This is not only important for anthropology but also important in terms of policy formation of national government to achive the broad goals. If this type of micro studies will not come out, then it is very difficult for government to formulate special policies for minority communities.

The traditional knowledge of indigenous communities give us the ';other dimension' of most problems faced today. From ecosystem management to traditional medicine, their knowledge can help us in coping up with resource depletion. Moreover as Sumoni says, it helps in formulating better, inclusive and relevant policies for these marginalized people.

Agreed with Sumoni and Merlin. There will always be 'indigenous' communities no matter how far removed they become from what they once were, and it is an exciting and useful aspect of anthropology to be able to track these changes while providing insight into their shifting ways of being and perhaps solutions to their changing needs.

thanks for your answer people, I totally agree with all of you guys. But, these leads us to another question whom can we call 'indigenous' or 'tribal?; isn't the term becomes misleading then......everything then has to looked into from a relative perspective. I am in any way not denying the requirement as you have quite clearly explained, but I feel such idioms needs further re-look?

Do not go by definition, look into the severity of the problems, and focus what you want to bring into light.

At least since the 1970s (I am talking about the Barbados meetings), the help and support towards indigenous or tribal groups has been strong within anthropology. I have the impression that this got lost in the last few years - favoring a new colonial intent to study and describe tribes in order to integrate them into westernized society - or in order to be able to relocate them if the government or corporations want their territory. So, good question, Abhradip.

Thanks, Philipp you are absolutely correct. Sumoni thank you as well.....you will understand it better for being an Indian-- what goes on in the name of development. You are absolutely correct about the need of looking into a problem with a clear mind. But how far that is been reflected by Tribal Developmental Policies or policies in general. Aren't some of our developmental policies are rooted within strong social and political interest? I am not denying about requirement of development. But are they serving the needs of those for whom they are meant to?

There are many volatile areas like identity politics which problematizes actual course of development. These are some of the areas we need to improve to broaden scope and relevance of Tribal studies today.

I remember when Clifford Geertz tried to anthropologize the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. where he was the head of the Anthropology section, he was refused. His issues were to study the regalia, the ritual processes, the attitudes and the use of time by the scientists at IAS. The IAS Director said something like: "Science is not a culture but a behavior" or some nonsense to that effect. (I believe the citation is in an interview with Geertz in "States of Mind" by Jonathan Miller)

The problem IMHO is not with trying to study other cultures but being unable to study your own. When I tried to teach that last year to a class of graduate students as a foundation for their Sacred Performing Arts courses, they, like the scientists were hostile to the idea. As an artist and interdisciplinary scholar I take my refuge in the Delphic Maxim: "Know Thyself." The sense of that can be found all over the world. Just Google it, there are thousands of versions and Geertz's published encounter with his director documents the problem of parochial thinking when it comes to self knowledge.

Unfortunately, parochial thinking becomes chauvinistic thinking when applied to other cultures, especially if you have a proselytizing bent. Most Indigenous Societies have taboos about proselytization. They say the Lifegiver gave us our place to be born and that we should accept the culture we were born into. That we may add to that culture but should not "take away" from it with simple proselytizing ideas. Integrity rather than a simple covering up.

In the U.S. that is not so easy because of the ghosts of former cultures that we all carry around within us. Like the church at Cordoba or the Mosque at Istanbul. Too often we find masterpieces underneath banal works that were layered just to save canvas, often by the same artist as the original.

Cultures in America resemble horses in a corral. "Which horse shall we ride?" You might start this discussion with the work of the Brazilian Anthropologists who have been the first to document eras in the use of the word "Tribal." "Tribal" is a derogative in the US where it really means "Remnant" cultures. You might compare it to the Spanish discussion of the effects of the Moors on Spanish culture. In America, the Cherokee "Tribe" was the size of France in 1492 before the diseases destroyed 98% of their populations. That gave the opportunity for the invaders to size down the land to the smaller population and eventually to drive them to what is now the state of Oklahoma, on a death march in a terrible early winter.

As Classical Historian Bettany Hughes makes clear in this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8HnvuKbAo

the current Spanish historic cant about the role of the Moors in the entire society, has been not simply ignored or denied but suffered a conscious attempt at rewriting history. That unscientific attitude is the opposite of "Know Yourself." Instead it is an act of "self-Creation" that is scientifically, educationally and in my opinion, spiritually profane.

I believe the issue of Indigenous, since I am one, is more served by the Emic/Etic anthropological attitudes of people like Darrell Posey who treated Indigenous people as adults and as experts in their own environment. If you apply Posey's attitude towards botanicals with studies of the human senses by anthropologists like Kathryn Linn Geurts (Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community) and relate that research to the COG research at MIT in Robotics you will begin to have a more humble attitude than is usual in the West. What is developed as pedagogy in Indigenous Societies through forestry, fire and agricultural technology becomes much more impressive that our feeble Western eyes can perceive not to mention the problem of English in expressing such a thing.

The problem of psychological and cultural projection as show by Geertz is still severe. Hughes in her generic "made for the public" program on the Moors proves that the information is there and that considering people both in history and in today's Indigeneous areas as adults and technicians of their worlds is the only possible attitude given the information era and the proliferation of both books, youtube and the internet in general. Both Relational and Referential Transparency is the only possibility given the current state of informational technology.

To address the initial question posed, IMHO anthropological questions might be posed about any society or group, and therefore it is certainly legitimate to study Tribal cultures today. There may be hurdles, as in the Institute for Advanced Studies example cited by Ray, above, and as with most studies, consent or acceptance by the subjects is required.

More to the point may be the question of what it is that one proposes to study with respect to the target society. This is an age of institutional ethical review boards. Some of the posts above indicate the competing interests with respect to dealing with indigenous or tribal societies, and I would hope anthropological studies don't threaten the interests of the studied group.

It is also an age where the researcher should consider how broad is the interest in the question posed? And for what purpose?

Thanks Thomas, you forced me to reread everyone's posts from the standpoint of the Comparative Advantage of an Indigenous Nation and what that means if they are integrated into the world market. Pharmaceuticals would be a large part of their Comparative Advantage in the world and such Comparative Advantage would be the Foundation of their being able to resist such things as the Dam on the Chingu River that Brazil is pursuing that will ruin so many people and culture's existence. As for the rest of the world, the loss of that botanical diversity for simple electricity resembles nothing more than the atrocities that happened in the U.S. in the late 1800s and the beginning of the 20th century. For example, the destruction of the Sioux and Navajo economic base to make the West available to the over abundance of immigrants in the Eastern US through the Homestead Act begun by Abraham Lincoln and flowering throughout the last forty years of the 19th century.

