Pablo Nogueira
Until recently the Awá-Guajá tribe were one of the last indigenous peoples in Brazil to lead a fully nomadic life, surviving through hunting and gathering. There may be about 60 uncontacted Awá-Guajá still at large in a protected area of the rainforest, but most of the other 300 live in three reservations, where they are learning to adapt to village life and practise agriculture—with difficulty.
Brazil has an indigenous population of 460,000. They are the responsibility of FUNAI—the National Indian Foundation— which demarcates and protects their land, most of which is in the Amazon, and supports villages from a series of nearby “posts.” These pictures were taken at Juriti post in the northern state of Maranhao, next to a village that is home to 37 Awá-Guajá. Juriti’s administrator, Patrilino Viana, helps them grow crops, especially the starchy root vegetable manioc, or cassava. But it’s an uphill battle. Many families disappear for days back into the forest, surviving on fruit and hunting monkey, tapir and wild birds with rifles or bows and arrows.
The Awá-Guajá traditionally lived in small communities of up to 30, avoiding stronger tribes and white men, who in the past often killed them. In the 1970s the construction of a railroad devastated their territory. FUNAI tried to gather together the native population and settle them near the posts, but more than two thirds of the Awá-Guajá died, victims of malaria and flu.
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Philip Ball
A ray of hope for astronomers
Having come to expect bad news, British astronomers were given a ray of hope in February, when the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) reversed its decision to withdraw from the Gemini project. Gemini’s telescopes in Chile and Hawaii offer peerless views of the entire sky at visible and infrared wavelengths, and the original decision of the STFC was seen as devastating.
But sadly it’s now business as usual, as the STFC has said that the e-Merlin project is threatened with closure even before it starts. e-Merlin is an upgrade of Merlin, a system that sends the signals of six radio telescopes around Britain by radio link-up to Jodrell Bank near Manchester. The new system will replace the radio links with optical cables, which will be faster and able to carry more data. It will boost the sensitivity of observations by a factor of 30, revealing things which cannot be seen at present—for example, how discs of dust around stars evolve into planetary systems.
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Cheryll Barron
No one could have believed what lay in her future when I met Aung San Suu Kyi, the leading opponent of Burma’s military junta, at a London wedding in the 1980s. “Fragile” and “exquisite” were the adjectives that came to mind—a tiny, straight-backed Asian Audrey Hepburn floating in a close-fitting costume of plain gold silk that began at her neck and skimmed her ankles.
But it is apt that the unofficial head of Burma’s democratic movement should be a woman. Unlike Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Suu Kyi’s position is not quite as anomalous in contemporary Burma—even if the decades of dictatorship have been regressive for women’s equality (a small, token number of Buddhist nuns were the only women to join the recent demonstrations).
Because Burma has mostly been ignored by western academics in its decades of seclusion, most western analysis of its core culture—an Indo-Chinese melting pot—is old. But since the country is scarcely modernised, that research still reliably represents basic attitudes. Traditional Burmese or “customary” law, which modern statutes reflect, treats men and women as equals in virtually every respect, even if it is ignored, when inconvenient, by Than Shwe, head of the military junta, and his henchmen.
The 1959 Encyclopaedia Britannica says that, “Burmese women enjoy an amount of freedom unusual in non-European races.” In fact, for centuries, they were actually more independent than western women—and even than women in other predominantly Buddhist southeast Asian countries, who benefited indirectly from the Buddha’s subversion of Hindu caste and other social strictures.
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Roger Scruton
Discuss this article at First Drafts , Prospect’s editorial blog
It is not surprising that decent, sceptical people, observing the revival in our time of superstitious cults, the conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderousness of radical Islamism, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others. The “sleep of reason” has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting from their pulpits?
What is a little more surprising is the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos—beliefs that, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation. Thus Hitchens, in his relentlessly one-sided diatribe God is Not Great, writes: “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody… had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs).”
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Geoff Mulgan
Few thinkers have changed how we see the world; even fewer have changed how we think about how we see the world. Mary Douglas, who has died aged 86, is one of the rare exceptions. Her field was culture, but she was as unlike the stereotypical cultural studies academic as one could imagine. A devout Catholic, she spent the last few decades in an extraordinary flowering of inquiry that is now providing insights in fields as diverse as the study of the Old Testament and the politics of climate change.
Douglas’s theoretical apparatus allowed her to think in original ways about almost any topic. In a lecture earlier this year at the Young Foundation, she discussed “enclaves,” the small groups which at their most extreme become terrorist cells. Where others emphasise their strengths, she emphasised their weaknesses: how prone they are to splits and sectarianism, and how hard it is for their founders to enforce rules. To survive, enclaves create around themselves what Douglas called a “wall of virtue”—the sense that they alone uphold justice, while all around them are suspect—yet the very thing that bonds them together encourages individuals within them to compete to demonstrate their own virtue and the failings of their peers. The only thing that can override this fragility is fear of the outside world—and so sects, whether political or religious, peaceful or violent, feed off the hostility of outsiders, using it to reinforce their own solidarity. The implication is clear for western governments: in the long term, defeating terrorism depends on ratcheting fear down, not up, dismantling the “walls of virtue” rather than attacking them head on with declarations of war.
