Pour ceux que ça intéresse et qui sont abonnés à courrier internationl, il y avait un article très frappant, appelé vade retro, sur une tribu isolée au large sur l'ile de la sentinelle du nord, qui refuse vioemment tout contact avec l'extérieur depuis très longtemps.
http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2010/09/09/vade-retrohttp://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/fr/North_Sentinel_Islandhttp://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/goodheart/rep-goodheart.htm"In 1296 or thereabouts, Marco Polo described Andamanese generally as "a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth like those of dogs. They are very cruel, and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon." Historians believe that he based this on hearsay, and did not visit the islands.
One night in 1771, an East India Company hydrographic survey vessel, the Diligent, passed by North Sentinel and sighted "a multitude of lights ... upon the shore." This is the first recorded mention of the island. The surveying party did not stop to investigate, however. In those days, bonfires still beckoned from hundreds of coasts, all over the world. The ship sailed on.
In 1867, toward the end of the summer monsoon season, an Indian merchantman, the Nineveh, was wrecked on the reef off North Sentinel. Eighty-six passengers and twenty crewmen got safely to the beach in the ship's boat. On the morning of the third day, as these survivors sat down to a makeshift breakfast, they were suddenly attacked. "The savages were perfectly naked, with short hair and red painted noses, and were opening their mouth and making sounds like pa on ough; their arrows appeared to be tipped with iron," the Nineveh's captain later reported. (The Sentinelese had probably scavenged the metal from flotsam on the beach, as they apparently still do today.) He had fled at the first shower of arrows and escaped in the ship's boat, to be picked up several days later by a brig bound for Moulmein. The Andaman Islands were now officially part of the British Empire - they'd been settled as a penal colony - so a Royal Navy rescue party was dis-patched by steamer to the site of the wreck. It arrived to find that the Nineveh's passengers had managed to fend off their attackers with sticks and stones, and the savages had not been seen since.
In 1896, a Hindu convict escaped on a makeshift raft from the main penal settlement on Great Andaman Island. He drifted across thirty miles or so of open ocean and landed on the beach of North Sentinel. A search party found his body there some days later, pierced in several places by arrows and with its throat cut. No natives were sighted. After this, the island was left alone for nearly a century.
In the spring of 1974, North Sentinel was visited by a film crew that was shooting a documentary titled Man in Search of Man, along with a few anthropologists, some armed policemen, and a photographer for National Geographic. In the words of one of the scientists, their plan was to "win the natives' friendship by friendly gestures and plenty of gifts." As the team's motorized dinghy made its way through the reefs toward shore, some natives emerged from the woods. The anthropologists made friendly gestures. The Sentinelese responded with a hail of arrows. The dinghy proceeded to a landing-spot out of arrow range, where the policemen, dressed in padded armor, disembarked and laid gifts on the sand: a miniature plastic automobile, some coconuts, a tethered live pig, a child's doll, and some aluminum cookware. Then they returned to the dinghy and waited to observe the natives' reaction to the gifts. The natives' reaction was to fire more arrows, one of which hit the film director in the left thigh. The man who had shot the film director was observed laughing proudly and walking toward the shade of a tree, where he sat down. Other natives were observed spearing the pig and the doll and burying them in the sand. They did, however, take the cookware and the coconuts with evident delight.
In 1975, the exiled king of Belgium, on a tour of the Andamans, was brought by local dignitaries for an overnight cruise to the waters off North Sentinel. Mindful of lessons learned the year before, they kept the royal party out of arrow range, approaching just close enough for a Sentinelese warrior to aim his bow menacingly at the king, who expressed his profound satisfaction with the adventure."
The explorers tramped through the jungle, systematically crisscrossing the small island in search of the natives. They found a network of pathways, and several small villages that looked to have been freshly abandoned, and the skeleton of an aborigine hidden between the buttress roots of a large tree. Portman was impressed by the island's fertile soil and its stately groves of tropical hardwoods. But he did not encounter a single living soul. The Sentinelese simply melted into the forest when they heard the Europeans approach. Finally, after several days, Portman and his men managed to flush out a few stragglers: an elderly couple and some children. In the interest of science, the adults and four of the children were brought aboard the exploring party's schooner and taken back to Port Blair for observation. Unfortunately, Portman later wrote, all the captured Sentinelese "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents." They had remained in British hands long enough, however, for Portman to note their "peculiarly idiotic expression of countenance, and manner of behaving."