Snowshoes and Solitude

Well, Les Stroud (Survivorman) recently released this on DVD finally instead of just VHS and so of course, it is now available to download via torrent.

I found it really inspiring and recommend it to every member of this forum. They took some cool footage, some that’s quite artistic even. Despite this they pull no punches when talking about their (almost) year living primitive in the Canadian wilderness.

Spoilers ?!
They spent over a year making all the tools and equipment they would need with primitive skills before they left. The main thing that takes away from the authenticity is that they had their ‘natural foods’ of beaver, moose, berries, maple syrup etc, air-dropped in every few months. They did fish I think, but I’m not sure how successful it was or how much food they hunted or gathered. And even with all this they seemed to struggle under the work load of shelter, fire, cooking, staying alive although the Giardia parasite from their water source would not have helped, this bug has seriously hospitalised some people over here. There is also a part that reminds you of the appalling high mortality rates of pregnant women suffered pre modern medicine, and other parts that remind you of the importance of friends and family and that most people can’t just run away and escape this. I wonder how they would have managed if they needed to take care of children and/or obtain their own food. It seems this reinforces the opinion around here that you really need a small tribe of people if your going to successfully live truly primitively. The nude canoeing scenes made me lol, and they really did fit my image of what Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers looked like thousands of years ago.

Anyway, buy it! (or download it if your unemployed/studying like me).

I feel the need to point out that in hunter/gatherer societies, this isn’t the case. Many of the complications that would lead to death during childbirth in, for instance, Medieval Europe were caused by civilized circumstances, such as poor, grain based diet. There are many, many recorded cases of women in indigenous societies basically just squatting the baby out and going about their business again.

Let’s avoid the use of terms like “pre modern medicine”, which implies progressivism. All medicines are ethnomedicines.

He’s that survivor dude that’s always hungry right?

[quote=“incendiary_dan, post:2, topic:1335”][quote author=Ulverston link=topic=1416.msg14691#msg14691 date=1235477157]
There is also a part that reminds you of the appalling high mortality rates of pregnant women suffered pre modern medicine,
[/quote]

I feel the need to point out that in hunter/gatherer societies, this isn’t the case. Many of the complications that would lead to death during childbirth in, for instance, Medieval Europe were caused by civilized circumstances, such as poor, grain based diet. There are many, many recorded cases of women in indigenous societies basically just squatting the baby out and going about their business again.

Let’s avoid the use of terms like “pre modern medicine”, which implies progressivism. All medicines are ethnomedicines.[/quote]

I had a feeling someone would rebutt that comment, do you have any data to back it up though? Heres my reference

I have no problem using the terms like modern, meaning new, or western medicine. what do you call it?

Hmm are you thinking of Bear Grylls? I havnt watched either one for a while.

Have you read the Thirty Theses yet? I point especially to these:

http://anthropik.com/2006/01/thesis-22-civilization-has-no-monopoly-on-medicine/
http://anthropik.com/2006/01/thesis-25-civilization-reduces-quality-of-life/

Aside from that, the ethnographic accounts of groups like the San give such examples, as well as a handful of recent studies concerning diet and childbirth (I’ll let Google find those for you).

[quote=“Ulverston, post:4, topic:1335”]Heres my reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_death#Maternal_Mortality_Ratio_.28MMR.29[/quote]

That link says so little it practically says nothing. It’s, at best, a comparison of civilized medicine and crappier civilized medicine. It includes very little about the role of diet, as well as not saying anything at all about traditional hunter gatherers (not surprisingly, as even the San I mentioned are now eating civilized diets for the most part).

Current Western medicine works as a descriptor. I believe Allopathic is also an acceptable term.

[quote=“incendiary_dan, post:5, topic:1335”][quote author=Ulverston link=topic=1416.msg14773#msg14773 date=1235546979]
I had a feeling someone would rebutt that comment, do you have any data to back it up though?[/quote]

Have you read the Thirty Theses yet? I point especially to these:

http://anthropik.com/2006/01/thesis-22-civilization-has-no-monopoly-on-medicine/
http://anthropik.com/2006/01/thesis-25-civilization-reduces-quality-of-life/

Aside from that, the ethnographic accounts of groups like the San give such examples, as well as a handful of recent studies concerning diet and childbirth (I’ll let Google find those for you).

That link says so little it practically says nothing. It’s, at best, a comparison of civilized medicine and crappier civilized medicine. It includes very little about the role of diet, as well as not saying anything at all about traditional hunter gatherers (not surprisingly, as even the San I mentioned are now eating civilized diets for the most part).

Current Western medicine works as a descriptor. I believe Allopathic is also an acceptable term.[/quote]

Thanks for the Anthropik links, bookmarked them ages ago but forgot about them. But where did they mention death of mothers in childbirth?

I thought the Wikipedia link was relevant because it compared western countries to countries where the majority of people rely on traditional methods as they have no access to western medicine.

I have tried google and can’t find any information saying otherwise. Got anything bookmarked? Feel free to prove me wrong here.

Maybe this thread needs redirecting to another area? Anyway. . .

I feel compelled to add, some cultures have enjoyed the benefits of highly skilled midwives, who made great use of certain kinds of technologies where modern western medicine severely lacks.

I read a really excellent book recently: Harukor, an Ainu Woman’s Tale by Honda Katsuichi. Thoroughly researched, the whole first half of the book gives thorough background and information on his sources, who he talked to and the lineage of their stories. [Aiko Aoki, a modern healer and midwife of Ainu heritage, provided a lot of the inspiration for the detailed pregnancy and childbirth part of the story.]

The midwife in the story, Auntie Monashir, uses touch and highly developed intuition to determine the size and position of the baby. Through a very slow, gentle, and patient process she assists the baby in turning around from a breech position, then deftly helps the first-time mother guide a very large baby into the world without tearing the mom thru her expert hand manipulation. Afterwards she instructs her helpers how to do blood stops on the arteries in her arms and legs, to stem the blood loss when it became a problem.

Before, during, and after the birth she made prayers and offerings to the hearth, ancestral and childbirth gods. Her main tools were her hands, her intuition, her patience, her cool head, and her confidence in the will of the gods, and the state of mind/spirit that all of the above competencies and her shamanistic relationships with spirit and ancestor put her in.

Also worth noting–the woman giving birth experienced the support of an intact, indigenous, village lifestyle. She had no concerns about whether she’d made the “right” choices, no decisions to make during labor about various interventions, none of the myriad stresses of civilized life on body and soul too numerous to mention here, and had grown up trusting all the people around her attending the birth.

Just sayin’, with all this talk of statistics and mortality rates, what price do we pay for those numbers? What do they even mean? What relationship do we have with death?

I’ve read that many cultures have a different sense of when to bestow “personhood”, that before a certain age, we have a sort of “liquid life” that doesn’t yet belong solidly to this world. When your culture has a whole and healthy way to frame these realities, maybe that matters more than the numbers?