Tawai: A Voice from the Forest

10/4/2017

There's a lot to cover here. Bruce Parry's latest foray into tribal exploration goes further than the usual appeals to civilisation's lost sense of unity with the world. Don't get me wrong, it's there, making up the titular theme (Tawai literally translates to a relationship with nature), and categorising, for the first half or so, the film's primary message. But thereafter Parry takes an interesting turn, focusing on the psychological and sociological aspects of certain tribes in Borneo and the Amazon. Parry's thesis is that after the invention of agriculture sometime in the neolithic, and the subsequent abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, human psychology, specifically the way we perceive and relate to the world around us, changed forever. Parry uses these nomadic tribes, still