• for: enthnography - Jarawa, African-Asian tribe, Alexandre Dereims, human origins - Jawara, anthropology - Jarawa, Andaman archipelago

• summary

  • An extraordinary film by filmmaker Alexandre Dereims about the isolated Jawara people, believed to be one of the first peoples to migrate out of Africa and who landed in an island off the coast of India. Their way of life has not changed for tens of thousands of years but unfortunately, is being quickly eroded by the influences of modernity.
  • This film documents the life of this ancient tribe, who until recently lived in complete isolation from modernity. Dereims illegally entered the territory to film the Jawara tribe and give them a voice in the context of the Indian governments continual exploitation of the tribe for tourism and their agenda to confiscate their land for modern development.
  • The film is a realtime record of how rapidly colonialism and the transformation of takes place. We hear the voices of the Jawara as they speak of the incremental exploitation and corruption of the modern world on their people. When we see this, we realize how little has changed since the 14th century when global colonialism began.
  • Instead of preserving the Jawara to have a living reminder of our ancient past and the wonder of human evolution, we myopically exploit them. What a sad commentary on humanity.

• new trailmark: deeper reflections

  • this trailmark is used to capture deeper reflections not captured in the initial annotation
  • this often occurs for me there next day after a night's sleep.
  • I believe it happens because the intuitive gut feeling that initially attracted me to the story is not so easily accessible. It could be complex, entangled and difficult to articulate and/or subconscious

• deeper reflections

  • our own process of cultural construction
    • the living Jawara are so valuable ethnographically and anthropologically because they are living, breathing examples of how culture constructs us -
  • adjacency between - Jawara people - Ronald Wright's computer analogy for modern humans
    • Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE)
      • Deep Humanity
    • adjacency statement
      • The comparison between the cultural differences between the Jawara people and we modernly enculturated humans is striking. Perhaps not as striking as feral children but still striking. It shows us how easily we ourselves could have such a different experience of life and Worldview if we were born into the Jawara tribe today.
      • As Ronald Wright noted, there is likely no difference between the human mental capacity of our 50,000 year old ancestors and ourselves
      • The significance of their existence is living proof of CCE, a profound Deep Humanity teaching about how we humans construct the meaningverse and symbolosphere so critical to intertwingled individual and collective experience of reality
      • The Jawara and other isolated ingenious progress should be treated with the greatest respect and esteem for being the living examples of our cultural evolution that teaches us the deepest lessons of what we are as humans and how culture profoundly shapes us
      • At a minimum, all the tourists the the Indian government have allowed to visit them, as well as the tourist operators should have mandatory Deep Humanity training before being allowed any contact with them in order to preserve their dignity
      • striping away all the amenities of modern life, we can see how happy they Jawara people are with so little
      • this is a lesson on recognising the wonder of simply being alive, an invaluable Deep. Humanity lesson

(1) ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘RT @MDaware: But 3 people had URI symptoms in november https://t.co/JcAom73VzM’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 21 June 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1402049602015023106

Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.