
An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest - gk1
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/08/an-isolated-tribe-emerges-from-the-rain-forest?intcid=mod-most-popular
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codezero
An elusive (but not totally isolated) tribe in Peru killed an outsider who was
known to provide them help (bananas, pots and pans), and it's not clear why
(probably he stopped providing help), this and a series of other violent
episodes prompted a government team to set up nearby in hopes of interacting
with them to try to prevent future violence. T here already exist laws
preventing others from contacting them out of a fear of communicable disease.

Christian evangelists still interact with them, hoping to convert them, and
it's pretty difficult to stop.

In the end, despite mutual communication, they couldn't find out why they were
killing people, because once they start asking questions, the tribe packs up
and leaves.

Their interactions outside of the jungle seem to be primarily for resources
and when they are not provided with those, they get upset and leave, and/or
take the resources forcibly.

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krick
Thanks. Saved me more than half an hour, I guess.

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codezero
I was pretty annoyed this started off with a mystery, and ended up with no
resolution. Kind of a cruel way to structure a story, but oh well.

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wavefunction
You've just described life.

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RikNieu
Don't worry, I'm pretty sure yours will end in collapse.

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curtis
One thing that wasn't clear to me from the article:

Do the Mashco (the isolated tribe) speak the same language as the Yine (the
more assimilated tribal people)? And if so, do the people on the contact team
(at least some of them) speak the Yine language and can consequently speak
directly to the Mashco using essentially the same language?

This kind of contact situation can't help but be difficult and dangerous, but
if the contact team and the contactee tribe have a mutually intelligible
language that they can use, it seems like it would make things a lot easier,
relatively speaking.

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codezero
In the article, one of the Yine people who the team works with had a father
who was half Mascho, but was abducted as a child and used as a translator, she
learned the language from him.

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happyslobro
Awesome idea for a browser plugin: find the <article>, delete all other
elements.

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fwn
The (mobile) New Yorker didn't appear cluttered to me, but I use Evernotes web
clipper for this purpose.

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seanp2k2
The Internet in 2016: so many ads and so much junk that you need to use
additional tools to extract the part which contains content.

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etatoby
> _they believed I was a pishtaco, an evil person who had come to steal the
> oil from their bodies._

> _in the sixteenth century, [...] some of the Spaniards, frustrated that
> their muskets and cannons rusted so quickly in the jungle humidity, were
> said to have killed Indians and boiled their bodies in iron pots, then used
> their fat to grease the metal._

Really, Spaniards? Really??

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sn41
... in search of better 4G signal strength.

