", which means "arrows" - how they call themselves is unknown.

They are armed with bows and arrows and live in the depths of impenetrable forests, when someone tries to penetrate them, they simply shoot him.

Therefore, there is no contact with them, and nothing is known about their way of life.

• Sergey Arutyunov

• © Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology RAS

In my memory, a number of similar tribes were discovered - in Brazil and New Guinea.

In principle, most of the non-contact tribes were able to survive precisely in these regions, since it is there that there are still such impenetrable forests that can serve as a refuge for them.

However, one must understand that as soon as a tribe becomes known, this automatically means that it ceases to be non-contact - one of them has come into contact with the civilized world.

It is possible that indirectly, through neighboring tribes that are already actively communicating with the outside world.

And already through them, conditionally “non-contact” tribes can establish ties with the big world.

I observed such situations in the Arctic when I worked among the Chukchi and Nenets in the 1970s.

Some clans refused to contact the outside world - the Soviet authorities, police, district councils, etc. At the same time, "unrecorded" people continued to communicate with their relatives who lived in the villages.

Through them, these free families sent their children to boarding schools.

The children studied, but often dropped out of school without completing their studies - they simply did not return after the holidays.

In order to return the children to their desks, the authorities sent them to look for the camps of their families from a helicopter - I myself witnessed such expeditions.

But it was very difficult to find them in the forest-tundra, often it did not work out.

These people kept large reindeer herds - unofficially, they did not pay any taxes.

And this was in the 1970s, in the Soviet Union - what can we say about the forests of Brazil.

- Why do some traditional tribes still do not want to join modern civilization, what are their motives?

—

Because they know what happened to those who joined.

These people become impoverished, drink too much, lumpenize, lose their culture and traditions.

Most of them live poorly in modern civilization.

So representatives of conditionally non-contact tribes are by no means fools.

On the contrary, they quite consciously prefer to preserve their way of life and customs.

Especially since some of these customs may not please white people very much.

For example, back in the middle of the last century, it was customary for representatives of the Fore tribe living in New Guinea not to bury their dead, but to eat them.

This became known when the American physician Daniel Gajdusek investigated the mechanism of the spread of Kuru disease among this tribe.

It turned out that the disease spread precisely through eating the human brain.

• Fore boy suffering from the last stage of Kuru disease

• © Liberski PP/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0

In addition, many aboriginal tribes do not have immunity to pathogens that are common among us.

This may also be the reason why these people do not want to contact civilization - they already know that this can threaten them with new, deadly ailments for them.

At the same time, such tribes can even trade with the outside world - most often through neighbors, but at the same time maintain their traditional way of life.

In the 1950s, I was with an expedition in Vietnam, we visited the local Xacau tribe, they had contacts with the outside world - about once a month these people descended from the mountains, left the forests to sell their products at the local fair.

However, at the same time, they practically did not use purchased items - except perhaps men.

And women continued to wear only homespun clothes.

And they knew only their own language - the language of puok.

Only the elder spoke Thai, thanks to which it was possible to communicate somehow.

- That is, in general, there are many tribes that have preserved the primitive way of life, although not all of them are non-contact?

- Recently, it is the non-contact tribes that are becoming less and less.

But even 60-70 years ago, when I started my scientific career as a junior researcher, there were quite a lot of non-contact communities.

I worked

in Vietnam, in India, in Chukotka, in Taimyr, where in the most remote places people still lived who refused to be connected with modern civilization.

Now such groups have survived only in the dense forests of Brazil or the distant highlands of New Guinea, but few.

Because after such a tribe makes contact, a mass pilgrimage of curious tourists begins to it.

- How different are the ways of various aboriginal non-contact tribes?

Or do they all lead a similar lifestyle?

— Of course, the differences are very strong.

But there are also similar features for all - for example, almost all such tribes are already engaged in agriculture.

There are not so many hunter-gatherers left in their pure form, although they exist.

An example is the Hadza tribe that lives in Tanzania.

But they are constantly pressed by neighbor farmers, reducing their hunting territory, although the Hadza are under state protection.

The Hadza themselves do not want to switch to agriculture and cattle breeding.

In fact, the Australian Aborigines could not fully switch to a modern way of life either.

Yes, they have been dressing in factory clothes for a long time, living in houses that the authorities helped them build, receiving benefits ... But most of them do not work, they are very poor, drunkenness is widespread among them - which, of course, was not in the primitive state.