Douglas’s work has set in motion important new schools of thought. Perhaps the most fertile of these is now being used to make sense of why so many well-intentioned policies fail, and why some others succeed even though they appear to work less well on paper. Her starting point is a deceptively simple framework she has repeatedly used to make sense of organisations and societies. It should be part of the mental furniture of any educated person, like the laws of supply and demand in economics, or the laws of thermodynamics.
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Adam Kuper
Clifford Geertz, who died last month at the age of 80 of complications following heart surgery, was perhaps the most celebrated anthropologist of a distinguished generation that included Ernest Gellner and Mary Douglas. However, Gellner and Douglas always regarded themselves as social scientists. Geertz switched sides and became the prophet of a radical new humanism.
Geertz began his professional career as a graduate student in an interdisciplinary social science programme that Talcott Parsons had set up at Harvard. Parsons elected anthropology to be the handmaiden of sociology. It should treat the collective ideas and values that Parsons called culture. After all, people often behaved irrationally, to the despair of economists and policymakers. The job of anthropologists was to decode their symbolic statements, find out what they believed and so explain why they made irrational choices. This was particularly relevant to the study of the new states that emerged after the second world war, where culture seemed to be the main roadblock to rational political modernisation and economic “take-off” (a rocket-ship metaphor much in vogue at the time).
In 1951, Geertz went to the new state of Indonesia as a member of an interdisciplinary Harvard team. He and his wife Karen Blu carried out two years of field research in Java, and his initial conclusions were optimistic. Traditional cultural patterns could adjust to the demands of development. “Indonesia is now, by all the signs and portents, in the midst of such a pre-take-off period,” he wrote in 1963, and he claimed to see “the beginnings of a fundamental transformation in social values and institutions toward patterns we generally associate with a developed economy.”
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Ray Pahl
In his case for a “progressive nationalism,” David Goodhart argues that it may be “the last resting place for the communal commitments that the left holds dear.” He states, as if it were a truth universally acknowledged, that old sources of loyalty are in retreat and that the shared experience that “creates real communities” is being undermined by affluence, mobility and individualism.
It is a platitude among social anthropologists that “anthropologically speaking there is no ‘representative Britain.’ Likewise there is no necessary ‘whole’ to British life,” as Nigel Rapport remarked in his introduction to British Subjects (2002). Few would deny that the British nation state is a very odd kind of beast compared with other large European countries. Our “United” Kingdom produces four separate rugby union teams to engage in the same tournament. The defeat of England’s football team by Portugal in the World Cup gave much pleasure to many in Scotland. Until recently, part of Britain was riven by a civil war which at its height produced a ferocious attempt to blow up the British government. After the riots in a number of northern English towns in 2001, a government-commissioned inquiry concluded that Britain was a “deeply divided country.” Do we truly imagine that such divisions have now disappeared?
As GK Chesterton remarked, “For anything to be real, it must be local.” Evidently, a Lithuanian migrant working in Aberdeen will have a very different experience of the host society from a newly arrived Bangladeshi in Tower Hamlets, a Pakistani in Bradford or a Turk in Stoke Newington. The immigrant taxi driver in Newport who much prefers the “atmosphere” there to working in Cardiff is recognising the practical significance of local variations. Britain is a community of communities. Indeed, it might be claimed, following the classic work of anthropologists such as EE Evans-Pritchard or Max Gluckman, that our social cohesion comes from “the peace in the feud.” It is the differences—or perhaps even the conflicts—that paradoxically produce solidarities and social glue. And people seem to enjoy perpetuating these differences. Years ago, taking an adult education class in the Fens, I was surprised to be told that the community was held together by its bitter opposition to another place a few miles away that had “fought on the other side during the war.” This, it emerged, was a reference to the English civil war.
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Adam Kuper
To Chirac’s surprise, anthropologists did not applaud this new relativism. They were particularly unhappy with the use of the term “primitive.” It was insulting. It was also difficult, if not impossible, to define. They were not mollified when the president suggested an alternative designation—the Musée des Arts Premières. Was he perhaps confusing an ethnographic showcase with a museum of upper Palaeolithic archaeology? Nor were they persuaded that the modern European notion of “art” was an appropriate description for the fabrics, stools, decorations, weapons and canoes that Chirac wished to put on display. Finally, they pointed out, Paris already had two museums, established in the colonial period, which performed similar—and now surely anachronistic—functions. These were the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the world-famous Musée de l’Homme, with its fine ethnographic collection.
This last argument did not trouble the president. He simply closed down the other two museums and appropriated their collections for his new $300m monument. And while he was impatiently waiting for the scholars to come to their senses, he obliged the Louvre to devote its Pavillon des Sessions to an exhibition of 120 works of African, Asian, American and Oceanic art assembled by his favourite dealer Jacques Kerchache. The president overrode the objections of the curators that the Louvre was, after all, dedicated to the highest achievements of western civilisation. And he waved away anthropologists who enquired what, precisely, the arts of Africa, the Americas and Oceania had in common—aside, of course, from their now taboo designation as primitive.
