In
frailer moments, we think of the border between ourselves and others as a kind of blood-brain barrier. Others are suspicious, threats of infection, and we’d best not let any foreign substance in. It’s easy to decry this perspective as crass solipsism, but a healthy amount of distrust is always called for. I like when Paul Simon sings losing love is “like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you’re blown apart. Everybody sees the wind blow.” These last few years of encroaching denialism and public line-blurring have made clear what a rickety, storm-blown shack the self can be.
There was always a paradox inherent in Hannah Arendt’s assertion that totalitarianism “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” That sounds like Arendt is suggesting the self and its faculties are the only thing you can be certain of. But she actually writes that the readiest subjects of totalitarian rule are “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Another term for “the standards of thought” is common sense. One of the greatest jokes of human existence is that common sense is private property—at least partly inherited wealth, of course, but also sui generis. It’s a terrible miracle that happens over and over in every human being, this ingenious knack for discerning from the storm of experience what is fact and what is not, what is true and what is not, what is right and what is not, what is good and what is not. And it’s no less common for being that way.
Even
if you speak German, it’s a good bet you’ve never heard of the Austrian poet Alfred Kolleritsch. He spent most of his life teaching at the Akademisches Gymnasium (the equivalent of a college prep school) in the city of Graz. But from 1960 until his death in 2020, he presided over the literary magazine manuskripte, which published some of the most innovative literature of the past half century. Though he released his own literary work to more-than-modest acclaim, he was mostly content to play midwife to early works by authors who would go on to have prodigious careers, including the controversial Nobel prize winner Peter Handke, who was also his close friend. The only reason I know of Kolleritsch is that in 2013, I couldn’t yet stream podcasts in my car, and so when commuting for work in Germany, where I live, I still listened to Deutschlandfunk, the national public radio broadcaster. The literature show one afternoon featured a lengthy discussion of Kolleritsch’s then newly-released book of poems, Es gibt den ungeheueren Anderen (There is the Awful Other), and I was transfixed enough to seek it and his other work out.
That book was Kolleritsch’s first publication since 2009, when he’d had emergency septic bowel surgery and had been placed in an artificial coma for two months. In his forward to the book, Handke relates that when Kolleritsch awoke from his lengthy sleep, he reported that the memories of his dreams were mostly diaphanous but that the people in them spoke “englisch,” meaning not English, but rather the language of angels. This brought to Handke’s mind the “englischer Gruß,” which is the German name for the Annunciation, the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she would conceive and give birth to Jesus. For Handke, the words of Kolleritsch’s terse yet mellifluous poems had the uncanny quality of angelic pronouncements.
In the words of Kolleritsch’s editor Rainer Götz, Handke meant “‘angel’ as the highly concentrated, nigh-on transcendent form of the over-and-against.” Repeatedly, faces appear in the poems—the speaker’s own, that of the addressee (who sometimes is a second-person you and sometimes a third-person she)—across from one another, vis-à-vis, entangled, the speaker and the angel wrestling. Kolleritsch’s book is a testament to the formation of the Self and the encounter with the awful Other—awful in the sense of “inspiring awe and terror”—who is other people, but also the Constitutive Other, the person in the world that the Self identifies as being but, as a subject and not an object, is irrevocably separate from. This is the Other of Husserl and Heidegger—on whose philosophy Kolleritsch wrote a doctoral thesis, and whom he consistently defended in the face of public condemnation for embracing the Nazi movement—and finally of Emmanuel Levinas, who saw the moral responsibility inherent in the face-to-face encounter between the Self and the Other as the basis of reality, more basic than even metaphysics. Through the encounter with the Other (an apparently willful causer of events in the world, seemingly subjective and motivated in the same way as oneself, and with all the same affiliated fears, but ultimately unknowable) the Self becomes itself.
This tradition in continental philosophy indulges in an arcane language of sublimity, but there is a variant tradition that appropriates the same language to more materialistic ends. In this latter tradition—in which the currency of intersubjective reality is mere power and there is no transcendence—Otherness means being disenfranchised. The Other is racially different or foreign—what the marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci labeled subaltern: people who are systematically excluded from socio-economic power and denied agency—awful in the more familiar and current sense: “deplorable and objectionable.” But just as the various senses of words enumerated in the dictionary are useful fictions for helping us parse the borderless spectrum of language, so too are these traditions of the Other actually commensurate. The experience of disenfranchised people only demands our moral attention because they are Other in the more numinous sense—objects of curiosity, wonder, affection, fear, and respect. They are, we suspect, like us and yet we cannot know them. And it is only by venturing to know them that we can hope to know ourselves. That is what I take away from Kolleritsch’s poems. And that is what I take away from a story that happened in a place more remote—and among a people more Other—than any other.
Four
years ago, John Allen Chau, a 27-year-old American man, was killed by the indigenous inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman Sea. In October of 2018, I conducted an interview with Armand Marie Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London, in which he described the Sentinelese and other islanders of the region to me as “exceptionally remote” and “genetically distinct.” At that very moment, while I was recording the interview from my office in Hamburg, John Chau was sojourning at Hutbay on Little Andaman Island, hoping to enlist a member of one of the other tribes—the Onge—to accompany him to North Sentinel Island and help him ingratiate himself with its inhabitants.
