On the weekend we saw the documentary film Up the Yangzte where Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang goes on a journey of discovery back to the setting whence his grandfather came. The film is not about the Yangtze as such. Rather the Yangtze and the Three Gorges Dam, then filling with water, form a backdrop to a look inside the Chinese modernisation dream.
There are plenty of negatives about the Three Gorges project, including environmental concerns, the destruction of local cultural and archaeological sites and the relocation of 1.13 million people. Yet as the peasant family central to the film stoically relocate their worldly possessions literally carrying them up the hill on their backs there is an acceptance of progress and an understanding of the importance of the project to the country.
The film is not about the worth of the project as such; nor does it attempt to give a summative view of its impact on the local people. It is clear, though, that a small minority are called upon to make considerable sacrifices for the good of the many. The clash of interests is much starker in the case of the Dongria Kondh tribespeople of Orissa, India whose sacred mountain is to be scraped bare of its rich deposits of bauxite. They say they will “fight to the death rather than leave their sacred home”.
It does appear that it is a situation without middle ground. On the one hand if the bauxite is there then it must be mined. Bauxite is of course refined to produce aluminium and after all people everywhere need wrappers for their lollies, packets for their chips, industry needs the light metal for boats, cars and aeroplanes and a thousand other applications. Moreover Orissa is a poor but resource-rich state so development and jobs are a necessity.
On the other hand we have a genuinely primitive people in the sense that their culture is pre-industrial with an animist religion.
Every hill is home to its own god.
“Niyam Raja is our supreme god. His name means Lord of Law, he made all things,” explains Jitu. “Niyamgiri mountain is the most important place for Dongria Kondh people, it is like Niyam Rajah’s temple, that is why our people worship nature, they have to protect nature.”
To rip up their sacred hill would be to the Dongria Kondh an act of violent terrorism, an existential threat.
I think it was John Gray who pointed out the nasty side of the concept of ‘tolerance’ as commonly practiced. The beliefs of others can be tolerated if they cause no harm but underneath lies the notion that such beliefs are actually mistaken and without rational support.
There is a world of difference between tolerance in this sense and genuine respect. If both governments concerned and the courts genuinely respected the Dongria Kondh and their beliefs the bauxite would stay in the ground.
I must remember that I only have some press reports to go on. It seems that the court originally knocked back the mining proposal.
The Supreme Court said it could not take “the risk” of handing over what it said was an important national asset to a company.
But the Court asked the company* to submit a plan with greater protection of the tribespeople’s rights. This of course assumes a Western liberal notion of rights-bearing individuals. The Court should be protecting them not just their rights.
Whatever the wisdom* contained in the company submission and the court decision it’s clear the Dongria Kondh didn’t appreciate it.
* The company is the UK firm Vedanta Resources which has most of its assets in India, hence Vedanta.
“There is a world of difference between tolerance in this sense and genuine respect.”
Yes, but I think the implication is the opposite of that you claim. On pragmatic grounds (getting along with people, wanting reciprocal tolerance for my own errors, learning from others what my errors are) I am tolerant of superstition. But I am also unashamedly disrespectful of it - if I think it error, I think it error. And there is no reason why I should respect an ancient superstition more than a modern one.
The only value of any culture is in the welfare of the people practicing it - it is not something valuable in its own right apart from that as it has no existence apart from those people. So really this case comes down to utilitarian arguments about which is the “greater good”.
Yes, dd, but I’m not prepared to assert that my own world view is not in error. And how is this judged? We assume that industrial society is a good thing, and possibly it is for our species, but in view of global warming and climate change I’m inclined to think it’s a bit too early to say.
In terms of balance and sustainably within the biosphere a case can be made that the animism of the Dongria Kondh is superior to our relationship with the rest of the biosphere.
On utilitarian grounds I think the greatest good for the greatest number has to be balanced by the injunction to do no harm. Also the role of governments is to protect the weak and marginalised, surely.
It always astonishes me when smart and educated people start romanticising pre-industrial life.
What, exactly, was more “sustainable” about it? Why do you think they had a superior relationship with the biosphere?
To answer these questions, one might ask the Maori about the sustainability of their moa hunting practices:
“The Māori arrived sometime before A.D. 1300, and all moa genera were soon driven to extinction by hunting and, to a lesser extent, forest clearance. By about A.D. 1400 all moa are generally thought to have become extinct, along with the Haast’s Eagle which had relied on them for food. Recent research using carbon-14 dating of middens strongly suggests that this took less than a hundred years.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa
One might also inquire into the fate of the big animals of Europe once neolithic man arrived. Or ponder the sustainability of one early Native American hunting method: driving entire herds of mammoths or bison over a cliff. One could go on and on …
The Industrial Revolution did not cause any revolution in human psychology. Pre-industrial human beings were just as greedy, rapacious, and short-sighted as we are.
