The People Who Live On This Island Will Kill Anyone Who Tries To Come Ashore
culturenlifestyle
North Sentinel Island, located in the Bay of Bengal, between Myanmar and Indonesia, is home to an isolated tribe that has never been colonized or even made contact with. These people are one of the last Stone Age tribes on Earth whose culture has been completely untouched by modern civilization.
onlyblackgirl
Good.
Leave them alone.
amazighprincex
“Stone Age tribes” “untouched by modern civilization”
what a bunch of white supremacist bullshit
they are not “Stone Age,” they are not “untouched by modern civilization,” they ARE a modern civilization… seeing as how they are a civilization that exists currently, today, in the modern world
whiteness is not a measure of modernity. colonization is not a marker of progress
taintedlips
Reblogging for the comment ^^^^
Some people have no fucking idea that there are many many many people in all different parts of the world who still live off the land. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that
Well, if they only use stone tools (and wood, bone, etc), they are by definition “stone age”. Modern stone age, yes, since they do exist today. “Untouched” is fairly descriptive of them, though. Evidently they have had little contact with other peoples (of any type, western, eastern, white, black, etc), and have taken little from them, and had little forced on them.
“Untouched by modern civilization” is a bit iffy, since we did say that they exist in the current time. But it has some utility, since we can’t say only “untouched by western civilization” or “untouched by white civilization” - since clearly there are non-white non-western civilizations that have technology other than stone. Phrasing can become rather difficult if you try to completely avoid words like modern and advanced.
The initial summary doesn’t particularly sound like it was saying that “modern civilization” was better, or that “stone age” was bad, or that “colonization is a marker of progress”. After reading the article, it doesn’t seem to have that tone either. They mostly seem to stick to the facts, and some speculation based on facts - it doesn’t seem to judge one way or another. Mostly just an issue of what weight can be attached to word, and the appropriateness of certain phrases.
In some ways the issue of speaking about them is a bit like evolutionary biology. Over there, you hear about “primitive” or “basal” vs “derived” traits (and organisms as a whole for that matter). Basal is often favored more these days because of the negative associations of “primitive”, likewise “derived” is preferred over “advanced” or similar. There is no “ladder of evolution”, with some higher and some lower. There are just differences. Every organism has the same length of evolution behind it (over 3 billion years). However, some organisms retain traits that appeared early on in the groups history (basal traits) and others have lost or changed those traits (derived traits). Still you sometimes hear the old terms like advanced and primitive, especially in more casual use, and if the people involved are likely to understand what is meant.