Given that history, Geertz's Director might not seem so paranoid. If the purpose of Anthropology is not the simple gathering of information but the deliberate objectification of a culture for the purpose of manipulating them as information, then a scientist would be nuts to put such information in the hands of the general reader who may, like so many of the fundamentalists in the US, hate and deny scientific truth. It now occurs to me that a lot of the anti-French attitude in the US is recent. Recent to much of the study done by American Anthropologists in France as well as the older (3,000 years old) towns in Italy described by David Peat. As an American Indian, I don't have a particularly good feeling towards scientists like Boas, Morgan, Schoolcraft and Cass. Even Mooney did a lot of damage with his paternalistic attitude but the worst was Samuel Morton and the discredited "science" of phrenology that guaranteed that every murdered American Indian would lose his head and send his spirit to his ancestors in a desecration. There are hundreds of thousands of those still extant in museums across America. The science of Anthropology was founded and grew out of that era of human thinking. (Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880, The early years of American Ethnology; Robert E. Bieder; OU press, 1986)

REH

Thank you, Ray, for some excellent remarks. The globe is replete with examples of indigenous or local cultures interacting with external cultures--both in recent or historical times, and in prehistoric (archaeological) settings. When it comes to present-day tribal cultures, the field may be ripe for study of the impact of globalization on these, in the context of cultural preservation (the Mundo Maya movement in Guatemala), or of cultural displacement or genocide (Chixoy dam in Guatemala), or of cultural integration. Just one of the many reasons it should not only be acceptable, but perhaps should be deemed mandatory that present day tribal cultures be studied. But as you mention, studied in such a way that the information is not manipulated to the disadvantage of the society studied.

Andreas, I would just add to: "the good faith of the anthropologist." The good faith, maturity, humanity and willingness to dialogue with the people that invites him into their homes." Good post, thanks. REH

It is clear that all those responding to the question here are speaking from the western key-hole of post colonial guilt. I speak as an African whose ancestors were once tribesmen who were luckily routed out of their tribality by the conqueror's cannon shot and the missionary's holy water. They tasted modernity and knew immediately that it was far better than the best their own ancestors could ever imagine. They converted en masse until the first acculturated elite, having picked up a few threadbare slogans from the west's own cultural pessimists, told them to return to their ancestral roots. many hesitated but many also heeded the cultural nationalist call to rediscover their negritude.The root of Africa's under-development is the decision to turn our back on the colonial call to modernity; it is the return to the tribal roots from which the colonial educator/ missionary had sought to extract us. Who misled Africa into this wrongful decision in the first place? It was the western anthropologist who thought he was doing Africa a lot of good by reversing the difference between civilization and primitivism into a bland, colorless cultural relativism. Now that Africa is stuck in the neurotic inability to come out of under-development and political infantilism, don't you people think that it will be better for the west to find other ways of expiating its so-called postcolonial guilt than by discouraging tribesmen from seeking every means possible to come out of their sick jungles in order to join the living sea of globalized humanity? Have you ever asked the native inhabitants of these cultural diversity enclaves if, given the opportunity, they would not readily exchange it even for a pot of American post modern porridge? The best any one can do to help Africa is not to continue to shed the crocodile tears of postcolonial guilt but to tell her to go back to the hard school of a proper transition to modernity

Denis,

Your passion is evident but consider that your judgment of my "post modernism" may be misplaced. My assumption is that our ancestors were mature adults who didn't just sit around for 500,000 years waiting for slavers and other imperialists to come and rescue them but had their own marvels that were lost when Empire arrived. The official cant of Western History is rife with political views of conquered peoples. Consider the official Spanish story about the Moors of Spain whose devastation was so complete that we can only hint at the environment that existed at the time. What we do get from the texts now coming into view is that they created beautiful environments and enriched the agriculture of the region far beyond what they found. (Hughes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8HnvuKbAo) Cordoba, like Tenochtitlan, is now buried beneath many layers of both silt and denial. One should remember that the Spaniards who knew both cities said that Tenochtitlan was the most beautiful city in the world. I've also heard stories like that about ancient cities in Africa. Anthropology has a checkered history at best and is loaded with arrogance and paternalism but most adolescents are like that. Their belief system is based in "authority" and personal "tenacity." That's a very tight jacket for a scientist.

With a little more maturity and awareness brought on by wise people like Edward T. Hall who used technology to micro-analyze not only remnant populations in jungles but immigrant populations in the great cities of the world, new doors into humanity can be quietly opened so as not to disturb the gifts passed down. Modern Anthropologists are opening these doors with Archeology building the context for those observations. Often it is common laborers building subways discovering palaces in Cordoba, Tenochtitlan and even London. I would argue that it is not Post Modernism or guilt but fear of history making a fool of them through Archeology, that stems the fantasies of the authoritarian Anthropologist and sews the doubts as they look at the remnants of once great civilizations. These are the doors that are opened by Anthropologists of the Senses like Kathryn Linn Geurts in Africa and the Emic/Etic dialogues by people like Darrell Posey in Brazil.

Denis, I realize that one doesn't want to give back the automobile or Chinese solar cells, but must we destroy the elephant because we don't? Must your continent become as barren of the spirits of the Animals as in America or worse, Great Britain? I don't believe it is an accident that the sightings of those big black panthers as well as other big game are regularly reported in Great Britain. As an American Indian I would ascribe that to "ghosts in the brains of the observers." That could be guilt, although the sightings are older than Post Modern and they've never found a single one.

Archeology holds the promise of truth about the past. Scholarship demands it and as the Hollywood Jewish culture just discovered last week: an ambitious Jewish PhD candidate will go anywhere for a unique Doctoral Thesis. Even one that puts their own community in an uncomfortable historical light. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/books/scholar-asserts-that-hollywood-avidly-aided-nazis.html?pagewanted=all) Only aesthetics offers a more blunt dedication to the truth than a hungry PhD candidate.

As for the remnant cultures today in the Americas, Australia, Polynesia and Africa, is there nothing special there to be lost or recovered? I, personally, don't believe that human centrism is good for the environment or the future of Africa or anyplace else. Is Australia renewed by putting Aboriginal people in business suits? Or is something crucial to the human quilt lost in the process?

