TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092391/0923990.000

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                                                                                CULTURES, Page 46

COVER STORIES

Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge


By EUGENE LINDEN


    One horrible day 1,600 years ago, the wisdom of many
centuries went up in flames. The great library in Alexandria
burned down, a catastrophe at the time and a symbol for all ages
of the vulnerability of human knowledge. The tragedy forced
scholars to grope to reconstruct a grand literature and science
that once lay neatly cataloged in scrolls.

    Today, with little notice, more vast archives of knowledge
and expertise are spilling into oblivion, leaving humanity in
danger of losing its past and perhaps jeopardizing its future
as well. Stored in the memories of elders, healers, midwives,
farmers, fishermen and hunters in the estimated 15,000 cultures
remaining on earth is an enormous trove of wisdom.

    This largely undocumented knowledge base is humanity's
lifeline to a time when people accepted nature's authority and
learned through trial, error and observation. But the world's
tribes are dying out or being absorbed into modern civilization.
As they vanish, so does their irreplaceable knowledge.

    Over the ages, indigenous peoples have developed
innumerable technologies and arts. They have devised ways to
farm deserts without irrigation and produce abundance from the
rain forest without destroying the delicate balance that
maintains the ecosystem; they have learned how to navigate vast
distances in the Pacific using their knowledge of currents and
the feel of intermittent waves that bounce off distant islands;
they have explored the medicinal properties of plants; and they
have acquired an understanding of the basic ecology of flora and
fauna. If this knowledge had to be duplicated from scratch, it
would beggar the scientific resources of the West. Much of this
expertise and wisdom has already disappeared, and if neglected,
most of the remainder could be gone within the next generation.

    Until quite recently, few in the developed world cared
much about this cultural holocaust. The prevailing attitude has
been that Western science, with its powerful analytical tools,
has little to learn from tribal knowledge. The developed
world's disastrous mismanagement of the environment has somewhat
humbled this arrogance, however, and some scientists are
beginning to recognize that the world is losing an enormous
amount of basic research as indigenous peoples lose their
culture and traditions. Scientists may someday be struggling to
reconstruct this body of wisdom to secure the developed world's
future.


    A Voluntary Crisis

    Indigenous peoples have been threatened for centuries as
development encroaches on their lands and traditions. What is
different about the present situation, however, is that it goes
beyond basic questions of native land rights into more ambiguous
issues, such as the prerogative of individuals to decide between
traditional and modern ways. Indigenous knowledge disappears
when natives are stripped of their lands, but in many parts of
the globe, knowledge also disappears because the young who are
in contact with the outside world have embraced the view that
traditional ways are illegitimate and irrelevant.

    The most intractable aspect of the crisis is that it is
largely voluntary. Entranced by images of the wealth and power
of the First World, the young turn away from their elders,
breaking an ancient but fragile chain of oral traditions. For
the elders, it is difficult to persuade an ambitious young
native that he is better off hunting boar with blowpipes than
reaching for the fruits of "civilization," even if those fruits
might translate into a menial job in a teeming city. For the
well-fed, well-educated visiting scientist to make that argument
can seem both hypocritical and condescending.

    The pace of change is startling. According to Harrison
Ngau, a member of the Malaysian Parliament concerned with the
rights of tribes on the island of Borneo, as many as 10,000
members of the Penan tribe still led the seminomadic life of
hunting and gathering at the beginning of the 1980s. But the
logging industry has been destroying their woodlands, and the
Malaysian government has encouraged them to move to villages.
Now fewer than 500 Penans live in the forest. When they settle
into towns, their expertise in the ways of the forest slips
away. Villagers know that their elders used to watch for the
appearance of a certain butterfly, which always seemed to herald
the arrival of a herd of boar and the promise of good hunting.
These days, most of the Penans cannot remember which butterfly
to look for.

    The number of different tribes around the world makes it
impossible to record or otherwise preserve more than a tiny
percentage of the knowledge being lost. Since 1900, 90 of
Brazil's 270 Indian tribes have completely disappeared, while
scores more have lost their lands or abandoned their ways. More
than two-thirds of the remaining tribes have populations of
fewer than 1,000. Some might disappear before anyone notices.

    A recent study by M.I.T. linguist Ken Hale estimates that
3,000 of the world's 6,000 languages are doomed because no
children speak them. Researchers estimate that Africa alone has
1,800 languages, Indonesia 672 and New Guinea 800. If a language
disappears, traditional knowledge tends to vanish with it, since
individual language groups have specialized vocabularies
reflecting native people's unique solutions to the challenges
of food gathering, healing and dealing with the elements in
their particular ecological niche. Hale estimates that only 300
languages have a secure future.


