Robbing Graves

It’s not often that one gets pointers from a comic, in this case the old Tintin story, The Seven Crystal Balls. That particular book and its sequel, Prisoners Of The Sun, dealt with a group of seven European “explorers” who went off to Peru and returned with Native American artefacts, including the mummy of the Inca Rascar Capac, which the expedition leader proceeded to place in a glass case in his living room. According to the storyline, surviving Incas then tracked the “explorers” down and – one by one – inflicted on them the revenge of Rascar Capac.
 

Early on in the first book, Tintin is talking to a man on the train who asks a simple question: why would the “explorers” want to go and dig up the mummies of Inca kings? Would “we” (the Belgians, like Tintin and his friends) like it if “they” came over and dug up “our” kings? What then?

It’s a valid point, of course. You know that the European “explorers” and “discoverers” treated the native cultures they discovered with an appalling degree of disrespect, something akin to the way a scientist watches bacteria on a slide, but with a sense of casual superiority thrown in, which a bacteriologist wouldn’t display. This was especially true of the Egyptologists, some of whose motives had more to do with the hunt for treasure than the search for truth.

Well, one might say, didn’t the digging up of Egyptian mummies (like that of that minor Pharaoh, Tutankhamen) and Viking barrows advance knowledge? Aren’t we better off now than if we’d known nothing of them at all?

It’s a valid point. Obviously, if we have any pretensions about seriously researching the past at all, we can’t draw a line around certain things and say “thus far and no further". This holds especially true of burial mounds and tombs because they are so much more likely than any other remains of past ages to come down to us undisturbed and with their contents giving us valuable information about the cultures they had belonged to. Even more important, when those cultures had vanished into the mists of time, this might be the only way to find out anything about them. They might even tell us that our preconceived notions about them were wrong; we know from their burial sites that the Neanderthals, far from being casual brutes, were intelligent hominids who buried their dead with flowers and the equivalent of religious ceremonies. That is not unimportant.

Yet, of course, you can’t brush aside the concerns of surviving descendants of the people whose graves you’re studying. You can’t just say something along the lines of “Too damned bad, they’re our remains now and we’  re going to do just as we see fit with them,” unless you’re willing, as the man in the Tintin comic pointed out, to have the same done to you.

So, where do we strike a balance? Can we strike a balance at all?

I believe, personally, that the search for knowledge trumps all other considerations. However, the search for knowledge at the expense of all other considerations is all too likely to degenerate into the expression of pure power over a helpless subject population. There should certainly be some kind of rules according to which such cases should be handled, keeping in mind cultural sensibilities.

If I were to advance my ideas on such rules, they would be these: if the people whose graves you are about to open have living descendants, their opinion and permission ought to be taken before proceeding. (Just because one’s own culture doesn’t think all that much of the dead doesn’t mean some other culture doesn’t.) If their permission is obtained, after, of course, explaining to them the benefits of the knowledge one might obtain, then one should go ahead, with the maximum amount of sensitivity shown towards said remains.

If the permission isn’t forthcoming, then an independent commission of archaeologists and historians should study the question of whether the disturbance of the graves is essential to the pursuit of knowledge. If, and only if, this commission says it is, should the grave be opened even against the wishes of the descendants, but the remains should be handled with the same circumspection and in both cases representatives of the descendants should be present.

Also, once whatever study needs to be done of the remains themselves (quite apart from any artefacts found in the graves) they should be returned to their resting places. There would hardly be any justification for keeping the skull of a Zulu chief in a display case, for instance.

If some rule like this was followed, I suppose Rascar Capac might finally rest in peace.

(From Nov 2009)

In The Garden of Eaten

From June 2008



There are still tribes and peoples in the world who are not in touch with what we...for want of a better word...call "civilisation."

One of them, for those here who don't keep in touch with the more esoteric news of the world, was spotted from the air recently near the Brazil-Peru border. They were photographed in order, as a Brazilian official, Jos Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, put it, "to prove that they exist".

