THE SENTINELESE PEOPLE Of North SENTINEL ISLAND ( A STUDY OF ISOLATION AND RESILIENCE)
North Sentinel Island is also part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the inhabitants of this island are termed of Sentinelese tribe who are still one of those tribes globally who have not come across with the modern civilization.
Their island is in the Bay of Bengal and is the only Southeast Asian island without a significant celebrated population, let alone mainland connection; moreover, the Sentinelese have generally declined to interact with outsiders.
This particular tribe is composed of people ranging between 50 and 200 in population, and their extreme seclusiveness and livelihood make them possibly the last living exemplar of Neolithic man.
Even today, the Sentinelese are still living a primitive life and are mainly depending on hunting and gathering techniques; although there is globalisation.
It is still kept safe from the outside world not only due to the tribe’s hostility towards outsiders and their exclusion of anyone getting closer than five nautical miles to the island according to the Indian laws protecting the Sentinelese and any potential visitors.
It is challenging to know much about the Sentinelese people and their culture all due to little to no surface contact.
Till date the Sentinelese language is yet to be translated or understood by any linguists or other anthropologist despite the fact that the language does not share any relation with other language spoken by other tribes in Andaman.
The Sentinelese are also thought to speak their own dialect, which gives them still another cultural remove from other indigenous peoples.
It may suggest to heed, based on their apparent hunter-gatherer like lifestyle although they seem to hunt using bows and arrows, catch fish at the nearby shores and forage on fruits and other products within the forested island they seem to inhabit.
They are nomadic and their housing can be described as improvised , leaf huts, for instance, or shacks made of other leaves.
This nominal savageness, therefore, will well have been overlaid by the highly refined and developed ways of the civilization that has evolved in exemplary isolation for centuries, and that the Sentinelese are in possession of unparalleled information about their surroundings and unique methods of survival pertinent to their terrain.
There is much that remains unknown about the historical past of the Sentinelese people, but archeologists guess that they have been living in North Sentinel Island for thousands of years. According to the molecular anthropology, the tribes – the Sentinelese included , are the descendants of one of the first waves of human migration out of Africa around 60 ka.
This pure genetic line points to a very traditional and largely unmixed population, the result of the isolation that has left the Sentinelese fairly untouched.
This isolation might also entail specific biological adaptations to the environment and no resistance to many diseases which are familiar in other parts of the world, which is why their isolation is also strongly preserved.
CONNECTION WITH OTHERS IS A HUGE RISK SINCE ILLNESSES THAT MAY BE TRIVIAL IN OTHER CULTURES MAY BE LETHAL TO SENTELESE DUE TO THEIR MINIMAL IMMUNIZATION TO THESE DISEASES.
They are also known for their hostile approach towards anyone who comes to their island: one of the most isolated tribes in the world.
As described by the British colonial administrator Maurice Vidal Portman in 1884, the tribe has always been hostile towards any effort made towards making contact with it.
This resistance persisted up to the present, for instance in the murder of two fishermen in 2006 who had strayed into the island waters and the death of an American missionary in 2018 who sought to baptize them.
Hearing such stories is an indication that the Sentinelese people’s goal is to continue living freely and be left alone by other people, this is a virtue that is hard to come by right now knowing how interconnected the world is.
Some researchers think it is not about aggression as the end goal, but rather a behavior that was conditioned by past abuse produced by colonization, and forced attempts at making contact with other Andaman tribes.
The Indian government has done a lot to avert any intrusion on the Islanders hence, provide security to the Sentinelese people with legal provisions to that effect. Sentinel Island and the surrounding sea area are prohibited for everyone due to the applicable Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Act of 1956.
The Indian Navy is tasked to patrol the water to implement this law.
These are intended to facilitate the continued isolation for this native tribe and to protect them from undue influence and interactions which are destructive in their outcome for the tribe. This isolation measure bes its ethical and cultural merits given the tribe’s sovereign autonomy over its ability to adapt a lifestyle of seclusion.
The Indian government’s position is an acknowledgment of the sentinelese as an independent people, which belongs to India.
But, the policy of isolation of the Sentinelese has become a subject matter of controversy in anthropology and human rights. About this some people claim that they want to use all the conveniences of the present age starting with medicine and up to education and proper nourishment.
Some argue that any such meddling disregards the auto- nomously run societies, asserting their cultural values and altering their frequently millennium-old ways of life.
Furthermore, any contact will always be dangerous due to the fact that the Sentinelese have no immunity to many diseases and have no conception of or experience with such novelties as cell phones.
While raising the fundamental question of the rights of such people in the modern world which is eager for progress but at the same time does not take into consideration that some progress is fatal to certain tribes.
However, in recent year some scholars have proposed a policy of ‘informed non interventionism’, where the outside world does not make any attempt to initiate contact with the Sentinelese people, but at the same time the people of the outside world avoid any harm to Sentinelese people and are fully accepted as a separate society.
This approach advocates for a sort of bystanderism where the tribe’s decisions are not only acknowledged but also their right to exist unmolested is recognized.
On the other hand anthropologists and researchers have been trying to watch these people from a distance with an aim of understanding more about them and their ways of life without by any chance interfering with them.
The case with Sentinelese has implications for other uncontacted peoples throughout the world, as many of them also struggle with questions of how to maintain their independence and avoid extinction when threatened by globalization.
Therefore, the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island remain perhaps the only living specimen of uncontacted, traditional society society in the present world.
For them it is both physical and social desert which has however kept them so much isolated in their lifestyle that it represents true face of human ancestry.
The Indian government and persistent ethical discourse provide insight into the multifaceted nature of autonomy/contact interface: protection.
Sentinelese people with their desire to live their life to the hilt for going naked and living in isolation teach us to value the differences that people have and accept their decision to live in the manner they think is fit.
They make the viewers question the notion of modernization, the concept of progress and the issues of ethic foundation of historical and cultural conservation agenda.
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