The difference is that we can cause damage to the environment on an industrial scale — but we can also repair it on an industrial scale, using the fruits of science and technology, while enjoying a vastly better standard of living.
I hope the Dongria Kondh and the company find some accomodation over the mountain. But sorry, economic development must continue, particularly in a country with such great poverty.
And anyway, if the Niyam Raja is a “supreme god”, who “made all things”, then surely He can put a stop to the project more effectively than the Indian Supreme Court!
Brian,
From the excerpt I have seen of Up the Gorges I think you have somewhat selectively quoted. Was there not another family that swore to drown with their land?
It is also alot safer to protest in India than in China. The Chinese system is more likely to put you on trial for complaining out of turn to a foreigner. While the Indian justice system is very slow, the Chinese method of a trial and a bullet in the head has little to commend itself in comparison.
Andrew, I don’t remember the other family saying that, but I was a bit distracted during the first half hour. My wife drove us there and when we arrived, just in time as always with her, she realised she’d only brought her sunnies. She shunted me out of the car, then materialised beside me half an hour into the film.
I’m sure there were many amongst the 1.13 million who did feel they’d rather drown than move, but I suspect that their embeddedness and attachment to their natural surroundings was not as complete as the Indian tribe, and their capacity to adapt may have been accordingly greater.
Personally I don’t have enough information to know whether the decision to dam the Yangzte was acceptable. From a TV program I saw on the environmental impact I suspect it wasn’t. That’s leaving aside the human impact.
On the human impact I’m inclined to think that the Yangzte decision could have been acceptable if the people concerned were adequately compensated and given genuine opportunities for an equivalent quality of life (not easy). But in the case of the Indian tribe the attachment to place is complete and the question of compensation seems irrelevant.
Paulus, it always astonishes me when smart and educated people rationalise the direct harming of people as OK when they have to be sacrificed in the interests of the many.
There are many instances, as you say, of pre-industrial peoples harming the environment. There are also many where a kind of balance has been achieved. Some of these involve industrial farming.
In reading around a bit tonight, it does seem that the Dongria Kondh respect their environment and have lived within it sustainably for thousands of years. To say they might be able to move over the hill is facile in a country like India. Your expectation would have to be that someone is already living there, if there is a living to be made.
My assumption was that with their extreme identification with place to move them is tantamount to ethnicide. It seems that that is indeed the opinion of anthropologist Felix Padel who studied the tribe for his PhD. You nevertheless agree with Naveen Patnaik, the chief minister of Orissa state who told his legislature:
I could not make a decision that would destroy the Dongria Kondh, nor can I see how such a decision could be ethically justified. If you could, good luck to you and may you sleep well at night. It has nothing to do with romanticising pre-industrial life. Move them and your assumption must be that they will be destroyed. It’s as simple as that.
“If you could, good luck to you and may you sleep well at night. It has nothing to do with romanticising pre-industrial life. Move them and your assumption must be that they will be destroyed. It’s as simple as that.”
I would like to think that with the right assistance they would adapt and move. As sad as it is, more advanced societies without exception crush the weaker, less advanced societies. This has happened since the year dot. A good example is how the bantu speakers in Africa have displaced and destroyed their less developed, non-bantu speaking neighbours. The Kalahari Bushmen are the latest victims.
The number of extant hunter-gatherer societies can now be counted on our fingers and toes. None will see out this century.
Brian, thank you for providing that link. I’m afraid though, if anything, it strengthens my feeling about this. A few quotes:
Well, three cheers for the British Empire. Seriously. Western imperialism is much condemned these days, but people forget that it achieved some very beneficial things.
Don’t the younger generation deserve the chance of something better than this?
As I understand it, probably every Stone Age people — past or present — have some form of animistic religion that gives them a sense of a special connection to their land. The entire globe would once have been covered by peoples like the Dongria Kondh.
One after another, these were swept away by Christians, Jews, Muslims and others, often with great cruelty. But without these original tribes and their religions being pushed aside, we’d have no modern Europe or America or Australia or Middle East or Asia. We’d ALL be living in squalid huts worshipping a freaking mountain. No thanks.
I don’t mean to be rude, but what would happen if the descendants of the original owners of the land in which you now live turned up on your doorstep and said, “Our people once owned this land, and had a profound spiritual connection to it, which we would now like to reestablish. So, um, could we have it back, please?”
