Toda threatened as women break out

[sugarimp]

The Toda tribe in India - one of the country's smallest communities - is gradually breaking up as its women marry men from outside. Is this the end for the Toda?The Toda are based in the Nilgiri Hills in southern India, and number around 1,700. While the tribe's men own property and work in agriculture, the women are renowned for their skills and

Comments

[caatinga]

What makes a culture worth saving?

The embroidery seems important, unique, and worth saving. But my notions of progress tell me that if you won't let women out of the cycle of illiteracy and indentured marriage then...maybe you deserve to lose them.

Then again, see all of western colonialism for more on my judgements about what cultures "deserve". I don't know.

[sugarimp]

While it's all nice and dainty and makes for a nice National Geographic coffee table book to see semi naked people living like they were in the stone age, the human population is growing and cultures are going to clash. There's no way to avoid that.

Eventually it's up to the people who belong in those communities to decide which sort of life they want to persue. Do they want to stay in their little village their whole lives, or do they want to see what's outside?

Things like crafts and languages can be preserved because anyone can, technically learn those. What more difficult to preserve are societal laws... but it's not necessarily bad to change the old social laws either. Infact it's often been beneficial to society as a whole.

Besides, social stagnation can lead to stagnant gene pools as well, which is never a good thing.