    The Price of Forgetting

    The most immediate tragedy in the loss of knowledge and
traditions is for the tribes themselves. They do not always die
out, but the soul of their culture withers away. Often left
behind are people "who are shadows of what they once were, and
shadows of what we in the developed world are," as one Peace
Corps volunteer put it. The price is real as well as
psychological when native peoples lose their grip on traditional
knowledge. At the Catholic mission in Yalisele in equatorial
Zaire, for instance, nurses and missionaries have encountered
patients brought in with burns or perforations of the lower
intestine. Investigation revealed that those afflicted had been
treated for a variety of ailments with traditional medicines
delivered in suppository form. The problem was not the medicines
but the dosages. As the old healers died off, people would try
to administer traditional medicines themselves or turn to
healers who had only a partial understanding of what their
elders knew. This problem is likely to get worse because Western
medicines and trained nurses are becoming ever more scarce in
Zaire's economically beleaguered society.

    In the island nation of Papua New Guinea, in the Coral
Sea, jobless people returning to highland villages from the
cities often lack the most rudimentary knowledge necessary to
survive, such as which rot-resistant trees to use to build huts
or which poisonous woods to avoid when making fires for cooking.
Many of the youths, alienated from their villages by schooling
and exposure to the West, become marauding "rascals," who have
made Papua New Guinea's cities among the most dangerous in the
world.

    The global hemorrhage of indigenous knowledge even fuels
the population explosion as people ignore taboos and forget
traditional methods of birth control. In many parts of Africa,
tribal women who used to bear, on average, five or six children
now often have more than 10.


    The Young Drift Away

    It is difficult for an outsider to imagine the degree to
which novel ideas and images assault the minds of tribal
adolescents moving into the outside world. They get glimpses of
a society their parents never encountered and cannot explain.
Students who leave villages for schooling in Papua New Guinea
learn that people, not the spirits of their ancestors, created
the machines, dams and other so-called cargo of the modern
world. Once absorbed, this realization undermines the
credibility and authority of elders.

    Father Frank Mihalic, a Jesuit missionary in New Guinea
since 1948, views with sadness the degree to which education has
alienated the young from their "one talks," as kinsmen are
called. "They don't like history because history is
embarrassing," he says. "They wince when I talk about the way
their dad or their mom lived." Mihalic and other members of his
order have intervened to prevent the government from burning
spirit houses, used during tribal initiation rites. But other
missionaries often tell the young people that their customs are
primitive and barbaric. Relatives who have left villages for the
city and return to show off their wealth and status also
influence the young. Girls encounter educated women who work as
clerks and are exempt from the backbreaking hauling done by
their mothers' generation. How can these youngsters resist the
allure of modern life? How can they make an informed judgment
about which of the old ways should be respected and maintained?

    John Maru, who works in Papua New Guinea's Ministry for
Home Affairs and Youth recalls how during his schooling he came
to see the endless gift exchanges and other traditions that
marked his youth in the Sepik region as a waste of time and
money and a drag on individual initiative. Now, however, he sees
that such customs serve to seal bonds among families and act as
a barrier to poverty and loneliness.

    Sadly, tribal peoples often realize they are losing
something of value too late to save it. In the village of Tai,
in the Ivory Coast, three brothers from a prosperous family have
tried to balance respect for the practices of their Guere tribe
with careers in the modern economy. Yet their mother, an
esteemed healer, has not been able to pass on her learning. One
brother said he wanted to know about the plants she used but was
afraid to ask because she would think he had foreseen her death
-- the traditional time to pass on knowledge. Another brother
would go into the forest with her but hesitated to ask what she
was doing because he feared the power of her medicines; while
the third, pursuing a successful engineering career, assumed
that others would acquire her learning. Now with each passing
year, it is more likely her knowledge will die with her.


    Western Contempt

    If the developed world is to help indigenous peoples
preserve their heritage, it must first recognize that this
wisdom has value. Western science is founded on the belief that
knowledge inexorably progresses: the new and improved inevitably
drive out the old and fallible. Western science also presumes
to be objective and thus more rigorous than other systems of
thought.