Oops, mis-formatted that! The last four paras are mine. (And I violated the 3 para rule too, tsk, tsk.)
Fixed, Paulus. And I’m not concerned about the 3 para rule. I’d rather you say what you want to say.
I have a lot of trouble with the notion of ‘progress’ because it’s difficult to judge except by using values embedded in our own world view and usually unexamined. Diamond details how the adoption of agriculture meant a marked reduction in nutritional standards and life expectancy in the first instance. But agriculture supported increased population, hierarchical social organisation the division of labour and ultimately modern civilisation, where eventually applied science, trade and modern market economies have allowed better nutrition, better public health, remarkably extended life expectancy and as you say a standard of living undreamed of heretofore.
Yet the impact on the biosphere has been extreme and it’s misleading, I think, to say that we can repair the environment on an industrial scale. From the viewpoint of other species monoculture is a form of extreme terrorism from which there is no return and no amount of tokenistic setting aside of ‘nature reserves’ can compensate.
Our concern, if we are to be true custodians of the planet, should take in the need for living room and an evolutionary path for the rest of the biosphere as well. People who think this way are usually branded deep greens, but I think that long term such a notion can be taken on board without a sense of religiosity; rather it’s matter of rational self-interest.
If you take this view one step further and include the non-living material world, as I think you must, then the building of dams on great rivers start to look like self-evident atrocities. Have a look at this link:
There’s no way back to the pre-industrial state, we’ve gone too far. But in shunting the Dongria Kondh we are setting aside the principle of self-determination and deciding what’s best for them, whereas in truth what motivates us is our own self-interest. So it seems to me and I don’t see any satisfactory compromise.
Sir Lord Sidney Snott, the prospects for successful relocation don’t look good. From the article I linked to on page 3 Felix Padel says:
The article continues:
This morning on Breakfast Germaine Greer was saying that all over the world the men in particular do not cope when progress meets hunter-gatherer people. I don’t know how universally accurate that is, but in this case, as I said, our expectation must be that the tribe will be destroyed and it’s hard to think that any compensation or an army of counsellors, social workers or community development officers would make any significant difference.
Is this because of the rate change required of these communities? I’d imagine there would be similar drug/alcohol abuse problems in the general community if suddenly there was a whole lot less “work” required and a relatively large increase in disposable income.
No one cares about these communities until someone wants the resources they sit on. Perhaps the transition would be more successful if started earlier and planning for gradual integration, rather than trying to preserve the communities and then at the last minute trying to convert them?
Chris (a different one), I don’t know. I haven’t the requisite expertise. I suspect that two major factors are in play. The first is an identity problem. The way such peoples see themselves and see reality is as part of the landscape, not as individualised entities that transact with the landscape and each other.
The other is that the male role within the group seems to suffer and be devalued in relation the the female role. Greer didn’t really have an explanation for why men particularly were struggling, with resultant violence and suicide.
I was pretty sure I heard her link it, in Australia particularly, to generations of sexual humiliation for the men: of seeing their women raped, whored and concubined by colonials who eventually sent the women back to the tribe with children who hadn’t been fathered by the tribesmen. The women who have to nurture the children get on with it and find a certain meaning in it, the men feel lost because so many of the children of their womenfolk are not their own bloodlines. The tribal cultures have adapted to this sufficiently to allow the children to claim a tribal identity through their mothers’ bloodlines, and their maternal uncles become their major male family-figures, but it’s not the same as the original family systems before the whitefellas arrived.
In the US indigenous population, the rate of rape is sky-high, and unlike all other US ethnic groups these rapes are mostly inter-racial rather than intra-racial i.e. the attackers are not fellow indigenes. It would be very interesting to see what the results of an equivalent study would be here.
I thought Greer’s argument was interesting - there’s a link in this post to the interview with her on Lateline last night:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/14/qa-plug-marcus-westbury-and-germaine-greer/
I don’t want to comment on the substance because I’d rather wait and read her book first. I think a lot of what Greer has to say gets fairly wildly distorted in media reports, and I’m interested also in why that is - a few quick thoughts in the post I’ve just linked to.
In the case of the Indian tribe I gather the men do the hunting and women do everything else, including whatever agriculture they engage in.
I wouldn’t be game enough to venture a comment on Greer’s comment, and if the past is any guide her ideas won’t be uncontested, but there is sense in what you say. It does strike me that the primary nurturing role is always there and is likely to give women a purpose in their lives in even the most adverse of circumstances.
Here’s another link: to the ABC Radio National page where you can listen to the audio from this morning’s program. No transcript yet.
She’s on Q&A tonight incidentally, which may make it worth watching.
Although that serial bore Greg Sheridan is also on.