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Private Notes
Host David Maybury-Lewis revisits the Xavante of Brazil to see how they have changed since 1959, and then journeys into the Peruvian Amazon to unravel the mystery of the Mashco-Piro, a tribe that has chosen to remain hidden from the outside world. Only by understanding "the Other" can we get a proper sense of our own place in the world. Our contact with tribal societies will change them forever - but can it also change us?
How do we balance personal desire for love with society's need for stable marriages? In Nepal, a young Nyimba couple falls in love - a dangerous passion in a culture based on polyandry, one wife with many husbands. The Wodaabe of Niger allow two types of marriage in the same family - one for love and the other arranged since birth. In matters of the heart, do Western people with serial monogamy based on romantic love have the strangest relations of all?
Have things replaced people as the focus of our relationships? Western views of wealth and economic needs have created a society of strangers in the midst of material riches, while tribal cultures such as the Weyewa of Indonesia and the Gabra of Kenya create economies of dependency on others and measure wealth through people, not things
While tribal cultures seek harmony with nature, Western societies try to dominate it, often with devastating consequences. Visit the Gabra of Kenya whose relationship to their harsh desert environment is key to their survival; the Makuna of Colombia whose complex myths and rituals reveal a highly sophisticated ecological awareness; and a modern gardener who resists the Western world's control of nature with a new attitude about sowing Earth's garden.
Where does individual identity begin and end? Western societies strive to answer these questions through biology - conception, birth, adolescence, maturity, death - while tribal cultures define identity through relationships with others and rites of passage with the living and the dead. Hear stories from the family life of an abortion counselor in Canada; an initiation into manhood for a Xavante boy in Brazil; a high school girl's attempted suicide; and a Weyewa man of Sumba Island, Indonesia who speaks to his dead relatives
Every society has a system of knowledge, a way to describe reality that we call either science or magic - and sometimes both. Who will stop a fatal epidemic sweeping the villages of the Huichol Indians of Mexico - the medical doctor or the shaman? Can a terminal cancer patient in a modern hospital benefit from mindfulness practice in combating her disease? Is there an objective reality "out there" or is it something we can shape as the Australian Aborigines believe?
Why do we separate art and living? In tribal societies, where there are no words for "art" or "artist", everyday life is an occasion for creative expression. Follow a Wodaabe woman from Niger as she judges a festival of beauty and grace; a Dogon man from Mali celebrating at a masked funeral dance; and a contemporary artist, diagnosed with HIV, revealing his own unique art of living.
How do tribal societies maintain social order and harmony without the vast legal institutions that we rely on? The tribal practice of democracy through consensus is put to the test when members of Canada's Ojibwa-Cree tribe have a constitutional struggle with the federal government and the Mohawk community squares off against the Canadian army in Oka, Quebec. Cultural survival is rooted both in the recognition of land rights and native language education.
Travel to France to explore the most perplexing dilemmas of the Western world - heart versus mind, body versus soul, the desires of the individual versus the needs of society. Through stories of family life in both tribal and modern societies, understand why our survival as a species may now depend on the wisdom of our tribal past. In Arizona, a Navajo grandmother tells the story of Changing Woman and the need to balance all tensions just like the pattern of the rug she is weaving. And David Maybury-Lewis returns to Brazil to visit his Xavante brother who speaks about the values of wisdom, compassion and family that ensure his tribe's survival.[
