by The Dharma Bum » Tue Feb 12, 2013 5:32 pm
I prefer to look at it as not interfering with indigenous and tribal peoples. They have a right to live their lives according their own folkways.
The thing is, you won't be helping them any more than the missionaries of the previous centuries helped them. What they really did was infect them with disease and shatter the social fabric of the cultures they encountered which is the same thing that what you propose will do. Your intentions, as good as they are, are misguided.
I would no more interfere in the existence of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rain forest than I would try to build shelters to "help" the penguins of the antarctic. It's better to leave that delicate balance alone, because once you get bored with "helping" you will go home and they will have to stay and survive. If that makes me a coward so be it.
A primitive people's culture is how they literally survive in their environment, you have no right to ignorantly stumble in and interfere in that balance which has been tens of thousands of years in the making.
People have tried to link this practice to Islam for purposes of jingoistically demonizing that culture but the truth is this is an ancient practice. One that has been practiced since the first civilizations of the Nile basin appeared.