‘BBC show makes mistakes about tribal people’
The BBC programme Andrew Marr’s History of the World that is being broadcast on Discovery Channel in India from February 15, is described as an epic journey through 70,000 years of human history.
Unfortunately, it makes some serious mistakes about tribal people.
The first episode refers to the Ayoreo tribe from Paraguay as “leading much the same hunter-gatherer lifestyle as the very first humans on earth”. In fact, the Ayoreo way of life and culture, like that of all peoples everywhere, has been continually adapting and evolving. It is easy to prove this, as their own ancestors travelled from Africa, through Asia and Siberia, and then moved south through North America, Central America and most of South America. No one has any idea how meandering these peregrinations were. There is no reason to suppose, for example, that they didn’t also take in Patagonia before ending up in what is now Paraguay. In any event, they would have lived in more or less all the temperatures and environments possible, and adapted accordingly.
For most of this time, it’s a fair bet they would have hunted, but their hunting technology could not possibly have been the same as it is now in the scrub forest.
Leaving Ayoreo history aside, no one knows how the “first humans on earth” lived in Africa. They would certainly have eaten wild berries, fruits and so on, as apes do, but if they ate a lot of meat it might have been procured as much, or more, by scavenging. So, we cannot even assert with any authority that the “first humans” were indeed “hunters”.
Obviously, a TV film must use a certain shorthand, but the danger in comparing the Ayoreo lifestyle with that of the first humans is obvious.
It strongly suggests that the Ayoreo themselves are like the first humans, and consequently further behind on the evolutionary chain, “backward”, “primitive”, and so on. This is still the same prejudice used to justify much of the destruction of contemporary tribal peoples today.
One example of this is the argument that mining firm Vedanta Resources used to defend the devastating impact that its mine would have on the lives of the Dongria Kondh in Orissa. A Vedanta spokesperson said: “As enlightened and privileged human beings, we should not try to keep the tribal and other backward people in a primitive, uncared-and-unprovided-for socio-economic environment.”
The fallacy of this prejudice becomes clear with the response of the Dongria to this unsolicited help. One Dongria said: “It’s crazy when these outsiders come and teach us development. Is development possible by destroying the environment that provides us food, water and dignity? You have to pay to take a bath, for food, and even to drink water. In our land, we don’t have to buy water like you, and we can eat anywhere for free”.
Stephen Corry is director of Survival International
www.survivalinternational.org
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