The Tracker (2002) is a powerful Australian drama written and directed by Rolf De Heer (Ten Canoes, Dingo). Set in the Australian outback in 1922, the film tells the story of a racist white policeman (Gary Sweet) and his half-willing posse, who have pressed an Aboriginal man (David Gulpilil) into service to hunt down the accused killer of a white woman. Viewers readily empathize with the predicament of the Tracker, […]
Archive | January, 2013
Jared Diamond: Why study traditional societies?
Why do we find “traditional” societies so fascinating?[1] Partly, it’s because of their human interest: the fascination of getting to know people who are so similar to us and understandable in some ways, and so unlike us and hard to understand in other ways. When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, in 1964 at the age of 26, I was struck by the exoticness of New Guineans: […]
Arundhati Roy: They call it progress
I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people [at this […]
Barbara Savage: Preserving the Ethnosphere—Humanity’s Greatest Legacy
There is a war being waged on the planet—and indigenous cultures are among the greatest casualties of that war. In North America, we often think that the genocide of indigenous cultures is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, it continues wherever wild earth remains—in the Amazon rainforest, the Kalahari Desert, the jungles of Indonesia. And it also continues among Native Americans who struggle to recreate cultural identities when their traditional […]
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