The Inconsequential Menagerie

mumbling-mice:

oneorangeshoelace:

mumbling-mice:

lysanderish:

mumbling-mice:

lysanderish:

mumbling-mice:

I get that this man is trying to look out for them or whatever, but I find this really unsettling. How can he just fly overhead and “monitor” them without giving any thought to how seeing an inexplicable giant thing in the sky is going to affect them? I mean look at the poor people, all of the images of them are of them staring back up in horror and confusion. I mean, Christ, they’re not idiotic ants who won’t put any thought into what’s going on around them, they’re human beings. That’s like if we just randomly saw a UFO flying overhead, without warning, and then were left to mull it over without any further explanation. Can you imagine how that would affect someone? How fucking terrified and and confused and on edge they would be?

If he’s so concerned about them, I don’t understand why he doesn’t just land the goddamn plane and try to communicate with them or something, rather than observing them like their apes.

I believe it’s because the anthropological community wants to keep this culture as pristine and untouched by western civilization as possible. At least, that’s what I remember being told in my anthropology class last fall.

I’d rather see them send in some people of similar colouring to learn about the culture without relying too heavily on western conveniences. 

Honestly, I fail to see how blatantly flying bright white planes right over their communities keeps them untouched by western civilization.

It doesn’t, that’s the problem. They’d probably have a less terrorizing impact if they just sent people in.

Exactly.

idk. I love anthropology and it’s what I’m going to be majoring in, but sometimes I feel like the field sometimes forgets the fact that the people they’re studying have brains and fears and feelings.

Did you… did you watch the video? First of all, they don’t look scared, do they? They look intrigued—fascinated. Second, and this is not in the video but in history, do you recall what people do about things they don’t understand? They make up religions. They probably just worship a helicopter god now. Third and most important—these people have been exposed to none of the same diseases as us. They specifically state in the video that even the common cold could wipe all of them out. We cannot and should not contact them. That’s the point.

…A ‘helicopter god’? Really? I don’t even know what to say to that.

Yeah, I know that the whole disease thing is a major issue (don’t want a repeat of what happened when the Europeans came to America and all) but there are creative ways you can certainly get around that if you put your mind to it. It just seems to me that they’d rather treat these people like some sort of endangered flora rather than human beings that are capable of the same level of intelligence as we in the western civilization. It’s dehumanizing.

»”Powerful Zoom lenses will allow them to film from a Kilometer away to minimize disturbance”
»”Zoom lenses will allow them to film from a Kilometer away”
»”allow them to film from a Kilometer away”
»”from a Kilometer away”
»”Kilometer”

I don’t know what a small airplane like that would look like from a Kilometer a way (which is a pretty sizable distance), but I would wager that it’d probably look like a largish, white bird. If I saw a largish white bird circling overhead from time to time far away, I’d be more amused than frightened.

There are reports about how when many Pre-Colombian civilizations first glimpsed the sails of Europian ships, they wrote them off as just a particularly strange cloud formation. Buzzing by them once every few months for the span of a generation I think does a better job at preserving their culture than marching into their village wearing a hazmat suit and telling them about all the other “tribes” out there.

On top of that, many of the other people commenting on this have missed the point of what they’re trying to do by a kilometer (which, I must remind you is still a pretty significant distance). The Peruvian Government does not recognize that these people exist, and therefore will not reign in the illegal logging that is doing a far more thorough job of decimating their culture than taking a few pictures, studding population growth, and flying by in a tiny airplane could ever do. How is the giant, clumsy, elephantine foot of western civilization going to know where to fall if there’s no one saying, “Hey, don’t step there, you’re going to hurt these people that you never knew existed!”