

The tribesman who Facebook friended me - wallflower
http://life.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_tribesman_who_facebook_friended_me/singleton/

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zeteo
> when they boarded the plane back to PNG, we were the ones racked with envy –
> envious of their joyously interdependent community, their clear
> understanding of what mattered in life, their rock-solid roles, simple
> pleasures and ample leisure time, their lack of mortgages and debts, their
> indisputable “goodness.”

I call BS. This is not an honest appraisal but just a good line to spew forth
at cocktail parties. Anyone who really believed this stuff would find it
relatively easy to join one of these hunter gatherer tribes. (For instance,
Napoleon Chagnon lived for decades amidst one of the fiercer tribes [1]. Read
the first pages of his book and you'll see he wasn't much prepared for it,
either. But a few iron utensils go a long way towards acquiring tribal
goodwill.) Any relocation inconvenience would certainly be over-compensated by
the very fundamental benefits described.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon>

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liuliu
I couldn't agree more. They don't have mortgages and debts, but my god, they
put their life on risk every day. The homicide rates in New Guinea during
1960s to 1980s were really high.

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gomphus
For anyone who hasn't seen it, the documentary he talks about is mesmerizing:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS7a-OJ7IVw>

Two standout scenes for me. First, gazing out from the London Eye over a
skyline filled with incredible feats of engineering, the chief is bemused -
because our money houses are so much bigger than our spirit houses.

Second, entering the main spirit house itself (St. Paul's cathedral) - after
establishing that their women won't be struck dead for entering such a holy
place - the tribespeople encounter, seemingly for the first time, the glories
of neoclassical Western sculpture, art, architecture. They caress the faces
carved from marble and stone, dance with pure delight between the soaring
Corinthian columns. They explain how such impossibly beautiful things could
only have been created by God, and have obviously been part of the world from
the very beginning.

Ever since watching this series, I've tried to look at my city with the same
combination of cynicism and amazement.

There's also a bittersweet segment where the chief of the tribe is dumbfounded
that he's not allowed to drop in on the "big chief" - Queen Elizabeth II.

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mckoss
Thanks for the link. Amazing show.

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patio11
The myth of the noble savage isn't dead yet, apparently.

Do you have two kids? Fancy both of them living to five? Right answer: you
want to live in your world, not your history.

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tripzilch
What a delightful story!

I feel bad for the commenters that feel they need to step on it, just because
it's a bit heavy on the "noble savage" meme here and there.

A culture very different from ours is always like a mirror. And it's much more
virtuous to describe the difference in terms of what is good, than how _we_
are better. That doesn't mean you'd immediately want to switch places with
them.

"If you like X so much, why don't you go live there?" is the reaction of a
small-minded person that feels threatened just because something very
different and alien to them is described as "also very beautiful".

I even see this reaction happening between two different Western cultures.

And yes, "we" also got quite a few really good things compared to them. More
than just feathered arrows, even :-)

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meric
Good story. Where did the tribesman log into facebook?

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geuis
Internet access of some kind or another can be found almost everywhere in the
world now. It might have been from a cell phone or a shared computer at some
nearby town. The point is, I don't think it matters _where_ or _how_ any more.
That's insignificant in light of the real sea-change, which is that almost
anyone in the alive _can_.

~~~
edge17
i heard in some talk that feature phones account for the largest segment of
status updates to facebook

