Primitivity

I once went on a class trip to visit a native village near the city I stay in. After we had gave a few gifts to the village elders and finished exchanging pleasantries, a friend and I started chatting with a native teenage boy.

My friend asked him: "So what do you do in your free time?" He answered "Playstation 2". After all of us had finished laughing, we began chatting about the games we played.

I bet some people would be disappointed at hearing that; they would probably hope that he would say his favorite pastime was kicking a rattan ball or hunting wild animals with a blowpipe. "More authentic" they say. We can observe this tendency to feel that it's better to keep the old ways from the laments we see in comments to magazine articles which feature native tribes in Africa or South America which are modernizing.

Now, if you asked those people who didn't like this trend of modernization to live without electricity or catch their own dinner, I bet they wouldn't be too fond of it. So why should we expect natives to like it too? Just because they are used to it? I am used to being stuck in traffic too, but if someone were to offer me a way to avoid the jam and get to work, I'd jump at the chance.

Same thing with natives and modern amenities. Why would you want to do things the hard way?