Here I have posted some of those photos; you can see large grass huts, and red-painted warriors firing arrows at the helicopter while a black-painted woman (note the breasts) watches...



...and in this photo a child can be seen as well:
 

Why should one want to prove that these people exist?

Well, one excellent reason is that these people live in a part of the world under great threat from environmental destruction, and if no one knows they are there, they might as well not exist, and it makes it easy for certain people to say "But that jungle is good for nothing and of use to no one. It should be cleared to grow biofuels to put in the fuel tanks of American SUVs and earn good dollars. A poor country can not afford environmental sensitivity." And once you accept the argument, the tribe will quietly vanish in a silent, undocumented, genocide; as so many already have.

Whereas, once you prove they exist, their forest can be declared a reserve that belongs to them and be protected from exploitation and destruction. And even though I know that the woolly mammoth and the giant moa were driven into extinction by pretechnological humans, by and large the so-called "savage" is a much better custodian of his natural surroundings than the "civilised" human. Where you have uncontacted tribespeople, you most likely have healthy unspoilt forests and undepleted fauna and flora. OK so far?

So far so good. But shouldn't the Brazilian government seek these people out, and give them access to the modern world and its benefits? Isn't it a violation of their human rights, as at least one person I know on this site would argue, to keep from them schools and hospitals and mosquito nets?

Well, now. Do you really think these tribespeople don't know the modern world exists? Anthropologists, for instance, have known of the particular group in these photos for twenty years. How do you think they knew just where to look?

These people aren't lost sheep wandering the wilderness in search of a shepherd. Like virtually all the "uncontacted" tribes, they know all about the modern world, and have come up against the business end of that modern world in the shape of prospectors, hunters, loggers, and so on. They decided that they could do perfectly well without the dubious benefits of stock exchanges and movie halls, and preferred to retreat into the interiors of the protecting forest. Given that the anthropologists say their numbers (or at least the number of huts) have doubled over the years, they aren't doing all that badly.

All right, so they don't have antibiotics to take when they get a bout of toothache. Sad. But the Native American population of South America collapsed from 5 million to 350,000 in the years after the alleged European "discovery" (ha ha ha ha hahahahahahahaha) of America, and is collapsing today. One tribe contacted in 1996 for the first time, for instance, lost half its members since then to the common cold. They'd probably prefer toothache.

While I'm on the subject: India has several indigenous tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Most of them are "domesticaged" as I'd put it; one group, the Great Sentinelese, remains uncontacted though frequently surveyed from the air. They seem to be doing well enough, though the population of some tribes contacted in the relatively recent past, like the Jarawas, for instance, is already in free-fall.

But, you know, I wonder what went through the minds of those tribespeople when they saw a helicopter for the first time ever? Giant mechanical insect? A messenger of the gods?

The Iceman Dieth

(From February 2009)

 
Five thousand and three hundred years ago, a man was killed on a mountain just inside what is now Italy. We do not know who he was, or what his name was, or what he did for a living; we can only speculate. What we do know is this:

In 1991, a pair of German tourists found a frozen, naturally mummified corpse on the mountain (it later turned out the corpse was less than a hundred metres inside Italian territory). When they got to the nearest, Austrian, authorities with their tale and photographs, the mummy (still thought modern at the time) was rather crudely hacked out of the ice, causing some damage, and removed to  a morgue in Innsbruck, Austria, where real study of it began. Once the site of discovery of the body was recognised as being inside Italy, even by just 92 metres, the corpse was taken to the South Tyrol Institute of Archaeology in Bolzano in Italy where it is displayed today.
They named him Ötzi the Iceman. He was, analysis says, some 45 years old when he died, so even back then they could live that long. He was some 165 cm tall and weighed perhaps 50 kilograms – short and skinny, like many of today’s Indians. He had apparently undergone tattooing from acupuncture as a cure for arthritis. His clothing was relatively sophisticated and mostly constructed of leather, and his shoes so well-made that an Italian shoe company wanted to purchase the rights to manufacture a modern equivalent. He was well equipped with flint and tinder and was armed as well – a quiver with several arrows, only two of which were finished, a flint knife, an unfinished longbow and an axe of 99.7% pure copper (it was the Copper Age, and far to the south east the first of the Pyramids of Egypt would not be built for another six hundred years).

