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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

‘The Dongria are hill people, resettling them on the plains is a form of ethnicide. They live in the hills, they worship the hills, they survive off the hills,’ he says. ‘The Niyamgiri Hills are not simply where the Dongria live, but the very essence of who they are. To resettle them is to destroy them.’

The article continues:

A resettled Dongria village - Sakata - on the edge of the forest would appear to support that gloomy prediction. A few years back, the people were given ‘pukka’ concrete houses and land to grow crops but have since done nothing with the government’s gift. Almost all the men of the village are dead from taking too much of the potent local liquor, which is far stronger than the sago-wine of their tradition. ‘With the connection to the forest gone,’ a local social worker says, ‘the men of the village simply earned enough as day labourers to drink themselves to death.’

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.

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:

To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the [London Society] Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

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.

Until the British arrived in the early 19th century and forced them to give up the practice, the Dongria used human sacrifices to propitiate their gods.

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.

By UN standards, many of the children are undernourished, and less than five per cent of adults can read or write.

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?”

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.

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:

‘No one - I repeat no one - will be allowed to stand in the way of Orissa’s industrial development and the people’s progress.’

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.

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.

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!

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.

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”.