Case 2: Helping or Exploiting Other Cultures

You are an anthropologist, working as part of an interdisciplinary team, to study a previously unknown population in a remote island in the South Pacific. This is quite a discovery and has captured world and media attention. The population appears to exist as hunter-gatherers, with stone tools, with no previous contact ever to the "modern" world. An interdisciplinary team, consisting of public health professionals, medical personnel, representatives of various international aid organizations, a film crew, and behavioral and social scientists (including you), have been sent to the island to study and offer assistance to this population (as needed). You are the anthropologist on this team.

You and the team have documented the behaviors, lifestyle, and social system of this newly discovered human population, including the following:

• The group is primarily polyandrous; that is, there is plural marriage, primarily with one woman and multiple males. The multiple males in the polyandrous marriages are usually brothers. However, in a few cases, there also may be other forms of polygamy, with multiple wives and multiple husbands in one marriage. Monogamy is not practiced in this culture.
• Children are raised jointly by communal groups of parents across a number of polygamous marriages.
• The group has had no previous contact with the "modern" world; group members rely on stone tools, hunting and gathering, and botanical medicinal practices.
• The general health of the population appears to be good, and the average adult life span is comparable to that seen in the United States.

Although the interdisciplinary team has been dispatched to study and document the population, several of the members of the interdisciplinary team strongly express their wish to "bring these people into the twenty-first century." The team members say that modernizing the lives from these "primitive" conditions would serve to help them. They maintain that modern medicine, technology, agriculture, monogamy, immediate family structures would "civilize" this population and make them part of the "human race." Before seeking to bring in additional units to assist on this project, the interdisciplinary team leader asks you for recommendations (as an anthropologist) about how to proceed with this population. The team leader is hopeful that, with enough international assistance, "We can bring these people into the twenty-first century in a few months."