> when they boarded the plane back to PNG, we were the ones racked with envy – envious of their joyously interdependent community, their clear understanding of what mattered in life, their rock-solid roles, simple pleasures and ample leisure time, their lack of mortgages and debts, their indisputable “goodness.”
I call BS. This is not an honest appraisal but just a good line to spew forth at cocktail parties. Anyone who really believed this stuff would find it relatively easy to join one of these hunter gatherer tribes. (For instance, Napoleon Chagnon lived for decades amidst one of the fiercer tribes [1]. Read the first pages of his book and you'll see he wasn't much prepared for it, either. But a few iron utensils go a long way towards acquiring tribal goodwill.) Any relocation inconvenience would certainly be over-compensated by the very fundamental benefits described.
I couldn't agree more. They don't have mortgages and debts, but my god, they put their life on risk every day. The homicide rates in New Guinea during 1960s to 1980s were really high.
Two standout scenes for me. First, gazing out from the London Eye over a skyline filled with incredible feats of engineering, the chief is bemused - because our money houses are so much bigger than our spirit houses.
Second, entering the main spirit house itself (St. Paul's cathedral) - after establishing that their women won't be struck dead for entering such a holy place - the tribespeople encounter, seemingly for the first time, the glories of neoclassical Western sculpture, art, architecture. They caress the faces carved from marble and stone, dance with pure delight between the soaring Corinthian columns. They explain how such impossibly beautiful things could only have been created by God, and have obviously been part of the world from the very beginning.
Ever since watching this series, I've tried to look at my city with the same combination of cynicism and amazement.
There's also a bittersweet segment where the chief of the tribe is dumbfounded that he's not allowed to drop in on the "big chief" - Queen Elizabeth II.
I feel bad for the commenters that feel they need to step on it, just because it's a bit heavy on the "noble savage" meme here and there.
A culture very different from ours is always like a mirror. And it's much more virtuous to describe the difference in terms of what is good, than how we are better. That doesn't mean you'd immediately want to switch places with them.
"If you like X so much, why don't you go live there?" is the reaction of a small-minded person that feels threatened just because something very different and alien to them is described as "also very beautiful".
I even see this reaction happening between two different Western cultures.
And yes, "we" also got quite a few really good things compared to them. More than just feathered arrows, even :-)
The last time I heard, people in New Guinea do regular trading with outsiders to acquire living-essential goods such as guns, machetes and VCDs. This is globalization.
Internet access of some kind or another can be found almost everywhere in the world now. It might have been from a cell phone or a shared computer at some nearby town. The point is, I don't think it matters where or how any more.
That's insignificant in light of the real sea-change, which is that almost anyone in the alive can.
I call BS. This is not an honest appraisal but just a good line to spew forth at cocktail parties. Anyone who really believed this stuff would find it relatively easy to join one of these hunter gatherer tribes. (For instance, Napoleon Chagnon lived for decades amidst one of the fiercer tribes [1]. Read the first pages of his book and you'll see he wasn't much prepared for it, either. But a few iron utensils go a long way towards acquiring tribal goodwill.) Any relocation inconvenience would certainly be over-compensated by the very fundamental benefits described.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon