This is amazing! However, I am afraid to hear how "modern" and "civilized" sociologists will interpret their way of life.

From the BBC:

One of South America's few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.

The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows.

More than half the world's 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says.

Stephen Corry, the director of the group - which supports tribal people around the world - said such tribes would "soon be made extinct" if their land was not protected.

'Monumental crime'

Survival International says that although this particular group is increasing in number, others in the area are at risk from illegal logging.

The photos were taken during several flights over one of the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil's Acre region.

They show tribe members outside thatched huts, surrounded by the dense jungle, pointing bows and arrows up at the camera.

"We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist," the group quoted Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, an official in the Brazilian government's Indian affairs department, as saying.

"This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence."

He described the threats to such tribes and their land as "a monumental crime against the natural world" and "further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilised' ones, treat the world".

Disease is also a risk, as members of tribal groups that have been contacted in the past have died of illnesses that they have no defence against, ranging from chicken pox to the common cold.

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Hypermasculinity, Whiteness, and Racial Paranoia
by Walton Muyumba

Recently the late author, Norman Mailer came to mind as I sat considering the machinations of whiteness and masculinity in American life. In 2003 Mailer, one of America's most famous white men and "white Negroes," predicted our current national condition of manifold social, political and economic decline in his acerbic essay "The White Man Unburdened." Though many of his critiques of African Americans and women foundered as dubious (if not plain wrong), Mailer was always a reliable critic of white American masculinity.

In an effort to analyze our wanton and exuberant Iraq war-lust, Mailer points to our craven desire for manipulated and televised displays of dominance as a major factor for the drive to the military invasion of Baghdad. But behind what Mailer calls the "Advertising Science"'s trumpeting the war was a "minor but significant" effort to charge the enthusiasm of white American men, raising them again to the top of the national social order. Understanding that conservative white men had taken "a daily drubbing" from feminists and the women's movement, while also losing their stake in major professional sports to black male genius, Tiger included, Bush, Mailer argues, played to their addiction to victory by using "sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag" in order to develop "many psychic connections with the military." According to Mailer, what Bush has always counted on is that "if we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology," because, at least, "we knew we were likely to be good at [war]."

To read the rest of the article, click here.