Update: Thanks to Kim Christen for pointing me to this discussion and this article of the news reports about uncontacted trbes. It is fascinating to know that I am less media savvy when it comes to topics I’m less familiar with — I can spot techno-hype, but I don’t have an eye for anthro-hype. Anyway, read the post, it tells a fascinating and more subtle story about how tribes like this one not only have had sporadic contact with the ‘Westernized’ peoples that live near them, but that a number of organizations and governments work very hard to buffer these tribes from incursions by loggers, governments, and gawkers.

So what was it that was so fascinating to me about this story? I imagine, as someone who studies technology and digital culture, there is always this lingering question of what it would be like to have a radically “other” existence, where the trappings of our technological, capitalistic, globalized society simply did not exist. This is one version of the classic fascination (fetishization) of the other, where we project all our hopes and fears and unease about our own world on those we we see as radically different. But there is something tantalizing about imagining a culture that has siply navigated a very different existence; even as we can question whether this technological advance or this cultural phenomenon is socially valuable, its extremely difficult to question it all. So the “lost tribe” moment is a seductive one. And, as Kim pointed out, the real story is its own kind of insight into our global society too: the messy efforts to both interact with those we share the world with and to preserve something unique about our own collective, the aggressive pressure of capital and nation-building that constantly press into the far corners of the world, the tendency to turn difference into the emblem of difference.

This is not related to my work or my broader interest, I just find it utterly astounding.

(CNN) — Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Indians are photographed during an overflight in May 2008, as they react to the overflight at their camp. Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.The National Indian Foundation, a government agency in Brazil, published the photos Thursday on its Web site. It tracks “uncontacted tribes” — indigenous groups that are thought to have had no contact with outsiders — and seeks to protect them from encroachment.

More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, according to Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people.