I was
just watching some catch-up TV, and the show I was most looking
forward to was the Channel 4 documentary about the hitherto 'undiscovered' tribe
of Amazonians, centred on the studies of the Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Morellis,
and the first meeting of a tribe that were ostensible hunter-gatherers.
To begin
with the tribe were very fearful of white men, and it took Morellis a whole
year and a practical understanding of their language and mannerisms to realise that these Amazonian
hunter-gatherers had been treated very badly by
white fortune-seekers looking for gold, by illegal loggers, and by those who
enslaved native men to tap rubber trees. In fact, in one of the most
startling moments, a photo was shown of such a group from yesteryear with chains round their
necks and wrists.
After
Morellis had spent some time patrolling up and down the river, sussing
them out, there was a meeting, which was sufficiently successful enough to
ensure the Amazonians no longer feared all white men. When both parties finally
learned to put their guards down, there were some very moving scenes between
the two groups.
Some
will be perturbed by the fact that more advanced people have come along and
disturbed a tribe of people otherwise living in virtual isolation from the rest
of the world's population. But the Amazonians weren't exactly having a blast
there - their daily existence was a continual struggle for survival, and always
with the spectre of being attacked by poisonous snakes and jaguars, and, particularity
interestingly if you're someone who knows your Bible, experiencing repeated feelings of shame for being
mostly naked.
This
programme was a rare chance to experience something terrifically fascinating
and unique - a real life present-day social experiment back to our
hunter-gatherer past (even more intriguing given the fact that rainforests are
not the most natural habitat of hunter-gatherers). As well as getting to
observe the behaviour of people one is never going to meet in virtually all
other places in the world, there were for me two other notable things. Firstly,
the Amazonians had no obvious status ornaments, yet there was evidently a hierarchy.
And secondly, despite no socialised views of religion or the divine, they
believed in heaven and the afterlife.
The programme was compelling viewing for virtually every minute of its duration. But perhaps the standout thing I observed is this. It's
quite possible that in just one hour of observing these Amazonian hunter-gatherers
we have clear exhibition of an analogue to the precursors of all the world's
religions: that homo-sapiens have evolved the hardware to experience awe and
wonder in a way that appears to make us worshipfully inclined (something the
writer of Ecclesiastes noted in chapter 3 verse 11), and that we have always possessed
all the blueprints for hierarchicalism, which makes the organised religions
that have emerged from our evolved hardware not in the least bit surprising,
and perhaps even somewhat inevitable.
