“The Sentinelese are not “Stone Age” people. They live in the 21st century and, like all cultures, have changed and adapted, so are not somehow frozen in time. They use modern tools because they live now, and modern doesn’t have to mean industrialized.
When we call people “prehistoric” or “Stone Age” or “pre-literate” we assume (often without meaning to!) that other cultures have to catch up with the rest of us, and we miss that there are lots of perfectly valid ways to live in the world. The Three-Age System is useful for some European and Mediterranean archaeology, but it doesn’t even generally fit well outside of this region.
The language of the Capitalocene makes it hard for us to talk about groups of people anywhere without presuming 1. An inherent right to have our curiosity satisfied and 2. An assumption that the idea of “human progress” is linear and industrial.
These are all things that have been used to justify colonialism and “civilizing” projects. They also experience the Capitalocene, even to the extent that they’ve had to adapt to the constant threats industrialized societies pose to them.
Even if there weren’t the issue of lack of immunity to diseases of the industrialized world, they would still deserve their privacy and independence because the very least we can do as part of industrialized cultures is not to wreck everyone else’s lives by thinking we know better.
The protection of their space shouldn’t be paternalistic or infantilizing. They aren’t simple or more “natural”, they’re complex like all humans are. The problem isn’t that a guy wanted to tell them about Jesus, it’s that we mostly carry an unchallenged belief that dominant cultures have a right to access anything we want.
It’s colonialism and capitalism, and missionary work is a vector, but so is a lot of adventure travel, development work, and even academic research. We don’t have a right to know stuff about people without their consent. (This is how we got digital colonialism, too.)”
- Jane Ruffino, November 25, 2018.