I'm an American Indian and language, for one thing, is an important way of "being" that was systematically exterminated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S. and the prejudice against such continues down to the present. The scientific problem is that Quantum realities are better expressed in Algonquin than in English, just as in the 19th century Algonquin could not express Newtonian realities. (Cass, Peat, etc.)

Mike Hollinshead and I did research for the Canadian Committee on Truth and Reconciliation, where they have discovered death rates among the students as high as 70% and an average of 50% as a result of ignorance of culture by the immigrant governmental and religious elites in power. All relating to loss of culture, identity and language as well as the other "run of the mill" abuses like sexual abuse and work gangs where children died from working eight hour days of hard physical labor. This is not something that would have been unknown in the Arkwright textile mills of child labor England either, where the children cemeteries are also full. Were these deaths "worthwhile," considering that they now have sewing machines, automobiles and a computer? I think you would have trouble making that case, as scholars from every profession are examining what was lost in the race to "conquer" the continent and deny the value of ancient knowledge encased in living bodies.

Even in Europe, the overall prosperity of the Spanish population during the Islamic city states in Spain are routinely written out by reworked history, victor's pride and religious politics, but that's not Post Modern but two hundred years of revisionist lying. I've found the same thing true here in my own personal experience growing up on an Indian Reservation (Quapaw), where the accomplishments of Indian history and people were/are, simply ignored as were the facts of agricultural technology that today supplies the largest number of basic foodstuffs to Western diets of any culture in the world: Deliberately developed foodstuffs; not "found" or "gathered" but developed. Only recently has the development of "Terra Preta" soil been discovered as Indigenous Science in the wild Amazon jungle. Only recently has the yearly burning of the forests of early America been discovered to have a theoretical base in scientific forestry and the Indians knew it. American Indian forestry is unlike the European Laissez Faire method of forestry that modern capitalism layered on the concept of the markets.

The types of civilizations and the advancements of those civilizations in environmental management, child education and political consensus theories, served as the basis for both of the theoretical sides of world liberalism. Education was radically changed by Europe's encounter with the foundations and theoretical basis in process evolved by nations indigenous to the Americas. Political systems were changed and evolved by the encounter with people like the Iroquois League and the Cherokee Nation, before the founding of the American revolution. These are documented in the writings of authors as seminal as Hegel and Locke (political theory) and Rousseau (child rearing and education).

The problem here is not guilt but justice. Also the roots of genocide that historian Ben Kiernan documents world wide and not only from Europe. I believe, the problems of cities, agriculture and now industrialization, merit another look at past answers and a realization that the problems are not between "primitives and sophistication" but more between "provincialism, parochialism and chauvinism" and societal maturity. These are very old problems and not only for Science but for Art, Religion, Commerce, Education, Law and even Healing.

I'm not qualified to comment on Africa and certainly not as you are, however, I would suggest that your thoughts require another look into your assumptions about the roots of this question. The people of the past were adults and they had sophisticated solutions that in many cases are the answers to problems that could send the world into the maelstrom of environmental collapse. Certainly, the loss of botanical information by a dam on the Xingu river in Brazil should give pause to us all. In a time when the cure for my Lyme disease was a vine from the Amazon forest, we should give pause to negative thoughts about the knowledge of the people who are keepers of that botanical pharmacy. Thank you for your passion. I found such questions stimulating. Such an international list seeking scientific solutions to questions is of great value to me personally. REH

Ray, many thanks indeed for your detailed response. Let me say first of all how pleased I am to have an encounter for the first time with an American Indian scholar. I have been enjoying most of your posts here but I never suspected that your genealogy was that of one of history's most battered victims. I am delighted to be acquainted with the source and the location of your trenchant anti-Eurocentric/globalization discourse. I can now agree with you as a fellow sufferer of Europe's past appropriation of the world process that it make sense to remind Europe that inhabitants of the non-west jungles were mature adults and not children in need of being salvaged and rebred. I also agree with you that the value of ancient indigenous knowledges relative to the needs of the people who invented them cannot be doubted by any sane person. However where I beg to differ with you is your conviction that we still have to hanker after and rediscover all that had been lost in the course of Europe's seizure of the rest of the world. On this issue, I am afraid, I reason like Hegel. The colonization of the rest of the world by Europe was an act of divine providence whose goal was not just to open and link up disparate peoples and cultures with one another but most importantly, to allow mankind to enter a different cycle of self-consciousness and world history. From this Hegelian perspective I tend to relativize not only the crimes of world history committed by Europe in the light of what Hegel termed the cunnings of reason in history. [to complete]

Thanks for your reasoned and graceful response. We are walking on the bones of our ancestors here. I prefer to think of dancing with them much as Kazantzakis had Odysseus do with his at the Well. I have many "horses" in my lineage but the one that I was born in is Cherokee (Tsalagi) and raised in was Quapaw (Oogapah). My principle lineage is Cherokee as is my faith but I also carry the other. At the same time I've made my living in the European Art forms for my entire life. They were the ones that taught me not to mix a French interpretation of an English song, an Italian Aria or a German Lied. That each had its own domain and rules and that it was essential to the proper history of each that we follow those. I agree with that.

The questions of rage and sorrow are always difficult. I began my search for our traditions after a long detour through college, the army and a professional career as an Opera Singer, Dancer, Conductor and Artistic Director of a Chamber Opera company here in New York City. My training was in teaching from my own parents who were teachers and school management and I have a pedagogy minor in piano pedagogy but my principle training and art has been in performance and work with old European culture and trying to help the Americans value their own expressions here in what is termed "Classical" formats. I've taught at two of the conservatories here as well as schools elsewhere and am presently developing the Foundations program for Sacred Music at the Jewish Theological Seminary here. The Foundations course is the generic course that underlies all Sacred Musics and not any one religion or group. It speaks well for the Jewish people that they hired an expert in that area no matter what his ethnicity. I am also a trained Priest (Didahnvwisgi) in the religion of my people.

Denis, I tell you all of this to simply make one point. I've done and am doing all of this work to recover the impulse and structures for Europeans and have done so for institutions in two of the three Abrahamic Religions. My question for you is this: What is so special about their traditions that we should ignore our own?

Hegel borrowed our ideas to form his idea of government. He did mention that but he still considered himself (and Europe) on the top of the current wave of history. I tend to think more in "cycles" of history instead.

