for: enthnography - Jarawa, African-Asian tribe, Alexandre Dereims, human origins - Jawara, anthropology - Jarawa, Andaman archipelago

summary

• An extraordinary film by filmmaker Alexandre Dereims about the isolated Jawara people, believed to be one of the first peoples to migrate out of Africa and who landed in an island off the coast of India. Their way of life has not changed for tens of thousands of years but unfortunately, is being quickly eroded by the influences of modernity.
• This film documents the life of this ancient tribe, who until recently lived in complete isolation from modernity. Dereims illegally entered the territory to film the Jawara tribe and give them a voice in the context of the Indian governments continual exploitation of the tribe for tourism and their agenda to confiscate their land for modern development.
• The film is a realtime record of how rapidly colonialism and the transformation of takes place. We hear the voices of the Jawara as they speak of the incremental exploitation and corruption of the modern world on their people. When we see this, we realize how little has changed since the 14th century when global colonialism began.
• Instead of preserving the Jawara to have a living reminder of our ancient past and the wonder of human evolution, we myopically exploit them. What a sad commentary on humanity.

new trailmark: deeper reflections

• this trailmark is used to capture deeper reflections not captured in the initial annotation
• this often occurs for me there next day after a night's sleep.
• I believe it happens because the intuitive gut feeling that initially attracted me to the story is not so easily accessible. It could be complex, entangled and difficult to articulate and/or subconscious

deeper reflections

• our own process of cultural construction
  • the living Jawara are so valuable ethnographically and anthropologically because they are living, breathing examples of how culture constructs us -
• adjacency between - Jawara people - Ronald Wright's computer analogy for modern humans
  • Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE)
    • Deep Humanity
  • adjacency statement
    • The comparison between the cultural differences between the Jawara people and we modernly enculturated humans is striking. Perhaps not as striking as feral children but still striking. It shows us how easily we ourselves could have such a different experience of life and Worldview if we were born into the Jawara tribe today.
    • As Ronald Wright noted, there is likely no difference between the human mental capacity of our 50,000 year old ancestors and ourselves
    • The significance of their existence is living proof of CCE, a profound Deep Humanity teaching about how we humans construct the meaningverse and symbolosphere so critical to intertwingled individual and collective experience of reality
    • The Jawara and other isolated ingenious progress should be treated with the greatest respect and esteem for being the living examples of our cultural evolution that teaches us the deepest lessons of what we are as humans and how culture profoundly shapes us
    • At a minimum, all the tourists the the Indian government have allowed to visit them, as well as the tourist operators should have mandatory Deep Humanity training before being allowed any contact with them in order to preserve their dignity
    • striping away all the amenities of modern life, we can see how happy they Jawara people are with so little
    • this is a lesson on recognising the wonder of simply being alive, an invaluable Deep. Humanity lesson

for: SRG intervention - Jawara - tourist education

SRG intervention - Jawara - tourist education

• Is it possible to transform this myopic, ignorant tourism approach into one that could create more cross-cultural harmony?

for: example - cultural destruction - Jawara - cigarettes and alcohol, example - indigenous genocide, example - forced addiction

comment

• Growing up in Canada in an indigenous community, this struck a nerve.In my childhood, I experience how the Haida first nations people of the Queen Charlotte Islands were reduced from a once proud and self-reliant culture to a dependent one living in government housing, the land they lived on denied to them and forced to live on small parcels of "Indian Reservations", their dignity stripped, and made dependent on alcohol and cigarettes.
• It seems that modernity is simply an arrogant and corrupting force on indigeneity.
• We see the beginning of indigenous genocide by the attempted infection by ignorant modern citizens who interact with the Jawara by attempting to hook them on the extremely destructive and addictive substances of our culture, alcohol and cigarettes

for: cultural destruction - Jawara - poachers, modernity - disruption of ecological cycle, example - ecosystem disruption

comment

• In a matter of years, poachers have disrupted the Jawara's traditional diet, forcing them to overhunt deer and disrupt the entire ecological cycle that existed up until then.It's an example of how modernity ruthlessly and rapidly disrupts ecosystems. In this case, ecosystems where humans have integrated in a balanced way.

for: cross-cultural dialogue - jawara and modernity,

commentary

• the tragedy of such myopic relationships and exploitation is that we miss the opportunity to hold cross-cultural dialogues to explore what happens when two human cultures that have developed in isolation meet for the first time.
• the marvel of modern lights to the Jawara, and their quick embrace of it and expression of wonder is reminiscent of the chronicles of earlier European explorers/colonizers who exposed modern inventions and cultural artefacts to aboriginals many centuries earlier