Tribe

I've been moved tonight, watching the Amazon DVD where Bruce Parry travels the full length of the Amazon.

I was watching the part where he's with the Kayapo people of Brazil, taking part in their songs and dances, and hearing their powerful calls to be allowed to live, as a people, to live in the forest and to be allowed to survive.

Like almost all peoples living in forests, it seems, they're under threat from loggers clearing forest in order to get timber, meat, or minerals from off or under the land, resources to trade on global markets, ultimately with consumers in places like the UK.

In all the healthy tribes Bruce visits on his trip, I'm struck by how much they sing and dance together. It's almost in the same family as some of the things we do at the fun fed. Almost.



It was last Christmas in India that I realised that there was something tribal about my many hungers. The kind of lifestyle I long for, with its relationships to nature, community, self-sufficiency, singing, dancing and (healthy) social ritual - these hungers are all elements of a tribal lifestyle.

And how strange that I should hunger for this, born and brought up as I am within this culture

This culture whose materialist norms and demand for resources is leading quite directly to the destruction of exactly that kind of lifestyle where it currently exists.