Even in the 21st century there are tribes largely untouched by modern civilisation. What does their future hold, asks Aengus Collins
On January 27th this year, two Indian fishermen were killed on North Sentinel Island, a tiny territory off the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The previous night they had anchored their boat well away from the island's shore but overnight their anchor had come loose.
The men, reportedly drunk on palm wine, were unaware as their boat bobbed its way into shallow waters.
The following morning the men were attacked and killed by members of the Sentinelese tribe, which has lived on the island for upwards of 60,000 years. Almost untouched by what we would refer to as civilisation, the Sentinelese history of contact with the outside world is almost entirely hostile. When the Indian coast guard sent a helicopter to recover the fishermen's bodies, it was forced to turn back after the Sentinelese attacked it with arrows.
Despite rapid urbanisation, the world remains home to a huge number of tribal peoples. Survival International, a London-based non-governmental organisation which campaigns for tribal land rights, estimates that 150 million people still live in tribal societies across more than 60 countries.
The numbers used to be much greater. Before the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago, for instance, there were more than 1,000 indigenous Indian tribes in Brazil, with a total population estimated at upwards of 5 million. There are now 200 tribes, with a combined population of just 350,000.
Many contemporary tribes remain in danger, says Stephen Corry, Survival International's director. The colonial era may be over, he says, but the mindset that sustained it continues to determine attitudes towards the rights of tribal peoples. Survival's policy is simple - tribal peoples should be given land rights to vouchsafe their freedom to live as they wish, even if their choices clash with mainstream ideas about civilisation and modernity.
Survival works with 80 tribes in 34 countries. "We focus on the most isolated peoples," says Corry, "the ones who still live most closely to their own way of life. Typically these tribes are very small, which makes them very vulnerable. They are just about the only peoples on earth faced with complete destruction." Most of the tribes that Survival deals with still live as hunter-gatherers - a pre-agricultural way of life that started disappearing many thousands of years ago, at the end of the Palaeolithic era.
Their dwellings tend to be temporary or semi-permanent, built to last as little as a few days, no more than a few years. Above all, says Corry, contemporary tribal peoples remain inextricably tied to their ancestral territories.
"It always comes back to the land," he continues. "It provides all their food. It provides all their building materials. And they have an immense spiritual connection to it." Much of Survival's work is devoted to awareness-raising activities.
"The way people think about tribal peoples needs to change," says Corry. "Opinion needs to shift in the same way it did with slavery." A high-profile campaign in recent months has sought to end the use of terms such as "stone age", "primitive" and "savage" to describe contemporary tribes' ways of life.
But Survival also campaigns in support of individual tribes facing crisis, and acts as an advocate for the interests of tribal peoples whose lands or way of life are being threatened. To return to the Sentinelese example, Survival argues that the tribe should be left to the isolation it has so vigorously defended over many centuries.
In the past, others have sought to establish contact with the Sentinelese. Up until the mid-1990s, the Indian government conducted a series of tentative "contact expeditions". Boats travelled to North Sentinel Island and tried gradually to win the tribe's trust by leaving coconuts and other gifts. For some time these visits met with hostility, but in 1991 the first recorded friendly contact between Sentinelese tribes people and outsiders took place. Islanders waded out to a dinghy to take coconuts directly from their visitors.
TN PANDIT, A scholar of the Andaman Islands and of the Sentinelese tribe, would have been on that dinghy but for a family emergency that caused him to send two assistants in his place. A few weeks later, though, Pandit too had his long-awaited encounter with the Sentinelese. Recounting the events to The American Scholar some years later, Pandit's words revealed his personal joy at the occasion, but more so than that a strange complacency about the fate of a culture he had devoted so much energy to studying.
"That they voluntarily came forward to meet us - it was unbelievable," he said. "But there was this feeling of sadness also - I did feel it.
"And there was the feeling that at a larger scale of human history, these people who were holding back, holding on, ultimately had to yield. It's like an era in history gone. The islands have gone. Until the other day, the Sentinelese were holding the flag, unknown to themselves. They were being heroes. But they have also given up.
"They would not have survived forever - that, I can reason out. Even destruction takes place in the natural course of things; no one can help it, it happens. But here we have been doing it in a very conscious way, knowing full well what the consequences could be."
This is precisely the kind of attitude that Stephen Corry abhors.
"One of the things we don't accept," he says, "is that civilisation is an unstoppable bulldozer. There are simple things that can be done to allow tribal peoples to live their lives the way they want to. If you give them the right to stay on their lands then 90 per cent of the problems we deal with would be solved."
For Pandit, there seems to have been a sort of noble beauty in the idea that a tribal culture with a history stretching back millennia might finally have given itself up to civilisation. It hasn't quite worked out that way, though. The coconut-giving trips were halted in 1996, and the occasional interactions between Sentinelese and outsiders more recently seem to have reverted to the hostile norm. In addition to killing the two fishermen earlier this year, it was the Sentinelese who tried to shoot down helicopters surveying the damage caused to the Andamans by the 2004 tsunami.
THE CRITICISM THAT'S most often levelled against Survival International and similar organisations is that they romanticise the way tribal people live their lives, and end up depriving them of many of the opportunities that we take for granted. How are we to balance the values of "our" cultures with those of tribal cultures? Unfortunately, much-needed discussion of this question is often drowned out by intemperate language that dominates this debate - "primitive" and "stone age" on one side, "racism" and "slavery" on the other.
In practice, though, ad hoc compromises work themselves out on the ground when the principals are left to their own devices. A modest example - steel machetes bought in from mainstream communities are now seen as an essential good by many tribes. Others, such as the Yanomami in Brazil, says Corry, have their own schools and medical centres.
Constructive interactions between tribal and mainstream ways of life can't be regulated or planned for. But they do depend on a significant degree of self-determination for tribal peoples. Critics of Survival are right to point out that group rights such as those being claimed for tribal peoples are fraught with complications. But it would be churlish not to acknowledge that a presumption of some such group rights is the most reasonable starting point in this debate.
As Corry puts it, almost in passing: "All we're saying is that they should be allowed to decide on their interactions with mainstream society."