One of the world's most primitive tribes is being humiliated on a daily basis - by tourists who pay to go on human safaris and treat them like animals in a zoo.
Hundreds of visitors to the remote Andaman Islands, north of the Equator in the Indian Ocean, queue up each day at dawn to drive through a jungle reserve set aside for the Jarawa tribe.
They then toss scraps of food to the half-naked natives, who only started making contact with the outside world in the late 1990s, and command them to dance.
One would think this kind of thing got old a long time ago, but apparently it's not old at all. There's no break between the feelings expressed in this passage, which Charles Darwin wrote 170 years ago, and this form of 21st century tourism:
Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian — of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? — men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.
1
2
3
4
6
7
Comments (11) RSS