The president did concede one point. The label “primitive art” was abandoned, and the euphemism “first art” more reluctantly dropped. In the end, his monument became simply the Musée du Quai Branly. Chirac modestly admits that should a future occupant of the Elysée wish to change the name to the Jacques Chirac Museum, he would consider it a great honour. But the absence of a name did not distract the architect, Jean Nouvel, from his task. He understood very well the message that the museum was intended to convey. Indeed, he has set it in stone. His building invites the visitor to explore an unspoiled tropical paradise.
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AS Byatt
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert
(Faber and Faber, £14.99)
EO Wilson, comparing human and ant societies, observed that all human societies had some form of religion. Like Richard Dawkins, Wilson grew up in a believing society—in his autobiography he describes his conversion, and his overturning of it. As a young woman, I thought I lived in a sceptical, pragmatic society, and was shocked to be told the percentage of believing Christians in the US, and subsequently surprised and curious to meet believing Marxists and believing psychoanalytic patients. When I read Lewis Wolpert’s Unnatural Nature of Science, I was largely convinced by it, having come to the conclusion that humans are not mainly interested in reason.
There has recently been a rush of interest among scientists, social scientists, philosophers and journalists in the origins and social structures of belief—and some attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation of the phenomenon as a helpful adaptation. Examples include Robin Dunbar’s thoughtful study in the New Scientist of the hypothetical origins of religion, next to Alison Motluk’s look at the neuroscience of believing and forgetting. And Daniel Dennett has just published his new study, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
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John Hemming
In 1972, I was part of the first group to make contact with the Suruí people of central Brazil. They were bewildered and apprehensive but – as feared warriors – put on a show of cocky bravado. Totally naked, the Suruí would slip unscathed through forests that had whites hacking with machetes at every step, or would race across patches of savannah with deer-like bounds. They had been contacted by Apoena Meirelles, a young man whose tousled hair, black moustache and political intensity made him look like a Californian anti-war radical, but who was one of Brazil’s elite sertanistas – Indian experts empowered to lead expeditions to make first contact with unknown peoples. This was achieved by a combination of woodsmanship – locating signs of the target tribe in the endless expanses of tropical rivers and forests; the bait of presents – particularly metal cutting tools that were irresistible in that world of exuberant vegetation; and, finally, patience – waiting for months or years for the Indians to decide on a face to face meeting. The Suruí contact eventually happened at one of their paths, a place where the Brazilian government team built huts and settled down to wait. Once the traumatic meeting had been achieved, it was several weeks before these warriors allowed Meirelles to visit their village and see their women and children.
Soon after my visit the Suruí underwent a hideous baptism into modern society. They were hit by an epidemic of measles, a disease to which these super-fit people had no inherited immunity. So the Suruí died in droves. All tribes are small – as hunter-gatherers they have to keep villages below a thousand people or they exhaust surrounding game, fish and forest resources. But measles and pulmonary diseases killed over half these people in a few months. The elderly were particularly vulnerable, and with them went their understanding of tribal mythology, heritage, shamanism and plant properties. The survivors were grief-stricken by a tragedy that was clearly linked to the contact. On the Brazilian side there was despair at this failure, with bitter recriminations about lack of medical back-up and botched inoculations.
Fast forward to 1985. A delegation of Suruí went to Brasília to lobby their congressman for legal protection of their lands. For me, seeing this pre-stone-age people at the time of first contact was an extraordinary experience; but their transformation in half a generation was even more astounding. With coaching from Meirelles and sympathetic anthropologists, some young Suruí had learned passable Portuguese, acquired clothing, and been introduced to transport, housing, cities and other trappings of modern society. More importantly, they had grasped the concepts of ownership (even of land), of law (the invisible force that could control their primeval forests), and of political power (wielded by strange chiefs in that distant capital city). A mere 13 years since first contact, this represented a staggering learning curve. The delegation performed well, with dignity, and achieved a legally protected reserve for their territory.
The Suruí tribe is one of 218 still functioning in Brazil. Every indigenous people has to undergo the same perilous transition, but each case is different. The process of change varies: some were first encountered in the 16th century while others are, amazingly, still uncontacted. Geography is all-important. Is a group’s habitat open savannah, campo cerrado scrubland, forest or riverine (and, if so, exposed near the main Amazon, or isolated far up one of its tributaries)? Location is equally significant. Do the Indians live on the Atlantic seaboard, or near the westward-expanding colonisation frontier, or (like the Suruí) in the path of a “penetration” road, close to modern towns, or deep in rainforests that Europeans find so daunting? Are its lands backwoods sertão, or do they contain something to attract greedy outsiders? In the 19th century, rubber trees were a magnet for adventurers. Another important lure has been minerals – particularly gold, diamonds, iron and cassiterite for tin. The agent of contact is also crucial. Is it a government team like that of Apoena Meirelles, or a group of missionaries (and if so, how fundamentalist?), road-builders, ranchers, poor settlers, wildcat prospectors, skin-hunters, loggers, or other adventurers who tend to shoot first when they see an Indian?
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