Bruce Parry on life among tribal communities

Yahoo

30-03-2025

Living with some of the world's most remote tribal communities has changed filmmaker and indigenous right activist Bruce Parry.
"I started out as an adventurer," he says. "It was all ego – I wanted to climb the biggest mountain, go and find the tribe that no one's visited to show the world how tough I was."
Across three series of the BAFTA-winning Tribe, viewers have seen Parry taking the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, having his nose pierced with a thorn and taking part in numerous rituals. Now, the series is returning to screens for the first time since 2007.
He was in his mid-30s in the first series of Tribe - and he has just turned 56.
"Initially on the show, my whole remit was to not say anything and to experience," he says.
"Now, I am much more knowledgeable, and that made it harder to be that wide-eyed character.
"I'm not the same guy any more."
Warning: This story contains descriptions of animal cruelty some readers may find distressing.
While trying to understand the communities he visits, Parry sometimes encounters difficult situations.
Among Angola's Mucubal community, for example, custom demands that as a guest, he must sacrifice a goat in a way expected within the group – that is, by suffocating it.
"They do it because they see it as respectful," says Parry. In the episode, he says this is the "most gruesome thing" he has ever been a part of.
"I knew how that was going to feel to some members of the audience," he says, adding that some might see it as "barbaric".
Despite finding it upsetting, he says he was able to get through it by thinking on a global scale.
"If you take these people as a whole, they are not a problem on this planet," he says, arguing, in his view, that by doing things like eating meat "you are contributing to so much more that is potentially negative and impactful on the planet".
In his new three-part BBC series, he lives among three remote communities. He conducts a sacred ritual with Colombia's Waimaha people, lives among Angola's Mucubal community and visits Indonesia's Marapu.
Behind the scenes, Parry's team works hard to make sure their visits are not just what he calls "coming to take away their images [by filming them] and take them home".
Instead, he refers to his time with the remote communities as an "exchange", with his team often trading gifts with the people he visits.
In the past, he has given equipment, from boats to a machine used to grind sorghum - a staple grain in Africa and Asia. And in the show, we see him receive items in return in the form of livestock or other items culturally important to each community.
"Sometimes they just want guns," Parry says, "but as the BBC, we can't quite do that."
He adds: "We haven't ever really approached anyone that isn't really excited for us to come. I've never really had a sense that people didn't want me there."
There may, however, be some wariness based on negative experience with outsiders.
The Waimaha, whose culture was nearly decimated by rubber tappers and missionaries, for example, make Parry sleep away from them until he has gained their trust.
Each episode reveals some of the other outside factors facing each community.
The region of Angola that Parry visits was inaccessible for decades because of landmines left during that country's civil war. And the Mucubal group feel the effects of climate change as the desert they live in gets hotter and drier.
Parry says he brings these issues to our attention after identifying what he saw as a problem with the original series.
"You could be forgiven for watching those first episodes and thinking that these people were living in pristine environments in the middle of nowhere, untouched by the outside world," he says.
"We used to get people saying it was questionable to go to these places and change them by our presence.
"To some degree, we are doing that, but our impact on those people was a drop in the ocean compared to all the other forces of change, the globalisation, the miners, the loggers and the missionaries."
While travelling, Parry says he often finds unexpected similarities in how people live their lives.
The Mucubal, for example, knock out some of their bottom teeth and file down their front two. In the show, Parry says: "The things we do for beauty" - hinting at dental and cosmetic procedures common around the world.
Other communities have very different practices - but Parry thinks we can learn from them. The Marapu live among the graves of their dead ancestors, giving them a unique bond.
"I'm not here to put any group on a pedestal," he says, "we're all human, but there is definitely always something that we can learn from each other.
"And actually, the more different you are, probably the more there is for us to learn."
Now, he says his guiding principle is "the more you can try and see the world through another person's eyes, the more you can reflect on your own life and your own culture.
"And that's where wisdom comes."
Watch Tribe with Bruce Parry on BBC iPlayer
'World's loneliest man' and last of his tribe dies
Modernity creeps into India's tribal communities
Cashmere and climate change threaten nomadic life