An anthropologist finds a “living stone-age museum ” On a chilly September night in 1982, three men approached a police
checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line
between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like
ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass. But one of
them was not what he seemed. French Anthropologist Michel Peissel had
disguised himself in garb like that of his two local guides, staining
his face with walnut dye in order to enter a region long forbidden to
foreigners: the Dansar Plain of “Little Tibet,” the no man's land of a
legendary tribe known as the Minaro. Unlike their neighbors in the mountains of Kashmir, the Minaro have
curiously light complexions and sharp, high-cheeked faces almost
European in character. The entire tribe consists of only about 800
people, but these hardy, isolated mountain folk may have a cultural
significance far out of proportion to their small numbers. Some scholars have speculated that they may be survivors of the Dards,
an obscure tribe mentioned in ancient Greek chronicles. Others suspect
that they are descendants of troops left behind by Alexander the Great
on his invasion of India. The most intriguing theory is that their
ancestors were the original Aryans, the prehistoric Indo-European
people whose language and light skin linger on in the speech and
appearance of modern Europeans. Fascinated by this possibility, Adolf
Hitler in 1938 reportedly dispatched one of the Third Reich's racial
experts on a personal survey of the Minaro region. It is said that
Hitler even considered sending a number of blond German women to have
children by these “pure” Aryans. Peissel, 47, a onetime Harvard Business School student who turned to
anthropology after a summer's roaming of Mexico's Yucatn Peninsula, is
convinced that the Minaro are Aryans, but his reports hardly evoke the
image of an Asian master race. In a book just published in Paris called
L'Or des Fourmis , Peissel argues that the Minaro
constitute “a living museum of life in the days of stone-age men.” They
live in adobe huts, erect great druidic stone monuments and center
their livelihoods on the ibex, a wild mountain goat that they hunt with
arrows tipped with the poison wolfsbane . The Minaro also raise sheep and
goats, grow grapes, from which they make wine, and in spite of an arid
climate, plant a little grain. Though white-bearded elders preside symbolically over village
ceremonies, says Peissel, who spent six months studying them, the
Minaro are a matriarchal society. Most married women have more than one
husband. The women dominate the men and slap them around in public. The
principal deities are female, goddesses of fortune and fertility, who
preside over lesser goddesses that reign over time, the hunt and the
village.
