While I had heard of the “never-before-seen” tribe recently photographed on the Brazil-Peru border, I had not fully appreciated the images until I discovered Boston Globe’s The Big Picture, in which ‘news-worthy’ images are blown up to more striking and powerful sizes [Hat tip to Kottke].

Try as I might, I simply cannot imagine living in a totally isolated world. In Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond relates the story of the discovery of a tribe in Papua New Guinea in the early-twentieth century, in which, due to the dense jungle surrounding the community, members never knew that the world extended beyond their clearing. While I am not totally surprised that such “hold-outs” have lasted this long in modern times, I do believe that discovery of similar tribes is completely inevitable.

Whether they are encountered due to the clear-cutting of the rain forests to make room for corn fields or by conservation groups surveying the land, I fully expect that at some point in my life another incredibly isolated people-group will be exposed to the the surrounding world, literally shattering the reality they have understood for so many centuries. And no matter how we try and ‘preserve’ their culture and way of life, they will have eaten, willingly or not, from the Tree of Knowledge, and for them nothing will ever be the same*.

Interaction, of any sort, is hardly a simple question of right or wrong: from Bartoleme de Las Casas Tears of the Indians to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, arguments over “spreading civilization,” colonialism, and imperialism are without end. People are expanding too quickly, globalization is becoming too powerful of a force; how we choose to deal with future contact with isolated tribes is a responsibility which weighs heavily on industrialized society, and one that must be considered with all the gravity we can muster.

I don’t know the answers. I wish I did.

*See the phenomenon of “cargo cults” for a fascinating example of the impact interaction with industrialized society can have on indigenous groups.