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The Last Whalers: The Life of an Endangered Tribe in a Land Left Behind

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I was mesmerized in the beginning, but by the time I was halfway through, certain questions started to come up in my skeptical mind. How did the author know so much about what these villagers were thinking? Had they really confided their inmost secret longings, some of them considered shameful, to this foreigner? Had this American journalist really spent a considerable amount of time living with these folks? How come he stayed outside of the story altogether - there was nothing about how he came to live with them, or how he communicated with them. (Disclaimer : I stopped reading the book about half-way through, so if this information was introduced later, I simply didn't get that far.). I found it odd - don't chroniclers of specific populations typically describe how they got to meet them and how much time they spent with them, and who their informants were?

I started the book with high hopes, and the first few chapters were very interesting. The author describes the life of a small group of whale hunters in a remote island in Indonesia. Apart from describing the high-adrenaline whale hunts and everyday life in the village, the author focuses on a couple of families in the village, all interrelated. He introduces us to a handful of people in the village, harpoonists and ship builders, a shaman, patriarchs. And, inevitably, we hear the modern world is encroaching on the village's traditions, with young men preferring to work in the cities and listen to pop music rather than to live on dried whale meat and participate in the old ceremonies.Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. The author describes their culture and life through some individual members of the tribe who we get to know, and through them the reader sees the stresses of balancing the ancestral ways with the impact of their collision with the modern world and their efforts to adjust to this new world.

And what hope, then, do these whalers have of resisting the onslaught? “There is a saying in Lamalera,” Clark tells us. “ Preme ki, ‘Hope, but not too much,’ reflecting the belief that the whales would never come if the people demanded them.” On a volcanic island in the Savu Sea so remote that other Indonesians call it "The Land Left Behind" live the Lamalerans: a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who are the world's last subsistence whalers. They have survived for half a millennium by hunting whales with bamboo harpoons and handmade wooden boats powered by sails of woven palm fronds. But now, under assault from the rapacious forces of the modern era and a global economy, their way of life teeters on the brink of collapse. Clark successfully depicts these people in their full human complexity rather than as primitive tropes. Lembata, in Southeast Asia, is home to the Lamalerans who arrived there 500 years ago. They settled on the beach under a cliff, surviving by fishing for sperm whale and Manta ray and flying fish. Those who are successful in the hunt share with aging family members and community members. They are one of the few hunter-gatherer societies left in the world. But industrialized society is crowding in on them. Their children are enticed to the cities for education and jobs. Some remain for the air conditioning and running water. Outboard motors and smaller boats are replacing the handcrafted boats propelled by oar and the young carry cell phones. Over the course of three years, the author, a two-time Fulbright recipient, spent months at a time on the island of Lembata with the Lamalerans, a group of hunter-gatherers. Of the 1,500 members of the tribe, 300 are dedicated to hunting sperm whales as well as other marine mammals and fish. Scrupulously leaving himself out of the narrative, Clark focuses on a few individuals to tell the story of the group. Chief among them are two young men who aspire to become harpoonists, the most prestigious—and dangerous—position on the whaling boat. Jon, raised by his grandparents after his parents abandoned him, struggles to find a place in a society that scorns him. Ben, an expert harpooner and boatmaker, finds himself drawn by the attractions of life outside the island. The author also closely follows Ben’s father, Ignatius, and other older builders and masters of the long rowboats whose construction, unchanged for generations, is guided by the “Ways of the Ancestors.” Clark pays less attention to the women of the group, many of whom are sent away to be educated and work elsewhere in Indonesia, sometimes returning to care for elderly family members, though he does devote space to the daily life of Jon's sister Ika, who wants to marry a young man from another tribe. In between the stories of the individuals, the author chronicles the history of the group and the ceremonies he attended in a society that meshes Catholic faith and animistic religion. Perhaps surprisingly, among the chief villains of the narrative are the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, which promote whale-watching rather than whale-killing. The author argues that sperm whales are less endangered than the Lamaleran society.One thing you learn, in squeamish detail, is how to carve up a dead beached whale. “By the end,” Clark writes, “only the flippers retained their skin, so that they rested against the flesh like mittened hands trying to cover a naked torso.” The loss of a culture is as permanent as the loss of a life, but rather than one star darkening, it is a whole constellation burning out. It is the disappearance of every soul that has constituted it. It is the end of a past and a future. Clark is hardly the first observer to study Lamaleran culture. Anthropologists and documentary filmmakers and others have been here before. But he brings empathy and literary skill to bear. This is a humbly told book, one in which the author’s first-person voice does not intrude.

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