Tribal life
This entry was originally posted on 8 December 2003 at 12:00 p.m. Outdated links have been updated and changed.
We recently started getting the National Geographic Channel on our cable system. It's a nifty little channel--there are at least two excellent programs that are shown exclusively on it. There's Taboo, which examines interesting rituals across cultures with topics like witchcraft, tattoo, pain, bloodsports, and so on. The other one is called Worlds Apart. It's a series that documents what happens when an American family is sent to a remote village in a third-world country for 11 days.
I'm fascinated by these programs.
On a recent episode of Worlds Apart, they took this uber-white family from New Jersey and dropped them in Kenya. Keep in mind, the American families are typically whiter-than-white, upper-middle to lower-upper class suburbanites whose greatest fear is that their lawn might look shabby. Typically, the Americans are very unhappy with their new surroundings because they tend to lack things like electricity, indoor plumbing, insulation, and all that good stuff. Many of the Americans go to these countries with the idea that they're superior because they have such comforts readily available, because they come from one of the richest countries in the world, or because they are university-educated.
Few of them stop to think about what they could learn from their excursion. For example, on that recent episode--with the family from New Jersey that visits a village in Kenya--as they showed the family boarding the little twin-prop plane that would fly them back to "civilization," the mother of the family said something like this: "I never understood the concept of a third-world country until I came to Kenya....but what do you do with this knowledge? Do you just take it home with you, or do you try to do something to help them?" (Not an exact quote, but pretty close.)
It astounded me that this woman was just as superior in her departure as she was in her arrival.
The message was not lost on her children, however: the night before they left, the children--these white, affluent, American kids who had been unhappy about living in a place with no plumbing and no air conditioning and no television, these children--who had probably never known a day of hard work in their lives until they went to Kenya--wept. Their tears came not from happiness that they'd be returning shortly to their beautiful house in its temperate climate, but from the deepest reaches of sadness.
Where did this sadness come from? Why cry when you're leaving a third-world country for your first-world paradise? Because what they learned out there was that 21st century America isn't paradise. They learned what it's like to live in a tribe, a real community of the kind that is no longer seen in this country--a place where people don't commute to work in office buildings with people they never see beyond their Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5 existence, where instead, people work together toward survival.
These kids were crying because they'd never seen a real community before. And now, after just eleven days of living in one, they had to leave it behind for the familiar nightmare of affluent isolation, where people are bombarded with advertising that tells them they're not good enough unless they look like actor/actress X, or they're not cool enough unless they own Product Y; where people buy and dispose rather than make and reuse; where people do not really know their neighbors.
One of the kids said it best: "I learned that you only need three things in life. Food, water, and shelter. And friends and family, too" (again, not exact, but close). He also remarked that people in the village came together in a way that people in America do not need to.
I'm beginning to think that humans were never meant to live in American-style suburban affluence--that maybe, after all, we are best adapted to live in tribes, to live lives where people are not part of discrete family units, but of communities that require them to be responsible for their actions.
What astounds me the most is that the adults never stop to think of this.
We recently started getting the National Geographic Channel on our cable system. It's a nifty little channel--there are at least two excellent programs that are shown exclusively on it. There's Taboo, which examines interesting rituals across cultures with topics like witchcraft, tattoo, pain, bloodsports, and so on. The other one is called Worlds Apart. It's a series that documents what happens when an American family is sent to a remote village in a third-world country for 11 days.
I'm fascinated by these programs.
On a recent episode of Worlds Apart, they took this uber-white family from New Jersey and dropped them in Kenya. Keep in mind, the American families are typically whiter-than-white, upper-middle to lower-upper class suburbanites whose greatest fear is that their lawn might look shabby. Typically, the Americans are very unhappy with their new surroundings because they tend to lack things like electricity, indoor plumbing, insulation, and all that good stuff. Many of the Americans go to these countries with the idea that they're superior because they have such comforts readily available, because they come from one of the richest countries in the world, or because they are university-educated.
Few of them stop to think about what they could learn from their excursion. For example, on that recent episode--with the family from New Jersey that visits a village in Kenya--as they showed the family boarding the little twin-prop plane that would fly them back to "civilization," the mother of the family said something like this: "I never understood the concept of a third-world country until I came to Kenya....but what do you do with this knowledge? Do you just take it home with you, or do you try to do something to help them?" (Not an exact quote, but pretty close.)
It astounded me that this woman was just as superior in her departure as she was in her arrival.
The message was not lost on her children, however: the night before they left, the children--these white, affluent, American kids who had been unhappy about living in a place with no plumbing and no air conditioning and no television, these children--who had probably never known a day of hard work in their lives until they went to Kenya--wept. Their tears came not from happiness that they'd be returning shortly to their beautiful house in its temperate climate, but from the deepest reaches of sadness.
Where did this sadness come from? Why cry when you're leaving a third-world country for your first-world paradise? Because what they learned out there was that 21st century America isn't paradise. They learned what it's like to live in a tribe, a real community of the kind that is no longer seen in this country--a place where people don't commute to work in office buildings with people they never see beyond their Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5 existence, where instead, people work together toward survival.
These kids were crying because they'd never seen a real community before. And now, after just eleven days of living in one, they had to leave it behind for the familiar nightmare of affluent isolation, where people are bombarded with advertising that tells them they're not good enough unless they look like actor/actress X, or they're not cool enough unless they own Product Y; where people buy and dispose rather than make and reuse; where people do not really know their neighbors.
One of the kids said it best: "I learned that you only need three things in life. Food, water, and shelter. And friends and family, too" (again, not exact, but close). He also remarked that people in the village came together in a way that people in America do not need to.
I'm beginning to think that humans were never meant to live in American-style suburban affluence--that maybe, after all, we are best adapted to live in tribes, to live lives where people are not part of discrete family units, but of communities that require them to be responsible for their actions.
What astounds me the most is that the adults never stop to think of this.
posted by Circus at 1:01 PM
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