• A young Hadza hunter

• Gettyimages.ru

• © chuvipro

In India, aboriginal primitive tribes lead a different way of life.

Someone is gradually turning into ordinary Hindus, like neighbors, moving on to agriculture.

True, farmers from such people are usually bad, they collect insignificant crops.

And so many are simply hired as laborers to their neighbors.

They live in reed huts, part of their food is collected in the forest ... Women wrap themselves in rags, and men wear shorts picked up somewhere in a landfill.

The government forbids them to hunt with bows, because the surrounding forests have been declared a nature reserve.

So these people are left to hunt with a slingshot.

If such a man sees a rat, he will pick up a pebble and shoot from a slingshot, very accurately.

And then this rat will be fried and eaten.

This is how many tribes live that have made contact with a civilized society.

In an even worse situation is the Ik tribe, which lives in Central Africa.

The authorities forbid them to hunt, because there are protected forests with rare species of animals nearby.

The climate in that area is arid, so the tribe is gradually simply dying of hunger.

— Are the languages ​​of such tribes similar to modern languages?

- No, these are very peculiar languages, as a rule.

For example, they have limited numerals - for example, they can only count up to 60. And when you ask a representative of such a tribe why only up to 60, he may answer that this is the maximum number of pigs one family can keep.

And there is nothing more to consider and there is no need.

And, as a rule, in contact with modern languages, such primitive languages ​​change rapidly.

For example, I observed this among the Eskimos.

When faced with the outside world, they did not stop speaking their language, only its syntax began to resemble that of English more and more.

That is, complex multi-part words that were characteristic of speech in its primitive state are replaced by simple analytical constructions that are characteristic of the languages ​​of highly developed societies.

• Gettyimages.ru

• © Ignacio Palacios

- Sometimes there is a point of view according to which the life of primitive hunters is healthier and somewhat more comfortable than the life of farmers and pastoralists.

Is it so?

- Yes.

But only such a life is twice as short.

Because such tribes have no, even primitive medicine - only witchcraft and shamanism, and some herbs.

For example, when I worked in Chukotka, among the Chukchi and Eskimos, a 50-year-old person was already considered an old man, few lived to 60.

True, for the sake of justice, I will say that in the conditions of modern civilization, not all men live longer.

As for peoples with a primitive way of life, some of them also eat specifically - in our north, for example, fermented meat was the basis of the diet.

This is not very useful, so stomach cancer is common in these peoples.

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- How do such closed communities manage to maintain a population for thousands of years, why do genetic diseases not accumulate in it?

- In reality, the life of such closed groups is by no means always associated with some kind of degeneration.

I can give such an example - one group of polar Eskimos has long since strayed from the general population, settled in the very north of Greenland.

They were discovered about 200 years ago - by that time, these Eskimos had even forgotten that there were other people, they considered themselves the only people.

The number of this group was about 300 people at the time of their discovery - but they did not degenerate.

The fact is that if there are no carriers of genetic diseases in the initial population, then negative genes will not be able to accumulate.

In animal husbandry, for example, inbreeding (imbreeding - crossing animals that are closely related. -

) lines may not degenerate for centuries.

– What does the study of such peoples give to science in general for understanding the social structure of our modern society, the psychology of modern people?

“Actually, it doesn’t really do anything.

To understand the psychology of modern people, you need to study modern people.

As for the social structure, it is approximately the same for all people - the top and the exploited masses.

In modern people, this takes modern forms, and among primitive tribes, the role of the top is played by leaders - as a rule, they are those who can arrange a big feast for their fellow tribesmen.

Such people, of course, have no division into such strata as nobles or slaves, for example.

However, all the same, in each tribe there is a “chief” who is in the lead.

- That is, hierarchy is inherent in people by nature?

Yes, since the earliest times.

Even in the very small groups that anthropologists found in the jungle, there was still a leader.

Yes, he could bring a lot of benefits to his relatives - due to experience, intelligence, dexterity.

But he still became a leader for his own benefit - not disinterestedly.

Why is modern science studying these tribes, what does it give scientists?

“Firstly, this is done out of a general desire for new knowledge among people.

Secondly, in the customs and norms of such peoples and tribes, we can find those mechanisms of tolerance, human mutual assistance and the ability to compromise, which are so lacking in modern civilization with its technocratic and mercantile tendencies.