Sea gypsies, Moken people

CBS photo

Our planet is consist of millions of different cultures and ethnicities, the world is full of variety.

In the 60 minutes plus program tonight, there was a story covered a minority group living in Andaman sea, which is along Thailand and Burma. This was one of places which faced the most serious attack of the Tsunami on Dec 26, 2005, but they had no casualties at all during this catastrophe.

It is not difficult to understand, because they are sea gypsies, they are the nomads on the sea. Unlike the so-called 'modern civilized culture' of the outside world, they have the strong intimacy to the ocean, which makes them to get familiar with the sea thoroughly, they develop the strong and sensitive sense towards the disaster. An old Moken man asked everyone including some tourists to flee to the high ground when he saw the coastline receded, he saved many lives.

There is another story of Moken which interested me a lot. All Moken people cannot tell you how old they are. According to the French anthropologist Jacques Ivanoff, in Moken language, there is no conception of 'time', they do not have a concept of 'now' and 'then', '2 years ago' or 'yesterday'. No wonder that I can see the special sanctuary on their faces, because they are so moderate and never need to rush for striving everything within any setting time frame. And for them, the question of how long the does the Earth exist in this Universe seems meaningless.

In their language, the concept 'want' is also absent. Moken people only know what is 'give' and 'take', but it seems that, innately, they do not have lush and desire as we are. Probably that they do not fight for anything, because they do not want a lot.

Here, we can see people shape their language, and how the people are shaped by their language and culture.