Sentinal Issue through Cultural Relativism: Anthropology and its Perspective

Can you define pleasure? Yes, of course, there is no simple way of defining it. Not only because it is subjective but also because it entails a lot of guilt that the technologically advanced version of homo sapiens carries with them. However, having said that we also need to remember that there is no shortage of people who seek pleasure by doing for others.

All of these because of the divided public sphere who are looking at the pleasure seeking principles associated with the killing of the American Missionary John Allen Chau by the Sentinal tribes of North Sentenel Island. Some believe it was a trespassing, of course, it was in so far as the rule of law the Republic of India goes. They are also the ones who keep on sharing links to show how beautifully Anthropologists have been able to befriend with them decades back (click here), or how it took 25 years and so coconut for another anthropologist to have a friendly gesture with them (click here). Let me just share one of the widely shared photographs of an anthropologist named Madhumala Chattopadhyay.

The image has a caption and that reads like this "An anthropologist’s moment of truth: This picture is of the first everbfriendly contact with the hostile Sentinelese tribe. Seen here, Madhumala handing over a coconut in person to a man from the Sentinelese tribe. Such are the moments every anthropologist dreams of. This requires years of preparation, persistence, courage, respect for the lesser known people of this earth and of course lots of luck. Some of the world’s most famous anthropologists including Alfred Radcliffe Brown had tried previously for this very moment but failed."

I shows the pleasure, the anthropological pleasure? Where does it differ from the Missionary's pleasure of conversion? Or for that matter some invester's pleasure of displacement and development of human zoo in excellent ecological niche? Let us concentrate on the photograph and the caption. It defines Sentinelese as hostile tribe, it compares the commendable exercise of courage that even British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe Brown has failed to do. The image not only creates stereotype of the tribe but carries considerable colonial hangover as well. Despite of Franz Boas and his school of cultural relativism, despite of the fact that these tribal people have for long showed no interest in contacting with the people from the rest of the world, these sort of Anthropological romanticism and celebration is undesirable.

On the other hand it is this so called 'hostility' that played a key role in ensuring their survival on this island for so long.

The role of 'hostility':

If you really want to understand how the tribal people of the island could survive, one of the main reason would be their hostility. We can refer to the between Maori and Moriori. In December 1835 500 Maori armed with with rifles, clubs and maces arrived on the Chatam island. Moriori had a tradition of resolving disputes peacefully. They decided in a council meeting that they will not fight back. They also decided that they will offer peace, friendship and division of resources. Before they could deliver that offer the Maori attacked on them. Theykilled hundreds of Maori, cooked and eat many of the bodies and enslaved all the others, killing most of them too. What if Sentenalis welcomed everyone in their islands? Would there been anyone left?

The unknown factors:

Hardly we have a concrete idea about their social organisations. Surely, they do have good conflict resolution mechanisms. Let us take another example of the tribe of Fayu of New Guinea. Fayu consists of about 400 hunter-gatherers and according to their own account they had formally number about 2000. Their population has been greatly reduced as a result of Fayu killing Fayu. Since, they do lack political and social mechanisms to achieve peaceful resolution of serious disputes killing is a regular phenomenon. In fact, Missionaries have arguably saved their tribe from disappearing by installing so called modern institutions of governance. Sentinals are not Fayu and they are here for so many years because of unknown factors of governance mechanisms coupled with resource sustenance.

There are at least five major factors that could ensure the survival or collapse of any group of people with limited resources and technological solutions. First the environmental domain second the sudden climate change, third, the conflicting relationship with the neighbours, fourth, the disappearance of support from the friendly neighbours and fifth, society's response to its problems.
Adding to these, there is of course a body factor, which is the management of public health issues. Their survival shows Sentinals carry all the required immunal responses towards available diseases.

The relativist questions:

What makes them survive for such a long period of time despite of all these challenges and with such a limited amount of resources. Or do they really really need other resources which we think essential for survival of the humankind in our part of the world?

There is an urge of establish a contact with these people who are better left alone. An anthropologist's moment of success as it portrays in some of the articles should not be to be able to establish contact with a fellow human being who is completely unwilling to establish contact. Missionaries, have always been ruthless in terms of expanding their faith. It is nothing but a slightly soft form of imperial dream carrying principles which has destroyed several countries in the name of establishment of democracy and 'fruits' of technological advancements. The power that lies within the discipline should always be scrutinized in terms of relativists arguments,  Dian Fossey can call it a moment when she was accepted by Highland Gorillas, anthropologists defining the establishment as such moment is not what anthropology is looking for.

We have more serious questions to ask, as can we really even think of trespassing such places as American Indian territory?

Even if we can, does it entail, or should it entail anthropological pleasure? Or are we yet to learn the true essence of cultural relativism?

Ethnocentric bias, starvation deaths and vanishing natives

People can die because of malnutrition, tuberculosis, fever and pneumonia, but they can never die of starvation. A recent report of starvation deaths in Birbhum triggers controversy that government and other key players have found hard to dodge. At least 19 tribal people have died because of starvation. There are several sporadic incidents of such deaths that go unnoticed. The question that becomes important is a historical one. The large scale starvation deaths occurred during 1942-43 do not report much death of tribal population of the state. The starvation death among tribal population while seen historically is a much recent phenomenon. What changes have taken place in last 70 years? More crucially it is important to explore what changes have taken place in last 20 years that have radically altered the tribal ways of life?

Post neo-liberal India sees lands being classified as barren, one to multi crop land, land having mining potentials and so on. Similarly forest policies kept displacing tribal access to the forest. Forest trees are replaced by eucalyptus and others adding noting to daily life of the people who depend heavily on the forest. Furthermore large scale displacements, often induced by development  have continued.