Our friend was no vegetarian – he had eaten red deer and chamois meat in the day or so before his death, along with processed grain in the form of bread. Somehow or other he had also managed to pick up whipworm infestation – not an unusual condition where hygiene standards are poor, even to this day. Pollen in his meal showed he had died in spring and the grain for the bread must have been stored over the winter since that grain matures for harvest only in the autumn. Ötzi was no primitive hunter-gatherer; he was part of a complex society.

So just how did he come to be found dead on a mountain, then?

At first they thought he might have gone hunting or maybe shepherding and lost his way and starved. But then they found strange things. They found cuts on his hands, including a particularly deep cut on his right hand, almost to the bone. They found bruises from blows to the back of his head and neck. And then they found the tip of an arrow in his left armpit. The shaft of the arrow was gone, apparently removed, but the tip was there, and there was a corresponding slit in his leather coat, as well.

It began to look like Ötzi had been murdered...

Then they did some more analysis, and this item on the World Science site informs me that the cut on the poor guy’s hand was suffered a couple of days before he died; and that the arrow to the armpit came much later than the hand wound because he would have survived it only for minutes to hours, even if he had had access to modern medical help. So he’d been attacked, and not just once, either – twice, at the least, he had been attacked by people out to kill him.

And he had struck back.  One of the two finished arrows in his quiver had the blood of two people on it, indicating that this arrow had been fired into two persons and then subsequently retrieved both times. Blood from a third individual was on his knife, and a fourth person had left blood on Ötzi’s leather coat.

Hmm, the shepherd or coppersmith or shaman of the early speculation begins to look rather like a mighty warrior who finally had bitten off a mite more than he could chew...

So we can sort of construct a scenario for his last fight, back then in 3300 BCE. He was part of a group (but of course; someone took care of him after that hand wound, and the blood on his coat probably came from carrying someone else, someone who was wounded) hunted and harried by a larger and more determined enemy contingent, they try a running battle to get back to safety. Ötzi himself kills several of the enemy, and does so effectively enough that on two occasions he can pick his arrow out of the enemy’s corpse so he can re-use it. Arrows are precious, more so since evidently he never found the time to finish the others he was making.

Severely wounded in his hand in close combat with the pursuing enemy, he manages to knife another, and while fleeing he carries a wounded comrade (or a comely female companion, also wounded, if it’s Hollywood telling the tale, played by Uma Thurman perhaps, the renegade daughter of the evil Dark Lord) on his back. One by one his companions fall to the enemy, but he goes on, nibbling hard bread, until even his strength flags and he can no longer carry her through the forests and snowfields. Resolutely ignoring her pleading to leave her and go, he stays by her side while the forces of the Dark Lord close in, until her life-force ebbs and she dies, clutching his wounded hand. Then he gets up and tries to flee, his manly heart breaking, but it’s far too late. Out of the trees zip enemy arrows. One slaps into his side, and, staggering, he stumbles and falls. A stone club crashes into the mighty warrior’s head – the enemy is too cowardly even to fight him now that he is strangling on his own blood. “Uma!” he gasps, and falls over, dead.

Cut to a close up of feet clad in leather shoes, approaching. A gloved hand pushes him over on his heroic dead chest, one of his arms flopping under him, and tries to pull the arrow out. It breaks off. A soft, evil-sounding curse in an evil-sounding voice. Footsteps crunch away through the remaining snow. Close-up of Ötzi lying face down in the snow.

