‘We can learn a lot from the Penans’
Tribe’s equality a good example for other societies, says explorer
PETALING JAYA: For four years, celebrity explorer Bruce Parry travelled from the jungles of Malaysia to the Amazon to find a deeper understanding of indigenous people and how their way of life can benefit people in an industrialised world.
It culminated in his latest documentary Tawai: A Voice from the Forest, a homage to the natives, particularly the Penan, and what they can teach the rest of the world about the survival of humans and that of the planet.
Tawai is a word the Penan use to describe the connection they feel to their forest home, said the English documentarian who is also an indigenous rights’ advocate and former Royal Marines commando.
“When I was living with these tribes, I got a deep insight into human nature.
“When I found the Penan tribe, I thought ‘here’s a group of people unlike any other I’ve met throughout my life’. They were somehow completely different.
“They were living in a system where they had completely extinguished any outward expression of competition. They had no leaders, no chiefs and shamans, zero hierarchy.
“This group of people and a very few others around the world live by the narrative of egalitarianism, which was how we all lived until the advent of agriculture and the Neolithic revolution,” said Parry when met recently at the Sharjah International Book Fair 2018 in the United Arab Emirates.
Tawai was released last year, and Parry has been travelling to several countries this year for its promotion and premiere.
Parry, also famed for the BBC documentary series Tribe, Amazon, and Arctic, warned that the world was leading to a point where it forgot to be mindful and live in the moment.
“We are heading towards a future that will lose its balance to competition and aggression. Look at where we are going. We all want what the neighbour has. We are all fighting for resources.
“We are all trying to assert power and authority on others in whatever way we can.
“Humans need to change this mindset if they are to sustain the world for future generations,” said Parry.
In the film, he also confronted the ongoing issue of deforestation, urging viewers to consider their own responsibility in environmental destruction.
It shows the considerable change to Penan life in the last 10 years and how they also adopt modernity such as television and chemical insecticide but stay rooted to their traditional nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life.
Parry urged the world to learn from indigenous tribes and consider changing its consumption patterns and lifestyles to embrace sustainability.
“By our innate predilections, humans find and accept popular narratives as a way of life.
“The narrative of power, money or religion has the same effect on us as egalitarianism has on the Penan people,” he added.