US man killed by endangered tribe in india

The noble savage myth never goes away, does it? Just mutates its form to suit our prevailing culture.

One might ask if the descendants of those whose communities were invaded and destroyed regret the loss of their inheritance?

Or do they prefer the modern way of life gifted them?

What about space travel and the mission to discover other life forms, how do we handle that? ALternatively how will space aliens handle us?

Maybe missile tracking stations are the way forward?

Rolf F wrote:

Shirley Basso wrote:

Like they did by murdering the guy?

How do you know it was murder? Who knows what the laws of this tribe are. They might have a low arsehole tolerance.

They put up with people who are short?

If you want to steer away from all the colonial 'savage' chat, would also be wise to avoid using the word 'tribe' as that's equally laced with all the usual colonial connotations.

If you want the PC approach, and I appreciate this is pandering to a rather small minority, you could use the term 'pre-state community'.

Rick Chasey wrote:

If you want to steer away from all the colonial 'savage' chat, would also be wise to avoid using the word 'tribe' as that's equally laced with all the usual colonial connotations.

If you want the PC approach, and I appreciate this is pandering to a rather small minority, you could use the term 'pre-state community'.

You could but then we'd still need notification of when "pre-state community" ceases to be a politically correct term.

Rick Chasey wrote:

If you want to steer away from all the colonial 'savage' chat, would also be wise to avoid using the word 'tribe' as that's equally laced with all the usual colonial connotations.

If you want the PC approach, and I appreciate this is pandering to a rather small minority, you could use the term 'pre-state community'.

Possibly that sensitivity is mainly within academic discussion. The word is used frequently to describe political groupings or groups of sports or music fans where there is no colonial context.

Rick Chasey wrote:

Tangled Metal wrote:

Nobility in our species? Savage I get but nobility? Don't see it somehow.

Keep up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage

You misunderstand. I don't see anything noble about our species whether isolated societies or modern world, but I do see evidence of savage tendencies in all cultures I've had any experience of.

Craigus89 wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

If you want to steer away from all the colonial 'savage' chat, would also be wise to avoid using the word 'tribe' as that's equally laced with all the usual colonial connotations.

If you want the PC approach, and I appreciate this is pandering to a rather small minority, you could use the term 'pre-state community'.

I like how we are all being so careful not to insult a group of people who killed a guy, but if someone says they disagree with someone who identifies as the opposite sex who is going to be around their kids they get all the insults under the sun thrown at them.

What a world we have made.

It was identifying them, which that language helps frame, as 'savages' that allowed a European to turn up and think it entirely legit to 'document' them for his own sexual gain and reprimand them for any number of behaviours with quite extreme violence.

Bluntly, if you think it is about offence, you entirely miss the point.

Using tribes in an anthropological context, and referring to things as a little exotic, 'secret languages' and all that?

Seems pretty similar to me.

Have the radio on, the Jeremy Vine phone in stuff on BBC R2, which had this as a topic today. Couple of self proclaimed missionary types called in, the arrogance on show was remarkable. Putting out the old 'call from God' schtick. You're wrong, I'm right, coz I say so. To55ers.

Rick Chasey wrote:

Using tribes in an anthropological context, and referring to things as a little exotic, 'secret languages' and all that?

Seems pretty similar to me.

A great way to avoid responsibility - focus on the words and not how people use them. Eventually you just run out of words and have to make up slightly silly phrases to say the same thing (albeit without, temporarily, the negative connotations).

Rolf F wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Using tribes in an anthropological context, and referring to things as a little exotic, 'secret languages' and all that?

Seems pretty similar to me.

A great way to avoid responsibility - focus on the words and not how people use them. Eventually you just run out of words and have to make up slightly silly phrases to say the same thing (albeit without, temporarily, the negative connotations).

Look, the short of it is, there is fairly good grounding to suggest that the language people use frames how they think of things, and thus allows or disallows certain behaviours.

So once upon a time Europe didn't see the rest of the world as something to be conquered and dominated, and at one point they did. At that point, an entire language was based around the idea that the Europeans would 'civilise' the rest of the 'uncivilised' world, and that ultimately was the rhetorical and intellectual justification for an awful lot of violent colonialism.

The way people have arrived at that conclusion is by doing a lot of literary analysis, and seeing how that correlates to what occurred. I had some work published which did exactly that; an account of a British administrative colonialist and his take on the extremely violent Belgian occupation of the Congo, which i deconstructed to establish how those atrocities were justified, in order to re-build the way of thinking that allowed for those things to happen.

I could bore you with the details, but this is fairly well recognised, and has been very much been accepted as the case in circles who study this for the last 30 years or so.

It's not about avoiding responsibility.

bompington wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

It was identifying them, which that language helps frame, as 'savages' that allowed a European to turn up and think it entirely legit to 'document' them for his own sexual gain and reprimand them for any number of behaviours with quite extreme violence.

Bluntly, if you think it is about offence, you entirely miss the point.

You could also argue that being an abusive 4rsehole was what allowed him to do this, but I'm glad we have academic experts to disabuse us of this silly notion.

It's more the intellectual space that allows people to do that.

I think if we discuss more recent instances of atrocities, referring to groups of people as 'rats' or anything like that is definitely considered to be something that helps tips people towards being capable of those types of things. If May suddenly started calling immigrants 'savages', she would quickly be accused of being dangerous, right?

This guy was allowed to do what he did because it was just considered part of colonialism, because these locals were inferior. No-one called him up on it, because it was just considered usual behaviour. The textual analysis helps us understand what the intellectual framework was to allow for that kind of behaviour.

Of course he was abusive - no-one is suggesting otherwise.

Rick Chasey wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Using tribes in an anthropological context, and referring to things as a little exotic, 'secret languages' and all that?

Seems pretty similar to me.

A great way to avoid responsibility - focus on the words and not how people use them. Eventually you just run out of words and have to make up slightly silly phrases to say the same thing (albeit without, temporarily, the negative connotations).

Look, the short of it is, there is fairly good grounding to suggest that the language people use frames how they think of things, and thus allows or disallows certain behaviours.

So once upon a time Europe didn't see the rest of the world as something to be conquered and dominated, and at one point they did. At that point, an entire language was based around the idea that the Europeans would 'civilise' the rest of the 'uncivilised' world, and that ultimately was the rhetorical and intellectual justification for an awful lot of violent colonialism.

The way people have arrived at that conclusion is by doing a lot of literary analysis, and seeing how that correlates to what occurred. I had some work published which did exactly that; an account of a British administrative colonialist and his take on the extremely violent Belgian occupation of the Congo, which i deconstructed to establish how those atrocities were justified, in order to re-build the way of thinking that allowed for those things to happen.

I could bore you with the details, but this is fairly well recognised, and has been very much been accepted as the case in circles who study this for the last 30 years or so.

It's not about avoiding responsibility.

That is a pretty shaky claim. Empires around the world have been seeking to expand and dominate their neighbours since there have been empires, and labelling those neighbours as lessers to justify it for as long. The Romans referred to those outside their empire as barbarians, as did the Greek city states, the Egyptians, the Chinese. Herodotus divided the world into those who speak Greek and those who do not. This is not a a phenomenon that started in Renaissance Europe.

Depends how long ago you start looking. 100s, 1000s or 100,000s of years ago?