    Guided by these conceits, scientists have often failed to
notice traditional technologies even, for instance, when they
are on display in the U.S. Several Andean artifacts made the
rounds of American museums in the 1980s as examples of hammered
gold. Then Heather Lechtman, an M.I.T. archaeologist interested
in ancient technologies, examined the metal and discovered that
it represented a far more sophisticated art. Lechtman's
analysis revealed that the artifacts had been gilded with an
incredibly thin layer of gold using a chemical technique that
achieved the quality of modern electroplating. No one had
previously suspected that these Indians had the know-how to
create so subtle a technology.

    Nor is it only the West that has scorned traditional
learning. When communist China imposed tight control over Tibet
in 1959, the aggressors tried to eradicate the captive country's
culture. In particular, the communists denounced Tibetan
medicine as feudal superstition, and the number of doctors
practicing the 2,000-year-old, herb-based discipline shrank from
thousands to 500. But since the Chinese began to relent on this
issue in recent years, Tibetans have returned to their
traditional medicines, which they often find more effective and
less harsh than Western drugs.

    Even in the Third World, governments have tended to look
at their indigenous cultures as an impediment to development
and nationhood. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, European
administrators, influenced by colonial practices in Africa,
sought to discourage tribalism by consolidating power and
commerce in cities far away from the villages that are the
centers of tribal life. According to John Waiko, director of
Papua New Guinea's National Research Institute, this decision
has fueled instability by making government seem remote and
arbitrary. Among dozens of nations and regions with substantial
native populations, only Greenland and Botswana stand out for
their efforts to accommodate the culture and interests of these
people.


    Growing Appreciation

    Attitudes are beginning to change, however. Scientists are
learning to look past the myth, superstition and ritual that
often conceal the hard-won insights of indigenous peoples.
Sometimes the lessons have come in handy: during the gulf war,
European doctors treated some wounds with a sugar paste that
traces back to Egyptian battlefield medicine of 4,000 years ago.

    Michael Balick, director of the New York Botanical
Garden's Institute of Economic Botany, notes that only 1,100 of
the earth's 265,000 species of plants have been thoroughly
studied by Western scientists, but as many as 40,000 may have
medicinal or undiscovered nutritional value for humans. Many are
already used by tribal healers, who can help scientists greatly
focus their search for plants with useful properties.

    Balick walks tropical forests with shamans in Latin
America as part of a study, sponsored by the National Cancer
Institute, designed to uncover plants useful in the treatment
of AIDS and cancer. The 5,000 plants collected so far, says the
NCI's Gordon Cragg, have yielded some promising chemicals. If
any of them turn out to be useful as medicines, the country from
which the plant came would get a cut of the profits.

    In the past decade, researchers in developed countries
have realized that they have much to learn from traditional
agriculture. Formerly, such farming was often viewed as
inefficient and downright destructive. "Slash and burn"
agriculture, in particular, was viewed with contempt. Following
this method, tribes burn down a section of forest, farm the land
until it is exhausted and then move on to clear another patch
of trees. This strategy has been blamed for the rapid loss of
tropical rain forests.

    Now, however, researchers have learned that if practiced
carefully, the method is environmentally benign. The forests
near Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, are not threatened by native
Lacandon practices but by the more commercial agricultural
practices of encroaching peasants, according to James Nations
of Conservation International in Washington. Many indigenous
farmers in Asia and South America manage to stay on one patch
of land for as long as 50 years. As nutrients slowly disappear
from the soil, the farmers keep switching to hardier crops and
thus do not have to clear an adjacent stretch of forest.

    Westerners have also come to value traditional farmers for
the rich variety of crops they produce. By cultivating numerous
strains of corn, legumes, grains and other foods, they are
ensuring that botanists have a vast genetic reservoir from which
to breed future varieties. The genetic health of the world's
potatoes, for example, depends on Quechua Indians, who cultivate
more than 50 diverse strains in the high plateau country around
the Andes mountains in South America. If these natives switched
to modern crops, the global potato industry would lose a
crucial line of defense against the threat of insects and
disease.

    Anthropologists studying agricultural and other traditions
have been surprised to find that people sometimes retain
valuable knowledge long after they have dropped the outward
trappings of tribal culture. In one community in Peru studied
by Christine Padoch of the Institute of Economic Botany,
peasants employed all manner of traditional growing techniques,
though they were generations removed from tribal life. Padoch
observed almost as many combinations of crops and techniques as
there were households. Similarly, a study of citified Aboriginal
children in Australia revealed that they had far more knowledge
about the species and habits of birds than did white children
in the same neighborhood. Somehow their parents had passed along
this knowledge, despite their removal from their native lands.
Still, the amount of information in jeopardy dwarfs that being
handed down.