Martin Buber the Jewish theologian and philosopher spoke of two words for that attitude. One is Pistis and he ascribes to the Greeks although the Christians also have that view of a flow of history that is the basis for the idea of "regeneration." Every person must begin history again with a choice. The other word is from the Hebrew and Buber ascribes that to where you are born. The word is Emunah. (Buber, Two Types of Faith).

In my own traditions we have both. First the Lifegiver, Giver of Breath breathes life into us in a specific place, family, community, culture and nation. We are given "original instructions" as a child that allows us to absorb whatever the language, psycho-physical processes, micro-movements etc. etc. of the environment we are given. Unlike the Europeans we also believe our spirits are not separate from the Lifegiver but that is a much longer discussion.

Until we lose the "Original Instructions" about the age of 12 or 13 years, we exist in a sacred manner as the responsibility of our families, clans, communities, cities, schools and all of their institutions.

The difference here is our belief in the sacredness of the child within their spectacular abilities to imitate, express, include and absorb the world as they experience it. What they don't have is wisdom and it is the responsibility of their environment to provide that and teach them its basis. That basis to their culture is traditional culture.

A people with no history or a partial one is a suffering people. In all of the domains of social existence they are poor. Absorbing another culture can be rewarding. Ask American Indian ballet dancers or opera singers or Chinese concert pianists. But there is still "Home" aqua nvsv'i as we say it. "Homelessness" is another world.

I said that we also had the "choice" idea as do the Greeks and the Christians. We call it a "vision quest" and each traditional person will do them throughout their lives as they seek renewal of the purpose and intent of their existence in this world. Some say there are four, some say seven and some say simply one. All education is local, even when the training comes from outside.

C.S. Pierce said that belief includes these four things and I agree: Authority, Tenacity, Metaphysics and Science. That's a European's way of saying it. But what is not said is that Pierce was living in Lenni Lenape American Indian country when he thought these things up and that our spirits were talking to him. We would say that you first hear your Mother in the womb and then you learn to hold to her even though you don't know what that means. Then you are born and you begin to learn about your own psycho-physical instrument in all of it's manifestations and then you observe the world, which is also a greater living being, and develop your sense of self, your language, you understand and reason what the Cherokee call the "way of right relationship" (logic) and finally you figure out a way to preserve it in some sort of archival process.

We could say there are seven processes by which this happens but that's a whole course. Returning to Pierce he said there are Foundations, Theories, Methodologies and Applications. To develop and use that, we need all of our tools and not just the most recent European ones.

Thank you again for your graciousness and the opportunity to think on these things.

REH

Ray sorry I had to cut short my response because the battery of my laptop had run down and there was no public power supply to bail me out. Power outage interrupted my train of thought just as it has been interrupting development/modernization in my country Nigeria and in the rest of Africa. So you see the issue here is what cultures are better placed to assist us in our efforts to come out of under-development or failed development. That is the perspective that has guided the formulation of my new approach to art, culture and intellectual discourse here in Africa. It is called Post-Africanism. I have already published a few things on this concept and in September this year I am going to deliver in South Africa, a key-note lecture on Post-Africanism versus Indigenous Knowledge systems in a modernizing Africa. The point I am making here is that the demands of development are so pressing in hunger-ravaged Africa that we have need for total mobilization of all things including art, culture, science and technology etc to help us win the battle against the seemingly endless cycles of failure in Africa. In the case of art and culture the issue is what view of art, what practice of culture, is best suited to our most urgent needs? Is it the return to old roots and archaic worldviews of our ancestors or should we rather not embrace the success codes embedded in other cultures? Can cultural/artistic traditionalism serve our best interests in the current conjucture or should we not rather seek to overcome our ingrained Africanism since this has not served us well? Posing the issues this way shows that though both you and I may have the same preoccupation with re-assessing the value of our hitherto disqualified traditions and ancient knowledge systems, we are talking from two very different contexts. Yours is the context of post-modern America suffering from post-material disgust with its technological over-development and feverishly seeking for redemption in the return to pre-modern worldviews, cultures and spiritual values. Mine is the condition of a continent slowly dying of hunger and political instability and in dire need of workable solutions to basic survival needs. While you can conveniently dabble in cultural primitivism, I cannot afford the luxury of taking my eyes away from problem-solving approach to issues including art and culture. However I have learnt a lot from your masterful exposition of Indian worldview and metaphysics. But I think that your statement concerning a people without a past being a suffering people seems exaggerated. The point about modernity is precisely that some people have to turn their back on their past in order to prosper. while some pasts, some native cultures are readily adaptable to progress, others are very progress-resistant and may need to undergo cultural change or worldview switch. Why anthropology is a dangerous science is that it takes all native cultures to be equally valid bases for productive life in modernity; for reasons of political correctness it dares not tell the truth to many native cultures. Are they not sick societies rather than cultural diversity specimens? Many thanks indeed for your very engaging discourse on some of the dilemmas of culture in nation with such a troubled past as America

Denis Ekpo said: Ray sorry I had to cut short my response because the battery of my laptop had run down and there was no public power supply to bail me out. Power outage interrupted my train of thought just as it has been interrupting development/modernization in my country Nigeria and in the rest of Africa. So you see the issue here is what cultures are better placed to assist us in our efforts to come out of under-development or failed development.

Ray Evans Harrell replied: I can relate to that. My Iphone is far more prone to break-up than the land lines of my childhood in Oklahoma. At that time we also knew who was listening to us. Just the neighbors on who shared the same telephone line. Today it's Homeland Security. (enough about that.)

DE: That is the perspective that has guided the formulation of my new approach to art, culture and intellectual discourse here in Africa. It is called Post-Africanism. I have already published a few things on this concept and in September this year I am going to deliver in South Africa, a key-note lecture on Post-Africanism versus Indigenous Knowledge systems in a modernizing Africa.

REH: Congratulations. I can relate to that. We had a member of our New York City Cherokee community lecture in South Africa at an International Conference not long ago. She is a world expert in Speech Therapy.

DE: The point I am making here is that the demands of development are so pressing in hunger-ravaged Africa that we have need for total mobilization of all things including art, culture, science and technology etc to help us win the battle against the seemingly endless cycles of failure in Africa.

