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Comment by zawerf | Hacker News Reader

There are still a few uncontacted tribes left. I remember reading about the Sentinelese[1] last year when some guy snuck onto their island to try to convert them to christianity and died.

I forgot where I read this but apparently they don't have a concept of gift-giving as a sign of goodwill. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around that!

Like how else could gifts be interpreted? Maybe as a sign of submission, like cats who think it must be a god to people who feed it? But can it even be possible for biological humans to not have a concept of reciprocal altruism? Or did their culture evolve to a different point where they can get (homicidally) mad at people for being too nice?

The fact that this simple gesture wasn't as universal as I thought really got me thinking about how much of our actions only make sense within a narrow shared context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

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They're not uncontacted, but if you're interested in very different cultures, the Pirahã are absolutely fascinating. There's a brilliant article in the New Yorker about them: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...

Dan Everett, the subject of the New Yorker's article, wrote a book about his experiences with the Pirahã called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes which is excellent. It's one of my absolute favourite books ever.

Not sure if I am understanding you correctly but they didn't kill him because he brought them gifts, they killed him because previous outsiders brought disease and death, so they are rightly xenophobic.

ISTM we don't have the faintest clue as to why they killed him. That's kind of the point. One doubts that any of them have studied public health.

What does ISTM mean?

It seems to me.

Be careful: The Sentinelese and all other uncontacted tribes are Homo sapiens exactly the same as you or I. Just because they might have a very different culture doesn't make them alien in the way Homo neanderthalensis or Homo floresiensis might have been to our (and the Sentinelese peoples') ancestors.

I'm half way into a book by James C Scott "The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia"[1][2] where he makes a compelling case for why (hill) people/tribes evolve differently. Not because they are in some sense isolated (and backward). It's research mostly about the tribes escaping China and looking for safety by going to higher grounds. They chose not to have a written language, reject religion, or farming, etc out of necessity and to avoid the encroaching state (which means slavery, etc). He shows that despite the difference in geography and their scatteredness (Burma, Vietnam, Laos, ...) all have certain customs in common (and even they are not all from China).

they are not unaware of civilization or reject "culture" because they are "backward" but have been part of it at some point. And they have chosen to become outcasts either because of heavy tax collection, risk of enslavement or imprisonment. People who flee into higher altitudes and away from what the rest calls "civilization" (the rice growing padi states).

The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc). Their customs and strange ways should be seen as having evolved out of necessity to avoid being absorbed by a different group.

[1] https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

"The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc)."

I don't know anything about the Jawari but this just seems like speculation w.r.t the Sentinelese. You're ascribing a single-liftetime conscious decision ("I know civilization, it is bad, so we should all just keep to ourselves in this isolated place and not develop technology") to groups of people who have been living in isolation for centuries, possibly even thousands of years. In the case of the sentinelese, it may not even be a type of cultural evolutionary trait to avoid people so much as a consequence of isolation, that people just don't go there because it's out of the way or they don't know about it. And their hostility to outsiders could have any number of explanations... it could be that they see civilization as a threat to their way of life, but it could also be that they are just scared of people who look different and use seemingly magical tools, or due to some pervasive myth/aspect of their religion.

The wiki article include descriptions of several visits where they seem to understand gift giving as good will quite well:

> During a 4 January 1991 visit, the Sentinelese approached the party without weaponry for the first time. They collected coconuts that were offered but retreated to the shore as the team gestured for them to come closer. The team returned to the main ship, MV Tarmugli. It returned to the island in the afternoon to find at least two dozen Sentinelese on the shoreline, one of whom pointed a bow and arrow at the party. Once a woman pushed the arrow down, the man buried his weapons in the beach and the Sentinelese approached quite close to the dinghies for the first time. The Director of Tribal Welfare distributed five bags of coconuts hand-to-hand.

But even if they didn't, it's quite possible that there are other factors influencing their decisions than basing it purely on receiving gifts. As for the missionary that was killed, it seems disliking proselytizers turning up at your door is another universal human attribute.

A powerful person can feel humiliated by an outstanding gift.

It can also be seen as an temptation of evil.

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