In 1996 rumours were swirling around the Brazilian state of Rondônia - a wild man was living in the jungle, alone. Govt tribal officials went to investigate, eventually tracking him down.
The story of the Man-of-the-Hole:
The Brazilian Amazon has long been under threat from illegal logging and mining, much of which is in conflict with the tribes who live on the land.
Sometime during the 1970's some such loggers or ranchers attacked the Akuntsu and Kanoé tribes, attempting to clear them off the land. They likely attacked another group at the same time, a people whose name is unknown to us.
When agents of the FUNAI indigenous protection agency went to investigate claims of this wild man, they found a small group of huts which had recently been bulldozed. The nearby Akuntsu had also been reduced to just six people, the rest killed by men with chainsaws and guns.
FUNAI surmised that this lone survivor was the last of his tribe, and he had disappeared into the forest. They tried to contact him, leaving gifts, tracking him. One agent got an arrow to the chest, the message was clear - leave me alone.
Surveys of his movements revealed that he built temporary huts, grew maize and maniac, hunted with a bow and gathered wild fruits and honey.
He also did something curious, along with building spiked-bottom pit traps, he always dug a deep hole inside every hut he ever built. Similar holes were found in his ancestral bulldozed village. Not knowing his name, he was dubbed the Man-of-the-Hole.
In 2007 FUNAI were concerned that he would be smoked out by continual logging and land intrusions, so they legally demarcated 31 sq miles around him as the Tanaru Indigenous Territory.
In 2009 he was attacked by unknown gunmen, presumably wanting him dead to open up the territory. He survived the attack.
He knew he was being watched, and in 2018 FUNAI made the decision to publicise some video of him, along with other uncontacted tribes, as part of an awareness raising campaign.
Almost exactly a year ago today, agents discovered the man dead in his hammock. He had decorated himself with macaw feathers, as if he knew he was going to die, he planned his own funeral as much as he could.
His identity will remain a mystery, as will his language, his people, his culture, his religion. He spent at least 26 years on his own, digging his holes and trying to escape the world.
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The last person tried under a British Witchcraft Act was in 1944, but not for the reasons you might expect
Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium, spent much of her time doing battle with scientists and sceptics over her supposed abilities to vomit up 'ectoplasm' during seances, as well as her photography showing 'spirits' over her shoulder as she communed with the dead
Most of this stuff was amusingly ridiculous, she would regurgitate cheesecloth covered in egg and claim it to be ectoplasm. Her critics made her swallow methylene blue tablets or tried to use X-rays to show up her fraudulence to the public.
Afrocentrism is probably unique amongst ethnocentric ideologies for its claims that basically every nation and people everywhere on earth were originally black. A thread:
At this point most people are familiar with this line - that the first Europeans were black.
But this goes all the way. The Anglo-Saxons were black, as were many royals and important figures in English history.
Before there was a Small Boats Crisis in the English Channel there was a Small Boats Crisis in Australia, and before that crisis started there was the Tampa Affair - that time when a Norwegian freight ship carrying Hazara Afghan migrants was boarded by Australian special forces..
On August 24th 2001 the rickety fishing boat, the Palapa, was disintegrating somewhere around 150km north of Christmas Island. Over 400 souls were aboard, mostly Hazara Afghans, with some women and children. They had been battered by storms and now faced sinking into the sea.
The closest vessel was the container ship, the MV Tampa. Responding to an SOS, Australian authorities guided the Tampa to the Palapa using a plane. The migrants were dehydrated, some unconscious and some had dysentery. Captain Arne Rinnan set a course for Indonesia.
Skin whitening cosmetics are an $8 billion a year industry, and going up. Bought predominantly by women, as many as 75% of respondents to surveys admitted to trying to whiten their skin using commercial or DIY products.
Most major companies sell some version of these lotions and creams around the world, with huge customer bases in southeast Asia, Africa, India, and Latin America. Terms like 'glowing', 'brightness' and 'natural fairness' are used along with 'whitening' to market the products.
Adverts point out that fairer skinned women have more successes in life, in their careers, love lives and social mobility. Many are quite blatant about the connection between whiter skin and opportunity.
Some extracts from Edgerton's book Sick Societies concerning the status of women in certain forager and pastoralist cultures.
Edgerton's main point in this book is to question the idea that all traditions and customs are necessarily healthy or adaptive - for instance the widespread habit in many cultures of denying women, even pregnant women, equal access to high quality foods.
There are many rationalisations for making women carry the heavy stuff, but ultimately men don't want to do it.
One of the benefits of multiculturalism is that the NHS has finally woken up to the problem of jinns and the evil eye, a topic they have been neglecting for decades. Here we see an NHS workshop correcting this oversight, helpfully delivered only in Bengali.
Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and other 'Asian Muslims' actually suffer worse mental health outcomes compared to other ethnicities - exacerbated no doubt by our ethnocentric blind spot over black magic and jinn affliction.
Jinn do indeed have like their own children and stuff, which is why we need to break the stigma of visiting a wise man when your mental health is not ok.