REH: I certainly would never suggest that one should avoid being contemporary. I was a member of the Minimalist Musical Movement in the 1970s in Soho. I have a contemporary opera company, The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. that has performed contemporary classical music from all over America and from Europe. All Art is time space specific. When it travels it becomes something else. I requested your paper on: "Speak Negritude But Think and Act French" but I'm not sure how or when I will obtain it. The title is reminiscent of the problem of Thinking Cherokee, a verb based language filled with metaphor and grammatical contractions, in English which is noun based and filled with words. Modern Cherokee speakers love text messaging since the idea of word reduction is native to the Cherokee sentence. As I said, yesterday, modern science is more speakable and writeable in Native prose than in Indo-European prose. No less an authority than David Bohm made that point before he died.

DE: In the case of art and culture the issue is what view of art, what practice of culture, is best suited to our most urgent needs?

REH: I don't think I understand that comment. I understand that Art flows through Social Domains as tools of the Domain and that only the Aesthetic Domain has Art at its center. All of the other Domains use Art as a tool for some purpose. Religion for example has sacred art, the Marketplace uses art for recreation, leisure, entertainment etc. Education uses art to train the human instrument, Government uses art in its organizations for bonding and team cohesion, Science uses Art to demonstrate its processes in the highest quality design possible and Health uses Art to create theraputic situations for public and individual health.

DE: Is it the return to old roots and archaic worldviews of our ancestors or should we rather not embrace the success codes embedded in other cultures?

REH: In America, the Aesthetic Domain is the research and development arm that keeps the artistic tools, in all of the other domains, true and of the highest quality. My question about your question is how can you borrow someone else's identity without changing it into something else? It's not a thing but a process that starts in the womb and comes from the unique perceptual instrument of every individual and their development. We can learn processes and there is educational purpose and value in learning many processes: that is something the Europeans have done in traveling the world; but performing French Art like German Art just gives you an accent. John Field did tremendous things for Russian music but it was the connection with the Russian rhythms, colors, pitches etc. that made Field's music and piano technique express Russia and not his native Ireland or his teacher Clementi's Italian English. For his contribution and heritage he needed the help of the Russians. Art is identity. Rhythms begin being shaped in the womb and are set by adolescence. Most never change after that unless the person is going to be an artist and is working in creative design, or as my old Hungarian piano teacher Bela Rozsa said: "A psycho-physical pursuit of values in a perceptual medium."

DE: Can cultural/artistic traditionalism serve our best interests in the current conjucture or should we not rather seek to overcome our ingrained Africanism since this has not served us well?

REH: Technically there is no more subtle use of musical elements in time in the whole of the world than in Africa. The whole world comes to Africa to learn that. Would you mess around with replacing Heritage or do you want to develop a modern professionalism that includes Heritage but expands it through dialogue with the modern world?

DE: Posing the issues this way shows that though both you and I may have the same preoccupation with re-assessing the value of our hitherto disqualified traditions and ancient knowledge systems, we are talking from two very different contexts.

REH: not sure about that but I will concede that you may be right.

DE: Yours is the context of post-modern America suffering from post-material disgust with its technological over-development and feverishly seeking for redemption in the return to pre-modern worldviews, cultures and spiritual values.

REH: That's academic nonsense. My disgust is with economic issues defining the identity of the nation and destroying the context for the rest of the Social Domains in a useless cost effectiveness. Check out this from today's NYTimes for the attitude of which I speak: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/fashion/sex-on-campus-she-can-play-that-game-too.html?hp (paragraph four)

DE: Mine is the condition of a continent slowly dying of hunger and political instability and in dire need of workable solutions to basic survival needs. While you can conveniently dabble in cultural primitivism, I cannot afford the luxury of taking my eyes away from problem-solving approach to issues including art and culture.

REH: I am not competent to discuss Africa or her problems although I am sympathetic. Heritage is not cultural primitivism whether its Dragging Canoe or Ludwig van Beethoven. The only point here is that less is known about Dragging Canoe than Beethoven because he was killed and his artistic products slaughtered. Beethoven didn't have it so good either. Europe has not been nice to artists and still isn't. What is left of Dragging Canoe's heritage are remnants, just the same as the remnants of Renaissance music in Europe or the Bach archives in Berlin after WWII. You learn a lot about yourself when you study your ancestors seriously but Heritage is not the same as profession. Profession is modern and Legacy is not the same as Heritage. Heritage is not primitive unless of course you are judging one Social Domain with the rules of another. Then you get a prejudice and an act of chauvinism.

DE: However I have learnt a lot from your masterful exposition of Indian worldview and metaphysics. But I think that your statement concerning a people without a past being a suffering people seems exaggerated.

REH: That is not my experience either as an Indian or as a producer and teacher of opera. Garcia-Lorca called it being able to listen to the "deep springs". As a teacher of theater I personally experience "deep springs" daily as actors from cultures all over the world learn to develop their psycho-physical instrument through improvisation and sense memory. Throwing away their heritage is throwing away their gifts. It has nothing to do with living in the present in their context although I am certainly sympathetic to the situation you describe in your context. It would seem to me that setting the parameters is very important in order to both conserve and develop. We've been through a terrible time here when the rule was: "Kill the Indian and thus save the man inside!" What we learned was that the man's soul died with the Indian and that the real reason for it all was someone else wanting to develop a competitive advantage and take what the Indian had. The prior to "Kill the Indian save the Man" was "Manifest Destiny."

DE: The point about modernity is precisely that some people have to turn their back on their past in order to prosper. while some pasts, some native cultures are readily adaptable to progress, others are very progress-resistant and may need to undergo cultural change or worldview switch.

REH: Jerome Rothenberg, a Jewish poet, went out to explore poetry in the indigenous nations. He lived a couple of years with the Seneca here and traveled around. What he found was: 1. When it comes to Sacred complexity, the Indigenous people's were Sacred Technologists. 2. The problem of linear thinking is inbred in European thought and only a good dose of non-linear poetic exploration would serve to break the European free from their linguistic bonds. It was a very exciting time in the 1970s in Soho when the Open Poetry work of David Anton and the others were creating it on the spot once they discovered non-linear thought. Of course now we know they were also coming directly out of the Romantic traditions from their past as well. It all works together.

DE: Why anthropology is a dangerous science is that it takes all native cultures to be equally valid bases for productive life in modernity;

REH: Is that so? No one seems to be doing very well at productive life in modernity. Have you seen the TPP corporate takeovers, the enslavement of girl children, global weather change, poverty and the massive economic hole between the rich and the poor? Classical music is great and classical art found all over the world is also great. Expressing your soul and your potential is crucial. I would throw away nothing. That's the rule of an Oklahoma farmer. You never know what you might need tomorrow.

