Quoted in a BBC piece on ‘uncontacted tribes’

Posted on by Rex

There’s a good new piece about ‘uncontacted tribes’ in Latin America. I did an interview with the author and I’m quoted in it — I’d recommend it:

Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes

Here’s the quote:

“This gets to the heart of a common misconception surrounding isolated tribes such as the one in Acre: that they live in a bubble of wilderness, somehow missing the fact that their small corner of the world is in fact part of a much greater whole – and one that is dominated by other humans. “Almost all human communities have been in some contact with one another for as long as we have historical or archaeological records,” says Alex Golub, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “Human prehistory is not like that game Civilization where you start with a little hut and the whole map is black.”

Any time I can promote Sid Meier and anthropology at the same time, I’m happy.

Published by Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a political anthropologist who studies kinship, customary land tenure, and the mining and petroleum industry in Papua New Guinea. He also studies the video game World of Warcraft, and is an advocate for open access scholarly communications. His book "Leviathans at the Gold Mine" was published by Duke University Press.