Ghost of a flea: Sentiment and the Sentinelese

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February 13, 2006

Sentiment and the Sentinelese

Two Indian fisherman, thought to have been drunk, drifted too close to North Sentinel Island and into range of Sentinelese arrows; the Sentinelese being a "Stone Age" people distinctly unwelcoming toward outsiders. Attempts to recover the bodies by helicopter have thusfar been similarly repelled.

Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on January 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.

"As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger," said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. "However they did not respond - they were probably drunk - and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed."

A five-kilometer "exclusion zone" is in place around the island in part due to previous worrisome receptions and in part to assuage the concerns of environmental groups demading the authorities leave the place undisturbed. It is unclear to me if the environmentalists favour what they imagine to be a low-intensity Stone Age subsistence system. More likely they believe denying the Sentinelese access to McDonald's and cable television is somehow akin to preserving panda habitat and their own unreconstructed racist ideas about "Noble Savages". One would hope if these two fishermen had been murdered by anyone else charges would be laid rather than treating the incident as an act of nature.

That said, there is surely some virtue in leaving people be and anyone taking pot-shots at anthropologists bearing gifts finds a warm place in my heart. In a remarkable document, Adam Goodheart relates one of only a few instances of contact with the Sentinelese; by whatever name they might know themselves.

In the spring of 1974, North Sentinel was visited by a film crew that was shooting a documentary titled Man in Search of Man, along with a few anthropologists, some armed policemen, and a photographer for National Geographic. In the words of one of the scientists, their plan was to "win the natives' friendship by friendly gestures and plenty of gifts." As the team's motorized dinghy made its way through the reefs toward shore, some natives emerged from the woods. The anthropologists made friendly gestures. The Sentinelese responded with a hail of arrows. The dinghy proceeded to a landing-spot out of arrow range, where the policemen, dressed in padded armor, disembarked and laid gifts on the sand: a miniature plastic automobile, some coconuts, a tethered live pig, a child's doll, and some aluminum cookware. Then they returned to the dinghy and waited to observe the natives' reaction to the gifts. The natives' reaction was to fire more arrows, one of which hit the film director in the left thigh. The man who had shot the film director was observed laughing proudly and walking toward the shade of a tree, where he sat down. Other natives were observed spearing the pig and the doll and burying them in the sand. They did, however, take the cookware and the coconuts with evident delight.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 13, 2006 09:21 AM

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