Sentinelese have Contacts with Outside World, but on their own ‘terms’- Busting the Myths regarding Isolation
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Nov 23, 2018, 03:37 pm IST
Rare footage captures Sentinelese tribes of Indian ocean
Historically there is evidence that the Sentinelese had contacts with other tribal groups, escaped convicts, and shipwrecked Europeans from the 1860s to 90s. Ethnographic and administrative accounts suggest that the Sentinelese have exchanged metal through a well-established relationship with other Andamanese tribal groups. One recent Government report carries a description of Sentinelese responses to shipwrecks near their shores. Two foreign cargo ships, the MV Rusley and the MVPrimrose, ran aground in the reef off the coast of North Sentinel Island in 1977 and 1981 respectively, and the Sentinelese scourne them for pieces of iron. In 1991, Andaman administration decided to auction rights to dismantle the wrecks to scrap dealers. One of these, M Mohammed acquired the rights and organised groups of seven to ten men to work in shifts for one week, just 300 feet from the shore. These details are shared by Vishvajit Pandya,a well-kown Anthropologist and author of New Histories of the Andaman Islands(2015), in his paper titled “Through Lens and Text: Constructions of a ‘Stone Age’ Tribe in the Andaman Islands.” History Workshop Journal, no. 67 (2009): 173-93.
Vishvajit Pandya
Pandya further informs that the same scrap dealer M Mohammed told him that at low tide his team was frequently visited by Sentinelese in canoes. When the canoes came closethe site his workers gave them fruit and small pieces of metl scrap.
Pandya himself had been to the Sentinel Islands three times, as a member of two official contact expeditions, in 1993, 1998 and again in 2005.
This is an on-going myth that Sentinelese have been living in complete isolation. Accounts of Pandya clearly suggest that Sentinelese have a strong sense about whom to be friendly with, and whom to see as an intruder and attack.
John Allen Chau, 27, was killed with arrows as he must have been seen as an intruder by the tribal group. Had the Sentinelese been killing everyone coming near to them, what explains the safe passage of Pandya and M Mohammed and many others?
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