Those who criticize the movie Avatar’s theme of colonial oppression as being clichéd or no longer relevant should be shown stories like “The World of China Inc.” (TIME magazine, 7/12), where this is still happening – in this case, Chinese companies exploiting Papua New Guinea for its natural resources, despoiling the environment, and some of the native tribal peoples fighting back.
“The Hadza”, National Geographic, December 2009 issue. These people in Tanzania are still managing to live the hunter-gatherer existence they have sustained for 10 000 years, though they are inevitably under threat from outsiders who want to “civilize” them – it seems impossible for outsiders to leave such people alone if they wish to be. If civilization were to collapse, it is these people who would survive best.
What the Hadza appear to offer – and why they are of great interest to anthropologists – is a glimpse of what life may have been like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Anthropologists are wary of viewing contemporary hunter-gatherers as “living fossils,” says Frank Marlowe, a Florida State University professor of anthropology who has spent the past 15 years studying the Hadza. Time has not stood still for them. But they have maintained their foraging lifestyle in spite of long exposure to surrounding agriculturalist groups, and, says Marlowe, it’s possible that their lives have changed very little over the ages.
For more than 99 percent of the time since the genus Homo arose two million years ago, everyone lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, once plants and animals were domesticated, the discovery sparked a complete reorganization of the globe. Food production marched in lockstep with greater population densities, which allowed farm-based societies to displace or destroy hunter-gatherer groups. Villages were formed, then cities, then nations. And in a relatively brief period, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was all but extinguished. Today only a handful of scattered peoples – some in the Amazon, a couple in the Arctic, a few in Papua New Guinea, and a tiny number of African groups – maintain a primarily hunter-gatherer existence. Agriculture’s sudden rise, however, came with a price. It introduced infectious-disease epidemics, social stratification, intermittent famines, and large-scale war. Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor and writer, has called the adoption of agriculture nothing less than “the worst mistake in human history” – a mistake, he suggests, from which we have never recovered.
The Hadza do not engage in warfare. They’ve never lived densely enough to be seriously threatened by an infectious outbreak. They have no known history of famine; rather, there is evidence of people from a farming group coming to live with them during a time of crop failure. The Hadza diet remains even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world’s citizens. They enjoy an extraordinary amount of leisure time. Anthropologists have estimated that they “work” – actively pursue food – four to six hours a day. And over all these thousands of years, they’ve left hardly more than a footprint on the land.
It is a surprisingly informal type of society, and women are not subservient like in some other h-g cultures. They live off the land entirely, with no need for agriculture. It is a hard life, though, and would be difficult for one brought up in civilization to adapt to.
There are things I envy about the Hadza – mostly, how free they appear to be. Free from possessions. Free of most social duties. Free from religious strictures. Free of many family responsibilities. Free from schedules, jobs, bosses, bills, traffic, taxes, laws, news, and money. Free from worry. Free to burp and fart without apology, to grab food and smoke and run shirtless through the thorns.
But I could never live like the Hadza. Their entire life, it appears to me, is one insanely committed camping trip. It’s incredibly risky. Medical help is far away. One bad fall from a tree, one bite from a black mamba snake, one lunge from a lion, and you’re dead. Women give birth in the bush, squatting. About a fifth of all babies die within their first year, and nearly half of all children do not make it to age 15. They have to cope with extreme heat and frequent thirst and swarming tsetse flies and malaria-laced mosquitoes.
For all our technological prowess, are people in modern civilization any happier? More and more to me, the civilization I live in seems sick and dysfunctional; obsessed with consumerism – getting more “stuff” – in a quest to fill an inner emptiness. In the process of this, the environment is being irreparably polluted and damaged, the sixth mass extinction of species silently continues, cities cover the Earth like metastasizing cancers. I almost wish this civilization would collapse, if only to save what is left of nature. Is achieving spaceflight worth destroying the planet we live on? People are not going to leave Earth in droves anytime soon (despite the wishful thinking of “Space Cadets”), yet contempt for environmental concerns is endemic on the space forums I visit (NASASpaceflight.com members, I mean you).
I feel disgust at governments and business (obsessed with the religious cult of this age: the Economy), and despair for the future, which I and the descendants of my generation will have to endure. The predicted disasters – overpopulation, water and food shortages, climate change, destruction of ecosystems, etc. – are already happening, yet governments are only making token efforts at change, such as instigating a dubious “Emissions Trading Scheme” which only benefits parasitical investment bankers (one of the most useless “professions” ever).
Avatar is quite pertinent as it deals with the themes of natives vs. invaders, destruction of the environment, living in harmony with nature, and so on. Though the hunter-gatherer Na’vi in the movie appear somewhat sanitized (I doubt there will be a scene showing the equivalent of eating a baboon’s brains!), not to mention idealized (all tall, very thin, attractive).
The marketing of the movie seems at odds with its philosophy though: it is being sponsored by a well-known soft drink.
“Avatar shares the same aspirational, edgy and unconventional brand values as Coca-Cola Zero,” noted Chip York, worldwide entertainment marketing director at the Atlanta-based beverage giant. “Working so closely with the studio and filmmakers has allowed us to create authentic and exclusive content that provides fans unique access into the world, deepening their Avatar experience.”
That sort of meaningless jargon-infested talk would be utter bullsh*t to the Na’vi (and the real-world Hadza above).
