Their stories would be the basis of what preserves them as a people, if anything would. We all survived, if we did, through having our stories grow to ever more elaborate depth, complexity and number with the growth of our numbers, skills, complexity as peoples. Ever more numerous and detailed heroic myths, tales of gods specifically our own or shared with kindred peoples, eventually recorded history, philosophy, theatre, visual arts, music. Our stories, our ways, our peoples. Theirs too, for them.

It’s a pity that at their level of development their stories will be not quite up to the shock of too much modernity too quickly, as has happened to so many others. But investing their stories with power is the only way to preserve some sort of identity, if there is such a way at all.

Anyone here watch Star Trek TNG back in the day? There’s a few episodes in which Worf struggles vainly to explain the role of Klingon stories in preserving the Klingon identity and ways to his idiot son, and a couple when he tries to do so to Klingon youth who have grown up under largely Romulan care. The son eventually takes some of it on board. The exiled youth get it much more quickly.

Star Trek writers weren’t always obtuse when they tried to apply vaguely discerned anthropological concepts.

I also thought the article a bit stunted as to just the level of mindset and linguistic habits required to arrive at “most of the content was about cooperation, egalitarianism, and gender equality.”

It’s not that it isn’t true as far as it goes- any human society will have core objectives of managing relations between sexes and facilitating teamwork and the more basic the society’s level, the closer to survival requirements, and the fewer the labor differentiations, the more egalitarian those will be. Or they might allow for command roles but flexible and on an experience basis.

It’s just that it filters the layers of meaning in a culture’s stories- personal conflict, identity, history, love, hate, life, death, memory, man and nature, man and the cosmos, men and women and all that passes between them, the value and personalities of animals in interaction with man – and drills them down to the intellectually, morally, and spiritually degraded level of the 21st century grad school. One pities the Agta.

Man’s archetypal ideal was so long the storyteller or poet. Now it is the lab technician or, worse, the social scientist. The former ideal has brought us much wealth, power, comfort and safety, if with hidden prices. The latter ideal I can hardly not praise, as it most closely reflects my own background and experience, but allowing social science to rule or even to define the boundaries of one’s society, culture and very frame of mind is a terrible bargain. Rudyard Kipling would probably have had a closer sensibility for the Agta’s tales.

That and, inevitably, the articles’ just touching on but failure to ultimately grasp that storytelling, used for these purposes, is not a substitute for religion, but the ancestor of religion. Indeed, it is religion. Those storytellers are one step away [be it 10 years or, the Agta enduring so long, 10000 years away] from being anointed shamans and their stories invested with magic power.