May 30, 2008 by Mirjam Hirch.

This is not their story. Nor is it good news to the people the media reports concern.
The coverage of a recent fly-over of a remote part of the Amazon rainforest during which members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes were spotted is all about chasing ratings by European media.

What about the key principles of good reports such as sensitivity and accuracy? Not a lot of these can be discerned in the articles on the newly “discovered” tribe.
Certainly the pictures of and reports about the tribe could be a great chance to highten the awareness of the world to the plight of indigenous tribes. However, there is little to thoroughly inform and educate the civilized world about the true situation of indigenous peoples. Quite the contrary, the common notion of the soon to be extinct indigenous tribes is promoted as, even though very sad, simply inevitable.

In Germany people were sending around pictures of the Amazonian tribe today like trophies of the exotic. The need was expressed that anthropologists should immedialtely research and study the tribe to satisfy the readers’ curiosity. No question was raised about whether the tribe maybe might not want this to happen. The common understanding being one of the tribes as the primitives „we“ cannot put in control of their own lives.
Strangely enough the so-called “primitives” appear so much more healthy and strong than their obese and diseased counterparts in the western world.

What is clear in this is that to uncontacted tribes reports about their existence often equals sure destruction and death, seeing friends and families die at the hands of outsiders, in genocidal massacres or epidemics, as well as long-term annihilation of their cultures through self-destructive coping methods such as substance abuse and suicide.

It is high time we get the real news and true reasons for and interests in specific developmental efforts and what they mean for regional tribes. If we want to go beyond sensationalism we need to fight for the survival of every single indigenous culture ensuring that indigenous territory is protected in accordance with international law.

Technorati-Tags: media, education, uncontacted tribes

Posted in Artby - Mirjam Hirch, Media, Daily | Print | No Comments »

May 30, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In the early years of post-communist totalitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, brutal violence against ethnic minorities like the Roma (Gypsies) was almost commonplace. In Romania, for instance, police assisted murderous mobs — numbering in the hundreds — while they committed calculated attacks and arsons all over the country. The desire for ethnic cleansing was proudly proclaimed by many throughout the region, not just in the former Yugoslavia. As Isabel Fonseca wrote in her book Bury Me Standing, this epidemic constituted, “the violence of violated men”.

Writers like Malcolm Gladwell (Damaged) and Lloyd de Mause (The Emotional Life of Nations) have cited scholarly studies demonstrating the corrosive effects of brutality on the human mind, but the long-term consequences of the psychological cruelty of totalitarian regimes is not as widely appreciated as it is in terms of phenomena like domestic violence and child abuse. Symptoms of community trauma crop up in ethnographic reports about such atrocities as aboriginal boarding schools in Canada, Australia and the US, or in medical papers on collective punishment in Palestine, but the sadism and seething hatred undergirding the resurgence of fascism in Europe is fueled by more than religious racism; it is sociopathic.

Unfortunately, this new pandemic is not limited to the geography of former dictatorships. As Hans Magnus Enzensburger, author of Civil Wars, wrote, “Those who look at globalization in purely economic terms have not understood it. Today, nothing is left that can remain separate from it, neither religion nor science, neither culture nor technology”. As the new capitalist totalitarianism, it is proving itself no less capable of producing mindless violence.

With the loss of hopes and dreams, millions more in the so-called developed world are susceptible to mobilized resentment and scapegoating. With the loss of security and identity, they are easy prey for manipulated hatred and revenge.

Ignoring the dehumanizing effects of such colossal disempowerment of humanity is a reckless luxury; in no time at all it can become catastrophic.

(Jay Taber — recipient of the Defender of Democracy award — is an author, columnist, and research analyst at Public Good Project.)

Posted in Daily | Print | No Comments »