Fade out, now, with only the slightest pause, fade in to the same scene in 1991, with German voices speaking and camera shutters vigorously clicking our hero’s mummified body.

That movie might even be not completely a lie.

A Discussion On Tribalism

I’ve read plenty of times uncomprehending questions that go something like this: why do some Afghans still support the Taliban? Don’t they know it’s wrong? Or, why do Africans behave so barbarically with each other? Why do they treat their women so appallingly/ teach their young males to hate others?

There are plenty of similar questions, all of which have at their root two basic problems: first, the fact that the societies or peoples involved are tribal; and, secondly, the inability of the questioner to understand the world-view of a tribal society, which is quite different from others.

I’ve lived virtually all my life in a tribal society or as a non-tribal person in close proximity of tribesmen and women, and while I’m probably not right in generalising, I’m going to go ahead and stick my neck out a little anyway.

1.    A tribal society is inherently xenophobic, to a far greater extent than any other. Even where a tribe interacts regularly and peacefully with another or to the non-tribal world, a tribal person will never accept, at least to himself, that the Other is an equal in any fashion. The Other will always, to his mind, be apart, even if he lives among the midst of it, and a potential threat if not an actual one. Whatever the Other does to gain his trust, this fundamental truth will remain; he will never accept himself as part of the Other, no matter how much he is accepted by it (and he seldom is to any extent, either, but that’s another story).

2.    A tribal society, being xenophobic, always feels itself under threat. Like any society that feels itself threatened by the outside world, it ultimately turns in on itself in a paroxysm of “self-preservation”. Therefore the customs of the tribe become almost holy, and must be followed at all costs, even when such customs are inimical to the tribe’s long-term interests anyway.

For example, the tribes here in this state mostly follow a matrilineal system where men have neither property rights nor even any rights over their children (not even the right to scold/discipline them or give them the father’s family name). Obviously, males in this society have no stake at all in a marriage and freely abandon their wives and children to fend for themselves when the pressures get too much (and this is made easier by the fact that the same tribal society opposes compulsory registration of marriages). Obviously, also, the system needs drastic reform if not complete junking; but, instead, it’s reinforced, made almost into a fetish, and any tribe member who suggests reform or change in the system finds himself in serious trouble, with everyone from “progressive thinkers” to fascist youth organisations condemning him or her.

If any tribe’s core social customs are forcibly changed, usually at gunpoint, those new social impositions then become the tribe’s core belief and after that the tribe will adhere to those even when they, with time, have become obsolete, harmful, and counterproductive in their turn.

Therefore, there’s no point saying a tribe “must stop” killing boys and girls who fall in love; or must stop hunting heads; or whatever. It won’t stop as long as it feels it’s under threat, and it will feel under threat because that’s the nature of a tribe, however large and prosperous it is. The local tribes I mentioned above are rich, well-educated, and many members of it are settled all over the world; yet they all love to claim they are endangered and helpless in the face of the modern world unless they preserve the worst and most retrogressive of their social customs.

It’s the trappings of tribalism that are most easily discarded – the feathers and war-paint and so on – because it’s all so impractical and because it’s so superficial. Nobody really gives a damn when these go. Next to go are the good values of the society, for example, nature worship, the protection of forests and so on. These give way easily to the search for individual short-term profit. What’s left, then, of the tribal society’s mores are the worst and most regressive practices, which are selectively preserved, maintained, and promoted.

In his remarkable book (co-written with Donald Barnett), Mau Mau From Within, Karari Njama, a rebel general in the Kenyan revolutionary war, says that part of the oath sworn by the Mau Mau recruit was that he would never leave a daughter uncircumcised - not because this had any particular relevance to the revolution but because this was one of the regressive social practices of the Kikuyu tribe, which the tribe (the only one to revolt) felt to be under threat along with the rest of its existence. The fact that the tribe had genuine grievances, of course, got somewhat buried in the crude animal sacrifices, oaths of blood, and so on - including that of female genital mutilation, which was in any case theoretical for the average recruit who had neither a wife nor a daughter to mutilate.

