Lessons of North Sentinel Island

[niko123]

I watched a couple of minutes of a documentary about the famous North Sentinel Island.

This is fucking insane. Just imagine how these people function, how they think, how they percieve the world around them. I mean it has to be so different from whatever we see. I'm 99% sure that if we studied them, their myths, etc. we would find some hero's joruney or some pattern that we can recognize, so they are not all that different, but we are AWARE of these patterns, these people live in them, are submerged in them.

How do these people percieve light? Or fire, or a plane flying overhead? They are sitting in the Plato's cave watching the shadows move. (tbh we are maybe a level higher, but hell na we ain't at the surface). Their concepts have to be so far fetched from ours, I'm amazed by it just by writing it just now.

This has massive implications, you can't ever even hope to percieve what the other person is thinking. You can think that people around you get you, but how can you know that they see things in the same way as you do? This is existential loneliness. No matter what, we are fundamentally alone.

You can never hope to truly understand someone else.

 

[Rafael Thundercat]

This one?

 

 

[niko123]

@Rafael Thundercat yes, this one exactly

 

[caspex]

In the 1880s the British abducted a few them and kept them nearby at Port Blair but they kept getting rapidly ill having been exposed to new diseases and dying. However one man named Enmei survived. The stay was quite short and he was sent back to his island. There are no records of any conversation or any knowledge gathered from Enmei.

I am just wondering what Enmei thought of the ordeal and what he communicated to his people. How is this story preserved in their culture over a hundred years later?