Geographically and chronologically speaking, the Sentinelese are indeed an exceptionally remote population. For all of our shared recorded history, they have lived on that island. Although it’s tempting to compare their culture and lifestyle to that of Stone Age people as imagined in stereotype, as the anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya, a researcher and advocate for the Andaman peoples, has reiterated to me in correspondence, all we know of the Sentinel Islanders’ ancestry and culture is
“based on unstructured observations. No sustained real contact.”
That is accurate. Together with the other Andaman tribes as well as tribes in Peninsular Malaysia, Southern Thailand, and throughout the Philippines, they were once collectively known as “negritos”—little black men. That label was originated by Spanish missionaries to the Philippines in the sixteenth century. It was, however, among the Andaman Islanders that the phenotypic features that gave rise to the term—exceptionally dark pigmentation, curly hair structure, a slender build, and an inordinately small stature resembling that of African “Pygmies”—were so conspicuous and seemingly distinct from the traits of other populations in the region as to compel colonial explorers to suggest that perhaps they were in fact a wayward and discrete set of migrants out of Africa. George Dobson, an Irish zoologist and ethnographer of the Andaman peoples, even ventured to write, in 1875, that one had to be a closed-minded fool not to conclude that this was a race of people ancestrally African and wholly separate from their immediate neighbors:
The presence of a race of negroes (for such everyone with a mind unbiassed by preconceived ideas of their origin will consider the Andamanese) in a chain of small islands surrounded by countries inhabited by races very different from them in every respect had, more than one hundred years ago, excited the wonder of travellers.
The irony of that statement is that the bias was in his own mind: The assumption that the Andaman Islanders must have originated from a distinct migration out of Africa persisted into the 2010s. Only in the past ten years have genomic studies definitively proven that the Andaman populations share ancestry from the same migration out of Africa as the populations in mainland India—and that the physical traits that have compelled us to believe they are distinct all resulted from adaptations in recent millennia.
Of course, with regard to the people of North Sentinel Island in particular, that conclusion is itself based on a presumption: that the Sentinelese only separated from other populations in the past few thousand years. There’s no reason to think the Sentinelese have ancestry different from any of the other indigenous Andaman populations; but we cannot know that definitively, because we cannot collect genomic data from the Sentinelese. They have, by all record, remained persistently secluded and violently defended themselves from invasion for millennia. In other words, for all of recorded history, they have been socially distancing.
I’m not the first to notice the almost too-delicious analogy between our recent lockdown measures and the Sentinelese’s millennia-long policy of self-isolation. The economics opinion writer John Tamny, whose response to the pandemic was to write prose at a pitch somewhere between abject terror and rage, drew the same comparison in Forbes. He believes that all forms of isolationism—epidemiological, economic, personal—are misguided and dangerous:
Their isolation has done the North Sentinelese no favors in a health sense. . . . Precisely because the North Sentinelese have been so isolated for so long from the outside world, their immunity is nil. . . . Isolated people aren’t saved from what threatens their health as much [as] the inevitable infection from the threat is delayed. Worse is what the isolation means over the longer term. The North Sentinelese are a very real reminder of how cruelly bankrupt the run-and-hide strategy is as a broad form of virus mitigation.
One need only consider the fate of the other indigenous Andaman tribes to realize that Tamny’s conclusion is not all that clear. The records aren’t immaculate, and they’re often speculative, but as best we can tell, the Andaman tribes numbered well over 10,000 people into the eighteenth century. But beginning with the first British naval settlement on Chatham Island in 1798, the isolation enjoyed by the indigenous populations was broken, and their numbers were decimated. The first tribe to suffer losses were the Jarawa of South and Middle Andaman Islands, but the largest number of deaths were endured by the Great Andamanese, who were once a clade of diverse tribes who spoke slightly varying dialects. The subgroups from the southern half of the Great Andaman archipelago were extinct by the middle of the last century. (According to the census of 1961, there were only 19 individuals of Great Andamanese descent remaining at that point.) A small set of the subgroups in the northern half of the island chain (mostly members of the Aka-Jeru and Aka-Bo) have, beyond all reasonable expectation, survived and even recuperated somewhat. There are presently 74 individuals who are Great Andamanese either in identity, ancestry, or language spoken, although they have collapsed and consolidated into a hybrid group, all of whose members also have Hindi or Burmese ancestry. The language primarily spoken is Hindi, or (depending on how you like to cut up the language map) Andaman Creole Hindi. Some among them are still bilingual and also speak a mixed language, Great Andamanese, that derives most of its vocabulary from the Aka-Jeru dialect but with elements from others.
The progress made in increasing the set of surviving Great Andmanese people—scant as it is—was placed at risk in 2020, as ten of the remaining individuals contracted Covid-19 and had to be quarantined. All of those people recovered, but the state of the population is so perilous, you can only conclude that the Great Andamanese are not long for this world. With that tribe’s fate in mind, you would have to be fairly obtuse to believe the Sentinelese people are better off soliciting exposure to outsiders.
In Part 2, we’ll explore the tangled story of encounter in the Andamans. . . .