OK. I was away from my PC for most of the past week, and I'm not sure I'll even now have time to do this justice. But what I'm going to try and do in this and (possibly) further posts is to try and address the issues that have arisen throughout this thread, by reference to some of the ethnography of the Yanomamo.
Before that, I want to quote what Adam Kuper said about the concept of 'the primitive'; 'it is our phlogiston, our aether'. Those defunct and debunked concepts will need no introduction to anyone here. Intended to enhance our understanding of the natural, they were abandoned when it became clear that they were at best surplus to requirements, at worst actively misleading. So too with the concept of the 'primitive'; Kuper would tell you that it misleads by lumping all the various 'primitive' societies into one category, and in so doing wipes out the crucial distinctions and differences between those societies, and can also lead us back into the deeply flawed perceptions of 'primitive' societies handed down to us from the Western philosophical tradition. Pace Hobbes and Rousseau, 'primitive' or small-scale societies are neither cases of a 'nasty, brutish and short. . . war of all against all', nor are they zones where the fantasy of the 'noble savage' is a reality (though it was Dryden who invented the concept of the noble savage a century before Rousseau; all of these people based their conceptions of the 'primitive' on slender or non-existent evidence).
Napoleon A. Chagnon, one of the most well-known, and most controversial, of today's anthropologists of 'primitive' society is very careful to signal his awareness of these issues at the beginning of his famous ethnography Yanomamo. He insists on the aggressive and agonistic reality of Yanomamo social life (one of the reasons his work is controversial, and the major points of dispute between him and other anthropologists of this region). However, he has this to say about another indigenous group, the Ye'kwana Indians:
By contrast to many experiences I had among the Yanomamo, the Ye'kwana were very pleasant and charming, all of them anxious to help me and honor bound to show any visitor the numerous courtesies of their system of ettiquete. . . Other anthropologists have also noted sharp contrasts in the people they study from one field situation to another. One of the most startling examples of this is in the work of Colin Turnbull who first studied the Ituri Pygmies and found them delightful to live with, but then studied the Ik of the desolate otucroppings of the Kenya/Uganda/Sudan border region, a people he had difficulty coping with intellectually, emotionally and physically.
I'm quoting this point because I think it demonstrates the need to avoid assuming that known cases in one region (along the Venezuela-Brazil border, where the Yanomamo reside) to another (the area where this supposed 'lost tribe' live, which IIRC is far away from the Yanomamo area, on the Brazil-Peru border). There are certain generalisations we can make, however, and that is concerning the nature of political leadership and social control in these societies. Chagnon notes that
most of the time men like Kaobawa are like the North American Indian 'Chief' whose authority was characterised in the following fashion: "One word from the chief, and each man does as he pleases"
Chagnon does mention cases of violent and despotic headmen, but his overall view is of a spectrum of political leaderships in which control by violence is one extreme end of the spectrum and not the norm. I'd say that this is linked to the economic and ecological condition of the Yanomamo. A common undergraduate mistake is to assume that the Yanomamo are 'hunter-gatherers' (the misleading concept of 'the primitive' at work again). On the contrary, the Yanomamo derive around 80% of their subsistence from cultivating gardens, whose location shifts, as do Yanomamo villages. Yanomamo economics cannot support a politics which allows for the maintenance of state or state-like political relationships; there is not, among the Yanomamo, the kind of permanently settled lifestyle or economic surplus which would allow for the emergence of a full-time social grouping dedicated to political control. Neither Yanomamo politics, nor its economic base, can be assumed to be in any way equivalent or even comparable to the slave-based agricultural societies of ancient Greece. I strongly suspect that the same is true of the 'lost tribe' whose putative discovery inspired this thread. In conclusion (for now) I'd say that while we have no reason to suppose that this 'lost tribes' lost nature is the result of a political leaders insistence on remaining uncontacted (because that's not how politics works in this sort of society) we have good reason to believe that the penetration of indigenous territory by e.g. gold miners brings in its wakes changes in the security of indigenous peoples, changes which are difficult at best and disastrous at worst. This latter point is something Chagnon has emphasised in the case of the Yanomamo. He had this to say about one episode of external penetration of Yanomamoland in the late 1980s:
Gold was discovered in the Surucucu region of the Brazilian Yanomam6 territory in early 1987. In August of that year a clash occurred between the miners and a group of Yano- mam6 in which four Yanomamo were killed and their bodies desecrated by a mob of angry miners who, during the clash, lost at least one of their own members as well. Since then, at least another twenty Yanomamo have been killed by miners, and a total of six miners have been killed in retaliation. The Brazilian gov- ernment began to severely restrict access to this area by journalists, medical personnel, anthropologists, and other researchers who might be sympathetic to the natives and went to the extreme of expelling missionaries who had spent as many as twenty years among the Yanomamo. Subsequent reports that came out of this area were usually vague and based on secondhand information, but all added up to the same dismal and alarming story: miners were illegally entering Yanomamo territory in large numbers, contaminating the rivers with mercury compounds used in the extraction of gold, and creating new disease problems that were taking a heavy toll among the Yano- mam6. The dramatic increase in human num- bers also caused existing diseases, such as ma- laria, to become epidemic, increasing the mor- tality rate.