While a land which is seen as barren is actually used for cattle grazing, cultivating wild and high calorie cereals for local consumption, collection of tribal medicines. These lands are then taken for either developing connectivity or stone mining or much recently for industrialisation. The land grab under which tribal people are going through for last three decades are unprecedented.  

Case - I: dam construction and a close call 

The place is known as Mukutmanipur where thousands of families were displaced because of the construction of a river dam which is supposed to irrigate parts of Bardhaman, Bankura and Paschim Medinipur. My two seasons of fieldwork reveals that the impact of the dam construction is still quite detrimental. Apart from the loss of their homes and families who are now resettled far off, the neighboring villages have lost their grazing land and valuable forest resources on which they used to depend. Now the alternative economic pursuit is to work as a hotel boy in several hotels developed surrounding the mukutmanipur lake. Furthermore, the nature of the jungle is transformed and people can no longer depend on the forest resources which used to provide vital nutrients. The result is large-scale migration of men folk to neighbouring urban centres. If the neighbouring urban centres would have been far off many of the existing family members would have died.

Derivations:

Displacement leaves long term effects and undermines local and micro value orientations.

Policies of development usually underestimates existing man and other resource relationships

Case - II: piggery project and child malnutrition

 What happens when government decides to do something for the people. It usually happens like this.

step - I something clicks in the mind of a minister or IAS or the like in one fine morning

Step - II S/he prepares the plan over cups of high-tea sessions

Step - III An expert committee is formed and the project is implemented with the help of local agencies including NGOs.

No one even asks or seeks to explore the feasibility of the project. Once in  one of my fieldworks in Manipur it is seen that after the implementation of piggery development project child malnutrition become extremely high. The assessment team populated by anthropologists finds that because of high cash value of the piggery project people have stopped cultivating wild maize and other cereals. In consequence because of the lack of fodder which used to come from the stems of those wild cereals people have sold off their goats and cows. As a result children started to suffer from mal-nutrition triggered by low milk intake. 

Derivations:

Long-term effects are often undermined

Possible consequences of any initiatives are not properly addressed.  

Case - III: barren land and a halted industrialisation  

As already discussed barren land with good connectivity is an indistralist's gold mine. Therefore, Jindal Steel Works with the help of GoWB started their JSW project in Salboni on a barren land. It completely undermined the nature of existing attachments of the neighbouring tribal people with the land. With the construction of Jindal walls they do not have a place to collect fuel wood, roots and tubers that used to be an integral part of their daily food intake. There is no land for grazing of animals. They have even  lost the place to do open defecation. 

Derivations: 

Understanding of the natural resources are never done from the persepctives of the people who depend on these resources.

Value judgement of any resource depends on perspectives and policies lack the perspectives of the people who tend to depend on those resources

Case - IV: Maoists and armed forces

In another long term fieldwork which continued for three consecutive seasons in several regions of Paschim Medinipur I have seen that people are systematically being denied from the resources on which they have historically depended. While in pre 2011 election Maoist violence have occupied the news headlines people's everyday lives have largely been unseen. The most severely affected people were the tribal. They could not go into the forest because of the fear of maoists who would see them as police linkmen and they could not come out of the jungle because of the fear that police would see them as a maoist sympathasier. The consequence have been devastating. Because of frequent bullet exchanges cultivation was virtually stopped people have starved, if not have died.  

Derivations:

Policies and sometimes armed ideological conflicts tends to undermine people for whom the fight take place.

The accumulations:  

One of the anthropological cornerstones have been the idea of cultural relativism. Although hotly debated, whether or not we should observe cultural relativist stance there is a need to make policies free of ethnocentric bias to the extent possible. Often we find people saying tribal and natives eat rats, snakes, insects and ant larvae because of the paucity of food. There should be policies to feed them for which we need their resources. This is an utter lie. Tribal people eat those items because they consider those as their foods and not alternatives to chicken/mutton or rice and wheat. We have continually damaged their resources. We have transformed their grazing lands to mining grounds, stone crushing factories and water reserviors. We have transformed their forests into bunch of eucalyptus trees which do not yield anything but fuel woods. We never try to explore the systematic relationship between tribal and their habitat. Sadly, anthropologists and other social scientists including activists who do understand the process are either sidelined by the policy makers or are too romantically involved in so called "going native". Instead we see site for industrialisation in their barren lands, we tend to calculate profit and loss from the land yield according to our mode of calculations. 

Now the question is how long are we going to prepare policies that has nothing to do with the natives? The answer however, is known, it is INDEFINITELY. 

Sandy and 'US': the obvious ethnocentrism

Taken from a facebook post

While Kaleidoscope was tracking Sandy news in BBC and CNN he felt a cold stream flowing through his backbone. If US is suffering from power cut, long queue outside the drinking water, oil and food sources that too moments before the presidential election, what could be the situation if it ever happens to his world?? These news channels including Al Jazeera continued to show the same video clippings from US. Within minutes Kaleidoscope started imagining US like an isolated island on which Sandy has attacked to satisfy personal wrath!

As Kaleidoscope like others learns from his experiences of bias and ethnocentric attitude attached to the mainstream news channels, it has been ages that he stopped taking news media on face value. Hence a quick search reveals that the storm kills more than 70 people in Cuba and Haiti. The storm also hit the Puerto Rico, Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic. In Haiti the devastation is comparable to 2010 earthquake (see Washington Post). Flooding at Haiti has triggered Cholera with 300 suspect cases (click here).

Kaleidoscope does not want to present himself as insensitive (though he is, sometimes)... there is no point in comparing death tolls and he knows comparative disaster analysis is meaningless here. However, yet the ethnocentric news reports make kaleidoscope to successfully bomb-out from his false consciousness regarding the end of ethnocentrism in so called global world.