What the World's Last Hunter-Gatherers Have to Say

What is lost when a culture disappears? That's the question at the heart of a new book about the Lamalerans, a tribe of about 1,500 living on a remote, eastern Indonesian island in the Savu Sea. The Lamalerans are one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups: For hundreds of years, they have fed themselves by hunting sperm whales, some of the world's largest mammals, using nothing but small boats and handmade harpoons. But this perilous endeavor—an almost unthinkable feat of coordination, athleticism, and bravery—will probably prove less difficult than resisting the homogenizing forces of the outside world.
 
The journalist Doug Bock Clark spent months at a time living with the Lamalerans to write The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific With a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life. In a conversation for this series, he explained how one Lamaleran saying—an ancient plea for unity—taught him how to tell the story of a tribe with no recorded history, whose ancestral knowledge survives only in the memories of a select few. The saying helped Clark develop the unorthodox interviewing technique he used for the book, which involved speaking with large groups of people at a time—letting individuals correct, refine, and deepen one another's narratives.