DE: for reasons of political correctness it dares not tell the truth to many native cultures.

REH: Half right. I don't see it as PC but they have lied on a regular basis for their own purposes.

DE: Are they not sick societies rather than cultural diversity specimens?

REH: I tend not to judge people with a medical model. Sometimes healing them makes it worse.

DE: Many thanks indeed for your very engaging discourse on some of the dilemmas of culture in nation with such a troubled past as America.

REH: From me as well. America has been a mix of all of the problems of the "Walking Wounded" from all of the cultures of the rest of the world. It wasn't a very nice thing to do. REH

Ray I must say that I have abundantly benefited from your deep well of knowledge and wisdom. The beauty of exchanges like this one is that they help us to expand our consciousness of the complexity of the battles between tradition and modernity in a post-modern world apparently gone awry. I will later respond to some of the important issues you have raised here. For now I request that you send me your e-mail so that I can send you a copy of my essay " Speak Negritude but act think and act French'.

The tribal studies basically is related with searching link between early man and its last remains. in form of various primitive societies. As these primitive people were distinct then the modern population- one they lived in very limited and primitive kind of tools and household things. Second they were totally writing less people and dependent on oral leanings or communications. In fact they were preliterate people since period of human evolution. So these tribal people or primitive people become useful in understanding the early man. For example the use of hunting or fishing tools of primitive people is totally in continuous of our Mesolithic period life. The tilling point of plough of tribal farmers is still without iron point. So the Anthropological studies of primitive cultures became part of social anthropology. The scientist study in it primary human requirements and their fulfillment by man in limited mechanized tools. Which definitely the early man would have experimented for years. The literature art crafts help us again in knowing art works of early man. On other hand, the tribal study helps in understanding of forest dwellers or scheduled tribe to enable the policy makers to undertake their development activities.

Denis, I just watched this on TED.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html

REH

Ray thanks indeed for the link. People have accused post-Africanism of being mere Europhilia. But if you read 'From Negritude to Post-Africanism' you will discover that my position on democracy in Africa is that it is simply a suicidal mimicry of a western idiosyncrasy. Of course every developing society dreams of the democratic freedoms, affluence and decencies of western societies. But Africans want all the goodies of the democratic way of life but they do not want to contemplate the very ademocratic conditions; the protracted disciplines and long endured tyrannies that finally produced the soft, prosperous and descent society that had democracy only as a reward. I am happy that China has provided a convincing proof that no nation can bypass the disciplinary reformation of its subjects if they must become successful candidates not just to economic modernization but also political liberalization. I am happy to find in eric li a kindred mind on this issue that the electoral democracy is not the sole route to a prosperous and descent future for non-west people. thanks. I am still waiting for your e-mail

Years ago I read Hannah Arendt's comparison fo the American, French, and Russian revolutions. What struck me as an important point she missed was that each of these could be viewed, ultimately, as a coup d'etat. Before and after each, the actual manner of governing did not change. That is, did the Soviet regime govern in a manner different than the Tzarist, was Napoleon so different than the King, and was the US Congress so appreciably different than the British Parliament? Yes, in each case there were some differences in specifics, but in essence the way human societies acculturate, the way they learn what to expect in the way they are governed or ruled, does not change easily or rapidly. What Arendt seemed to miss is that the US revolution was really not a revolution. The leaders of the rebellion were prominent members of society both before and after, and the underlying political goals, and acceptable means to achieve those goals did not change with the change in nominal leadership. Arendt's book may have focused on political philosophy, but what she was observing was basic human behavior. In that sense, modernization and political reform in Africa or in the middle east might need to fully understand indigenous (local) traditions and customs, and guide reforms that are mindful of those customs.

Denis, How do I get your e-mail? REH

Tom, I don't agree with any of those conclusions. About the roots and results of the three revolutions? All three societies were immensely different from the Aristocratic/Feudal government they replaced. Could you explain more how you see the life of the citizen peasant before either of the three revolutions being the same? I would agree that we seem to be moving toward a Feudal solution here in America with the rich and the poor but that's not what happened after the revolution unless you mean the Native Americans became the new serfs in the republic and the kidnapping of Africans to create a Greek slave state when disease destroyed their Native American slave pool. I have lots of references for this if you want, I'd be happy to post them to the list. There is a lot of research and writing being done at present on the Native American Slaves of Colonial America.

I apologize to the list for this diversion but in some ways its not a diversion since the underlying assumptions of much of Anthropological literature grows directly out of the American Philological research into the languages of Native Nations here. The languages were so foreign to them that they didn't really make headway until the amateur philologist and anthropologist, Benjamin Lee Whorf opened the doors into the Pueblo verb based grammars, in some case incorrectly, but his proposal as to the personal limitation of worldview through language, fedback onto the European world views and gave Anthropology a big boost over the chauvinistic fence around European culture at the time.

I don't agree with Denis that this is bland relativism but instead believe that the only richness is to be found in understanding human Foundations while appreciating the diversity of Cultural Theory and Methodologies and respecting all of them. REH

For the American revolution you need to see the likes of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest as business and thought leaders prior, and subsequent to the ouster of the Brits. Socio-culturally they were the same as the Brits, and for the most part this was a pre-industrialized society. By this time, England was not so much a feudal society as much as a pre-industrialized merchant/small business economy. Aristocratic/feudal society was rapidly fading--we already had Cromwell and the beheading of Charles, and the likes of Guy Fawks. Less than a century later we had the great movements for nationalism and statehood in Europe, and the rise of non-aristocratic intellecutals. In France, yes the nobility were put to the guillotine willy nilly, but no effective legal control was in place until the rise of Napoleon and an new aristocracy. The Russians overthrew the Tzar and the aristocracy, but ultimately had to replace those with an aristocracy of commisars, who perhaps lacked much of the knowledge or skill for effective leadership. I have been a long way from history and anthropology for a few years, so am not up on all the literature, but the basic point is that the American colonialist, the French peasant, and the Russian peasant each had a paradigm for how they would be governed. The French revolution may have tried to replace that paradigm with liberty, equality, and fraternity, but ultimately the people returned to accepting the benevolent despot. Likewise the Russians returned to a newer verion of Tzarist tyranny. The American yeoman farmer was accustomed to participating in the body politic--in colonial Massachussets and Pennsylvania, and the rest of the colonies. Their colonial charters were modeled after the English system, with perhaps some syncretism with the Iroquois league (but that is another debate).

