| Tribes |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|10:52 am] |
Assuming that my time is worthless, I'm continuing to get infinite value from the BBC (by having no television, and thus no legal requirement to pay a television license, but at the same time listening to BBC radio and watching programmes on the iPlayer). Recently, I've been taken by a couple of programmes based around the contrivance of Developed World 'westerners' going to and living with ancient tribes.
The first is 'Last Man Standing', in which pop anthropology is hidden inside a thick coating of high-energy, US-style reality TV gameshow: six male contestants - arrogant, narcissistic jocks from the US and the UK - have to compete with each other in a series of games. The twist: the games are those created and played by various ancient tribes from around the world. Each week, the jocks would live with the tribes and learn the rules and techniques of the game; invariably, this also meant learning something of the customs and rituals of the tribe, at least insofar as rituals - dances, chants, ceremonies and so on - were integral parts of the games.
Most interesting to me was an episode in which a form of 'cricket' practiced by a tribe in Papua New Guinea: many generations ago, Western missionaries came to the tribe to 'civilise' them, and taught them Christianity and cricket; after the missionaries left, the tribe seemed to discard the Christianity but keep the cricket, adapting it into something very much their own. Batters bat with carefully selected and prepared tree branches, delegating the running to specialist runners, grass skirts and feathers flailing as they run, each team comprises fifty or sixty players, intoxicated on a local herbal drink, who burst into intricate song and dance routines lampooning their opponents each time one of their players is bowled or caught out. Sometimes the games turn into low-level warfare, they mention; a few years ago a rival chief's son was killed...
Originally I thought the reality TV gameshow format was incorrigibly inappropriate, a sign of the BBC desperately trying to force interest and appreciation of the 'other' to uninterested and unappreciative lumpenproletariat. But then I realised that the format was, in an odd sort of way, completely appropriate, as its central conceit - ranking and sorting of young males into a dominance hierarchy - is fundamentally tribal, a kind of isomorphic thread of male behaviour that links all cultures, whatever their level of ostensive economic development, whether they live in jungles or cities.
More recently I've watched two episodes of what appears to be the female corollary of Last Man Standing, called 'Tribal Wives'. Perhaps more conventionally anthropological, without the gameshow structure, the 'suspenseful' music, and the ADD-inducing editing, it's instead based around the premise of the high-flying, highly-stressed career-woman-with-kids wanting to 'rebalance' her work-life with her home-life, and her body with her spirit, by going somewhere where people haven't forgotten how to be in touch with their environment, their friends, their feelings, and their inner-selves. (i.e. the premis follows, arguably, from a kind of naive fetishisation of extreme poverty.)
The two episodes I've seen made an interesting contrast. The first involved a middle-aged, previously divorced career woman with three kids going to a small tribe (or perhaps 'band') of about 50 people who lived in the Brazilian rainforest; the latter involved a sub-middle-aged (mid 30s rather than mid 40s) Irish previously-divorced (from shotgun marriage following teenage pregancy when aged 17) career woman with three kids going to a medium-sized tribe in a dry African dustbowl.
Although it wasn't stated explicitly in the programmes, the first tribe were mostly hunter-gatherers, though with some basic agriculture, and the second were subsistence farmers, entirely reliant on their crops and their livestock.
Again, though this wasn't stated explicitly, the first tribe seemed friendlier, happier, calmer, and more egalitarian, both in terms of differences between household wealth, and gender relations (for example, they were monogonous). The second tribe, by contrast, seemed to be unhappier, more possessive, less friendly (they laughed at the protagonist when she tried to 'fit in' by dressing like them), more tense, more jealous, and more unequal (for example they were polygynous - one man with many women, which by implication means many men with no women - and marital relations appeared to be skewed in favour of male dominance over females).
By the end of the first woman's sojourn in the first tribe, she had been married to a middle-aged divorced tribal man who had spent the previous few weeks courting her with offerings from long hunts in the jungle, and was distraught at the prospect of leaving the tribe and their way of life. By contrast, the second woman was very happy to leave when her stay was over, having suffered drought, diarrhea, and persistent social ridicule.
The first woman arrived and left in a plane; the second woman in a car. When the second tribe saw the car, they were jealous ("She must be rich because the windows of her car go down without a handle", one of them said). The first tribe, apparently, were not.
Though just a set of contrived, carefully edited (and thus potentially misleading) anecdotes, the differences seem to fit with what I've read about the relationship between agriculture and inequality. Once people depend upon their possessions to live, they start to live for their possessions. More possessions thus means more chance of surviving; less possessions, less chance. Comparative wealth soon matters as much as absolute wealth, as having less wealth that others means having one's life-chances increasingly determined by those with more wealth. Accumulation and ownership thus become predominant concerns, and can spiral (and have spiralled) into practices and standards of living that can endanger the entire planet...
I've realised I just sounded like a self-righteous hippy. Of course the situation's more complex than this, and I'm essentially ambivalent (rather than simply dismissive) about modern ways of living. However, ambivalence and endless equivocation isn't a useful way of thinking about these issues clearly; better to take on a perspective and see where it takes you, than to change direction mid-route. |
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