Frequently Asked Questions

Q: "Ultimately, access to communications will change everyone's way of live, tribes' as well as ours. With access to the outside world, changes need not necessarily come from outside but from within the own society or tribe, some members of which discover the outside "universe" and start taking new thinking or habits from it."

A: There are perhaps less than a few dozen tribes in the world whom we haven't 'discovered' yet. All the others are in some stage of being assimilated into our "culture". Diversity of humanity is just as important as diversity in ecology.

Another thing that needs to be pointed out is that these peoples aren't doing this by choice as you suggested but were forces to change. If you set up a Macdonald's or a web cafe in the middle of a healthy tribal village, that won't make them change into us. You need to take away their hunting lands, their elders, their right to exercise their culture and oppress them with our religion and outright violence. And even then, as the missionary organizations' own reports state, the missionaries in the mountains of West Papua are in difficulties even getting people to wear pants, let alone convert to Christianity or practice agriculture instead of hunting and gathering.

These peoples are proud of their cultures and they willing to defend them with passion and conviction most of us westerners have never experienced. They would rather die then convert to our way of life. The problem is that that is exactly what many of them are doing. It is the very real overt violence that is forcing these people to change or die and not some philosophical eventuality to do with clash-of-cultures.

Our primary concern is to help these people maintain their tribal way of life i.e. that is our primary objective and not high-tech communication.

However in practice the situation with a lot of these tribes is that they are having to put up with missionaries, development workers and outright overt exploitation and violence from government and industry and there is little they or anyone can do to help them in their situation if no one is aware of what is happening in the remote regions where they often live. For these sort of people, wanting to just overrun a tribe in the way of progress, it makes their job a lot more difficult if the tribal people have access to modern communications with themselves and with the outside world.

Q: "On the long run I don't think there's a way to preserve one's way of live if confronted with a totally different, dominating culture."

A: Our modern conveniences do not interest tribal people who still have their own way of life intact. Our domination and "superiority" are based only on violence.

I think what you say is a major false conclusion a lot of people tend to make. If you look at any two tribal or even sligtly 'developed' cultures living side by side, their identities are strong enough to keep them separate. So it is not true that when two cultures meet that one of them must be taken over by the other. It is not inherent for cultures themselves that take over other cultures. It is the particular malfunction of our culture to be dependant on external input of resources and invasion of ever further space on this earth. This fault is neither natural nor sustainable in the long run.

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