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Traditional societies probably are not immune to mental illness, but contact with civilization has been causing indigenous mass-suicides and a stupendously high individual suicide rate at least here in Brazil, besides extreme poverty, discrimination and drug abuse that generally plague integrated indigenous populations worldwide. I suspect everyone is better-off in intermittent contact regimes, with indigenous populations getting tools but keeping dominion over their territory. Land use is a key issue, even doing something simple as opening up a road leads to poo poo like illegal logging, hunting and in lots of cases an expansion of the agribusiness frontier, all of which generally end badly for the locals. On traditional (as in millenia-old and not "new age") medicine, a tribe in the peruvian amazon that has put together a 500 page encyclopedia of medicinal rainforest plants is a pretty good example of what sort of knowledge is lost by "integrating" populations. It may not follow western typology, but this basic knowledge of what plant does what has been filtered through many generations of people living there and figuring it out by experience, which narrows the search for potential new medical compounds still undiscovered in the rainforest. So yeah, I guess forced education is pretty horrible because it paves over cultures that have formed over hundreds of years and in return gives the "educated" one of the most miserable and discriminated positions in modern society. Maybe we should try instead to treat them as fellow autonomous human beings and holders of knowledge worthy of respect. But we're probably gonna extinguish them all anyway.
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Oct 8, 2015 16:38
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Adar posted:Intermittent contact is probably "best" in the short term (again, we're avoiding the everyone dead from measles thing here) but in the long run for every hundred people saved from a moderate fever or a stomach cramp by a plant the tribe will lose as many to everything from Hodgkin's to the local guinea worm equivalent to haemochromatosis. You won't see them die but that doesn't make them less dead. Well, they do manage to survive in one of the most hazardous environments for human beings so that's got to count for something. But yeah it's ultimately not about them being uncorrupted or noble or something like that. That's just moralizing navel-gazing by "civilized" people about their own perceived corruption, plastering romantizations over a "natural" other. In the end it's about indigenous people's rights as autonomous groups of human beings.
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Oct 8, 2015 19:37
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