3.    The members of a tribal society will stick together no matter what, even when they are clearly – even to themselves – in the wrong. If tribesman X steals a chicken from tribesman Y, he is a thief and must be punished. However, if he steals a chicken from Z, who is not a tribe member, then the tribe will stand at his side no matter what happens. This holds true no matter how well-educated or socially advanced the tribe is. Any disagreement between a part of the tribe and the outside world, on whatever level, becomes the Tribe versus the Other, and because the tribe is under threat, of course it becomes the (unthinking) duty of every tribe member to stand by the malefactor.

4.    The typical tribal society takes its cues from village heads, tribal elders, religious shamans and the like. Even when the individual tribesman can see for himself that the proper way to do something is at variance from the orders of the witch doctor or the local headman, he’s constrained to follow their orders or see himself ostracised or worse. And, naturally, the village head, shaman, or whatever always looks to his own interests, which lie in propagating regressive practices because that’s how he maintains his power.

5.    Tribal societies, being insular and closed worlds, have long memories and bear grudges for extraordinarily long periods, something of the nature of hereditary blood feuds. Since there is no significant intermarriage with the non-tribal world – any non-tribal person who marries into the tribal world is expected to merge into the tribe and subsume himself/herself entirely within the tribe’s culture – there’s none of the moderating effect that intermingling of genes brings. A society where everyone has to rigidly conform to a fixed code is liable to be intolerant of anyone who doesn’t follow that code, and to carefully preserve and nurture enmities with peoples who don’t follow those codes. This is why tribes find it so easy to go into savage conflicts with each other.

6.    Tribes usually react extremely poorly to genuine existential threats like habitat loss and disease or environmental degradation. Instead, they overreact to things that aren’t really threats at all or at the most minor threats. So you will find (again a personal observation) a tribe ignoring deforestation and the drying up of water-bodies and the vanishing of employment prospects, but railing against the wearing of “alien” clothing by women of the tribe (in this case, Western attire wasn’t thought alien though – only North Indian salwar kameez was condemned).

7.    For the tribal, the tribe is his entire social matrix. His worldview has no meaning in the absence of the tribe, because since birth he’s been conditioned to the customs of the tribe. Therefore, what the tribe decides, he will do, whether he wishes to or not – the alternative is expulsion from the tribe (or at least part of its social fabric) at the minimum, something he dreads worse than almost anything else. Therefore, “winning over” individual tribe members by building barns or providing fodder for livestock or a food packet won’t win you his heart or his mind – when the crunch comes he’s going to have no alternative but to back the tribe against you. If you want to change or win over a tribe, you have to begin at the top.

Therefore, it absolutely does not matter that the Taliban are among the most regressive movements the world has ever seen. It’s a movement based on the Pashtun/Pathan tribe, and to the tribal mind, he who attacks the Taliban attacks the tribe, and so the tribe must stand by the Taliban. (The extreme clumsiness and incompetence of the US and other imperialist occupation forces in Afghanistan are of course another factor but one that has no direct relevance to this article).

When I was in dental college in Lucknow, we had an association (which rapidly became defunct) of students from this part of the country. I remember an occasion when there was a dispute between students from Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh on certain issues; it came to a general vote. Now, the Arunachal Pradesh lot were clearly in the right; so much so that there were even some of the Nagas (who were all members of various tribes) who said they were in the right. However, when it came to the vote, those same Nagas voted for the Nagaland viewpoint, which they had just declared in the open forum was wrong.

I’m not in the least suggesting that tribes are lost causes and should be bombed to nonexistence or allowed to die of benign neglect. What I’m saying is that there’s absolutely no point treating a tribe as though it’s a non-tribal society, because you’re going to end up with the questions with which I began this article, and you won’t find any answers, either.

Disclaimer: I’m no anthropologist, so you can safely ignore everything here.

(From 2009)