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The most immediate tragedy in the loss of knowledge and traditions is for the tribes themselves. They do not always die out, but the soul of their culture withers away. Often left behind are people "who are shadows of what they once were, and shadows of what we in the developed world are," as one Peace Corps volunteer put it. The price is real as well as psychological when native peoples lose their grip on traditional knowledge. At the Catholic mission in Yalisele in equatorial Zaire, for instance, nurses and missionaries have encountered patients brought in with burns or perforations of the lower intestine. Investigation revealed that those afflicted had been treated for a variety of ailments with traditional medicines delivered in suppository form. The problem was not the medicines but the dosages. As the old healers died off, people would try to administer traditional medicines themselves or turn to healers who had only a partial understanding of what their elders knew. This problem is likely to get worse because Western medicines and trained nurses are becoming ever more scarce in Zaire's economically beleaguered society.
In the island nation of Papua New Guinea, in the Coral Sea, jobless people returning to highland villages from the cities often lack the most rudimentary knowledge necessary to survive, such as which rot-resistant trees to use to build huts or which poisonous woods to avoid when making fires for cooking. Many of the youths, alienated from their villages by schooling and exposure to the West, become marauding "rascals," who have made Papua New Guinea's cities among the most dangerous in the world.
The global hemorrhage of indigenous knowledge even fuels the population explosion as people ignore taboos and forget traditional methods of birth control. In many parts of Africa, tribal women who used to bear, on average, five or six children now often have more than 10.
The Young Drift Away
It is difficult for an outsider to imagine the degree to which novel ideas and images assault the minds of tribal adolescents moving into the outside world. They get glimpses of a society their parents never encountered and cannot explain. Students who leave villages for schooling in Papua New Guinea learn that people, not the spirits of their ancestors, created the machines, dams and other so-called cargo of the modern world. Once absorbed, this realization undermines the credibility and authority of elders.