This is a rather simplistic presentation in a single paragraph of a concept that would take much larger space to explore. But the American's did not replace an aristocratic.feudal system. It is an anthropological discussion, however, because the concept deals with acculturation of the young into social mores and customs, and with the nature of cultural change and evolution--and my sense that "revolution" does not really happen. Change wil nearly always evolutional; incremental adjustments and modifications to one's understanding of how things are done in one's society. The American's succeeded because their change was minimal. The French and Russians failed because the population could not adjust to, or accept, such dramatic changes.

We had an internet workshop two years ago where we discussed and wrote papers on these issues. Following is a paper by an English Canadian Economist from the Pennine Hills of England, a graduate in Applied Economics from St. Andrews came to Canada to teach economics at University of Alberta, is now a Futurist and Interdisciplinary scholar with work expertise in the Social Sciences, climatology, the humanities and the history of science and technology. He's also one heck of a tenor and the author of two books. One on Western Mythology and the other on the interplay between culture, society, economics and science and technology. He's also my co-author on an article for the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His name is Mike Hollinshead and his company is "Facing the Future, Inc. where he writes articles on the various topics on the future of work and entrepreneurship.

I asked his permission to share this with you and he gave it. Please respect that it is copyrighted. It is for the discussion in these areas.

Introduction: Paper for Medicine Wheel Conference 2010 by Mike Hollinshead

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF NATIVE PEOPLES TO THE WORLD

Part 1.

Before Europeans arrived in 1492, there were 100 million people living in the Americas, most of them in cities and almost all of them supported by a sophisticated agriculture far in advance of that found in Europe at the time. The population of Europe at that date was no larger and may have been smaller. Most of those cities had dependable clean water supplies and sewage disposal at a time when European cities drew their water from rivers polluted with industrial and human wastes and in which the streets were filled with human excrement. Europeans lived cheek by jowl with domestic animals which transferred serious diseases to them.

For 150 years, most of Eurasia was ruled by the most powerful Native in history, Genghis Khan. His empire covered 22% of the world's land surface and included 100 million people. He ruled most of China from whence came most of the technologies which enabled Western Europe to develop and dominate the world - gunpowder, the compass, paper and the printing press. They transferred through trading routes of Genghis Khan's empire. Just as important, Genghis put in place a world system which consisted of “free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious co-existence, international law and diplomatic immunity” which continued to develop into the modern world economy.

Part II continued.

Part II cont. Contributions of Native Peoples to the World by M. Hollinshead

Pre-Contact American Indians were masters of agricultural science and contributed eight of the twenty-six most important crops in the world economy today. They were developed by means of careful breeding, a science which Europeans did not master until the 18th century. For centuries they managed the forests with fire, a technique Canada's National Parks service has rediscovered only in the past decade. Without Native agricultural science modern Western society would not be possible. It simply could not be fed.

Aboriginal cultures thus made enormous and mostly unrecognized contributions to the development of Western culture and civilization.

These contributions continued into modern times. By the 16th century, printed Bibles translated into local languages enabled ordinary people to read the Old Testament and the Gospels for themselves. Each person was able to relate to God personally, without any help from priest or bishop. As a result people began to feel themselves equal before God. It didn't take long for them to start thinking that if they were equal before God, maybe they were equal before other men too. Kings started to seem unnecessary. Philosophers began to ask themselves what the alternative to rule by kings could be. They started to ask how people ruled themselves before kings came along. They found their answer in North America. They assumed that Indians lived as Europeans must have done before kings existed. The English philosopher Locke summed up their thinking when he said: "In the beginning, all the world was America."

Locke's synthesis of property rights and representative government, drew on the opinions of the radicals in the English Civil War but also on European descriptions of self-governing Indian societies and visits by Indians to England. These ideas were transmitted back to America by Tom Payne and picked up by the writers of the American Constitution. One of the drafters, Benjamin Franklin, was a diplomat to the Iroquois Confederacy and learned at first hand their philosophy and methods of governance. The constitution writers took their model of federal governance from the Iroquois Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace. Iroquois advisors attended the Convention in Philadelphia. The foundational idea of modern democracy, that there exists a social contract between the governors and the governed, is owed entirely to Locke and Rousseau being inspired by Indian societies. Iroquois society also fascinated Karl Marx, who read Lewis Henry Morgan's account of it in his book Ancient Society. Both Marx and his colleague, Friederich Engels, saw the Iroquois as living proof that a classless communist society was possible. Engels subsequently wrote a classic of Marxist literature entirely based on Morgan's book. Native North Americans thus influenced both the capitalist West and the communist East. The system of government the West lives under today was inspired in large part by Indian societies and their forms of government.

Europeans were also fascinated by the way Indians raised and educated their children. They couldn't help noticing that Native children were given great freedom and were essentially educated by observing the natural world under the guidance of a mentor. European children, by contrast, were beaten into cowed submission to adults and educated rigidly in school rooms out of books. The French philosopher Rousseau designed an ideal system of education around the Native model, and published an extremely influential book which was still required reading when my wife took her teaching degree in the 1960s. For him, as for the Indians, nature was the great teacher. It transformed European attitudes towards children from being blank slates for adults to write on, to being individuals to be cherished and encouraged in independence and a feeling of self-worth. They also noted the equality of the sexes in Indian societies. One epidemiologist believes that it was the change in European family life inspired by these ideas, particularly the more nurturing attitude to children, that caused the fall in infant and child death rates and the acceleration of European populations in the 18th and 19th centuries.

European societies (in which we include Canada and the United States) thus owe a great deal to Native peoples. They rose to world dominance on the basis of technologies transmitted by them. They inherited principles and practices for a world economic system from them. Their crops feed them. Their social models govern them. Their family and educational models are drawn from them.

Which then is the greater culture?

Ironically, the ideas the White Man borrowed - equality, the primacy of personal development and the freedom of the individual - are the very ones on which he prides himself most and considers the most important elements in Western civilization.

Today the West faces an existential crisis as huge as the one it faced in the 17th century. In the 17th century they were faced with incorporating into their societies the idea that equality before God meant equality before Man. It did so by drawing on Native models. In doing so it created the modern world. Now the problem is how to face up to the fact that mass industrial societies are unsustainable and adopt values that permit a transition to a sustainable society. The key value is the sacredness of Nature. Is it possible that the West will once more draw on Native societies for guidance, this time from their spiritual traditions central to which is respect for the natural world? Could Grandfather's lessons perhaps be the beginning of that?