    Lending a Hand

    There is no way that concerned scientists can move fast
enough to preserve the world's traditional knowledge. While some
can be gathered in interviews and stored on tape, much
information is seamlessly interwoven with a way of life. Boston
anthropologist Jason Clay therefore insists that knowledge is
best kept alive in the culture that produced it. Clay's solution
is to promote economic incentives that also protect the
ecosystems where natives live. Toward that end, Cultural
Survival, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Mass., that Clay
helped establish, encourages traditional uses of the Amazon rain
forest by sponsoring a project to market products found there.

    Clay believes that in 20 years, demand for the Amazon's
nuts, oils, medicinal plants and flowers could add up to a $15
billion-a-year retail market -- enough so that governments might
decide it is worthwhile to leave the forests standing. The
Amazon's Indians could earn perhaps $1 billion a year from the
sales. That could pay legal fees to protect their lands and
provide them with cash for buying goods from the outside world.

    American companies are also beginning to see economic
value in indigenous knowledge. In 1989 a group of scientists
formed Shaman Pharmaceuticals, a California company that aims
to commercialize the pharmaceutical uses of plants. Among its
projects is the development of an antiviral agent for
respiratory diseases and herpes infections that is used by
traditional healers in Latin America.

    An indigenous culture can in itself be a marketable
commodity if handled with respect and sensitivity. In Papua New
Guinea, Australian Peter Barter, who first came to the island
in 1965, operates a tour service that takes travelers up the
Sepik River to traditional villages. The company pays direct
fees to villages for each visit and makes contributions to a
foundation that help cover school fees and immunization costs
in the region. Barter admits, however, that the 7,000 visitors
a year his company brings through the region disrupt local
culture to a degree. Among other things, native carvers adapt
their pieces to the tastes of customers, adjusting their size
to the requirements of luggage. But the entrepreneur argues that
the visits are less disruptive than the activities of
missionaries and development officials.

    There are other perils to the commercial approach. Money
is an alien and destabilizing force in many native villages. A
venture like Barter's could ultimately destroy the integrity of
the cultures it exhibits if, for example, rituals become
performances tailored to the tourist business. Some villages in
New Guinea have begun to permit tourists to visit spirit houses
that were previously accessible only to initiated males. In
Africa villages on bus routes will launch into ceremonial dances
at the sound of an approaching motor. Forest-product concerns
like those encouraged by Cultural Survival run the risk of
promoting overexploitation of forests, and if the market for
these products takes off, the same settlers who now push aside
natives to mine gold might try to take over new enterprises as
well.

    Still, economic incentives already maintain traditional
knowledge in some parts of the world. John and Terese Hart, who
have spent 18 years in contact with Pygmies in northeastern
Zaire, note that other tribes and villagers rely on Pygmies to
hunt meat and collect foods and medicines from the forests, and
that this economic incentive keeps their knowledge alive.
According to John Hart, the Pygmies have an uncanny ability to
find fruits and plants they may not have used for years. Says
Hart: "If someone wants to buy something that comes from the
forest, the Pygmies will know where to find it."


    Restoring Respect

    Preserving tribal wisdom is as much an issue of restoring
respect for traditional ways as it is of creating financial
incentives. The late Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy put his
prestige behind an attempt to convince his countrymen that their
traditional mud-brick homes are cooler in the summer, warmer in
the winter and cheaper than the prefabricated, concrete
dwellings they see as modern status symbols.

    Balick has made it part of his mission to enhance the
status of traditional healers within their own communities. He
and his colleagues hold ceremonies to honor shamans, most of
whom are religious men who value respect over material reward.
In one community in Belize, the local mayor was so impressed
that American scientists had come to learn at the feet of an
elderly healer that he asked them to give a lecture so that
townspeople could learn about their own medical tradition.
Balick recalls that this healer had more than 200 living
descendants, but that none as yet had shown an interest in
becoming an apprentice. The lecture, though, was packed.
"Maybe," says Balick, "seeing the respect that scientists showed
to this healer might inspire a successor to come forward."

    Such deference represents a dramatic change from past
scientific expeditions, which tended to treat village elders as
living museum specimens. Balick and others like him recognize
that communities must decide for themselves what to do with
their traditions. Showing respect for the wisdom keepers can
help the young of various tribes better weigh the value of
their culture against blandishments of modernity. If young
apprentices begin to step forward, the world might see a slowing
of the slide toward oblivion.