Mike Hollinshead,

Facing the Future, Inc.

REH

Ray here is my e-mail: [email protected]

Denis I sent you an e-mail but if you didn't get it. Send the article to

[email protected]

REH

Ray I have not seen it yet but I am sending the paper via your e mail

Thanks Denis, just got it. REH

Isn't the modern society still when viewed in its most primitive form a tribe? If you remove the fancy modern gadgets and clothes, there is still a hierarchical structure in place, although there may have been a shift away from royal leadership there is still power-figures to whom we all pay respect. The way in which the modern society functions may be different to past behaviours but there still remains the key concepts of communication and hierachy. .

Mathew you are right. The more it changes the more it remains the same thing. I think that nature can't just do without hierarchies. Even the monarchy you may think is long gone is still much alive. Under the so called democracies, many African peoples yearn for the tribal monarchs, the hieratic authority figures before whom they can bow in unconditional self-surrender. Even when the leader is elected to act as a democrat, the people make a monarch out of him. Maybe Joseph de Maistre was right: there is an ineradicable monarchical instinct in man, even in the postmodern man

Yet another example of the role of acculturation and the difficulties in introducing or adopting political systems that are not in alignment with the established beliefs about authority and compliance/obedience.

Thomas you have a point here: introducing political systems and models not aligned with native beliefs and worldview structures is bound to create difficulties. The problem however is not that those new systems are incompatible with native ways. Most impositions that have come to stay were originally incompatible with native thoughts and forms of life. The problem as in the case of Africa's democracies, is that the elite believed that we could adopt them without having to first make the native life-world more receptive to the grafted systems. It is not the west's fault that democracy was preached to Africa. It is Africa's tragic error that it stretched its hand to enthusiastically receive democracy when neither the people's mind-set nor the socio-cultural environment nor the economy was in a state in which we could, with the best will in the world, make democracy to work. The trouble with democracy in Africa is that we put the cart before the horse.

I agree wiith your assessment, Dennis. This is also in alignment with my thoughts on the French and Russian revolutions--both initiated by local forces, local players, but also prematurely initiated, As you note, they were neither consistent with "people's mind-set nor the socio-cultural environment nor the economy."

Good Morning Andreas,

My basic poins are that:

1. The American Revolution was not a revolution, but rather a coup d'etat, though that term is perhaps not the correct one. "Revolution" implies, or at least I infer that it means a dramatic change from the past, a paradigm shift that is rapid and forcefully displaces the prior paradigm on governance. In America there really wasn't a paradigm shift, but rather a re-establishment of previously held principles that had evolved over the prior centuries to bring parliamentary rule to Britain, and various governing charters in the colonies in the Americas. It succeeded because it maintained the paradigm, and did not significantly alter the social and class structure in the colonies.

2. The French and Russian revolutions were attempts at dramatic paradigm shifts, and I used the term "premature" in context of Dennis's comment, "The problem as in the case of Africa's democracies, is that the elite believed that we could adopt them without having to first make the native life-world more receptive to the grafted systems." Therefore the system sought a new balance that was consistent with the previous social order.

To bring it back to the original question in this string of comments, regarding study of Tribal societies in a global world, it ties in with Dennis's comments, "The problem however is not that those new systems are incompatible with native ways. Most impositions that have come to stay were originally incompatible with native thoughts and forms of life." External forces can conquer and dominate a region, but that is a different dynamic that an internally attempted revolution. And as may have seen in the Balkans during the past couple of decades, or in Southeast Asia during the last quarter of the 20th Century, removal of the external force (Tito's Yugoslavia, or French rule in Indochina) can lead to re-emergence of suppressed identities. Study of how tribal societies adapt to external forces might provide insight into how regions can successfully integrate their society and economy with the global environment. How do they preserve identity and values, and successfully blend into a global environment that will not go away? The alternatives of "isolationism" or "reservation" systems or "containment" may be unworkable. And the principles of anthropological study may be useful here.

"Tribal" refers to the political organization of a group, so I confine my answer to those groups with a tribal political system. The tribal mode of political organization is a significant feature of the cultures of the herding peoples from North Africa eastward as far as Mongolia. These people, and the more complex societies arising from their cultures, are significant actors in global political and ideological conflicts. Understanding the cultural foundations of their beliefs and behavior, particularly the Islamic laws that civilized them, is extremly important in politicial relations. It is far better to base political relations on good cultural anthropological understanding of these cultures than to attempt political relations with them based on niave notions of globalization.

If we consider that designations like "band" and "tribe" and "chiefdom" which have been applied to societies encountered by anthropologists are analogous to other typologies, these words are merely reference points on a distribuition mapping of societies. In the models of Sahlins and Service, they may have been considered points along a continuum, but human societies are much too complex to place along a linear distrbution. Even a 4-quadrant grid may be too much of a simplification. But the essence of understanding political organization and complexity may be to understand how communities not only make decisions, but also how issues of disputes or competing interests are resolved. Who are the players? What are the rules or expectations?

As James Dow points out, it is very important in interacting with a society to have a sound understanding of the local customs if one is to successfully interact. By "successful" I mean to imply a fair and judicious interaction, not a forceful suppression of a society. Knowing what is important to the other parties can be useful in proposing a collaboration that benefits both sides and has a reasonable chance of acceptance. Ignoring what is important to the other parties greatly diminishes acceptance, or risks acceptance with a misunderstanding of essential factors.

Merely understanding the other society does not insure productive cooperation, however, because there may be situations where the two societies or cultures have mutually antagonistic value systems. But knowing this to be the case can be vitally important.

Hola, precisamente, si hay tribus vivas y descendientes de ellas que confluyen entre sus herencias ancestrales y los tránsitos hacia la modernización y las globalizaciones (incluyendo la del cambio climático) es una justificación suficiente para continuar abordando nuevos enfoques en investigaciones sobre ellas y con ellas como agentes activas de las investigaciones de las que son a la vez objeto y sujetos.

Have you seen the book "The Falling Sky", by David Kopenawa Yanomami and Bruce Albert? In the book, a representative of one of the most famous "tribal" societies in anthropology, the Yanomami of the Amazon, gives his answer.