Previously, they harpoon-hunted whales on their tana (a boat with about 8-10 rowers and a harpooner), usually several at the same time, so they wound the whale and keep him by several dispersed boats, so it is unable to capsize any and run away. This made them one of the most communal cultures – only a group can hunt and deliver the whale and only whales have enough meat/fat to sustain the community in the quiet season. Seasonal work, drag-nets to catch smaller fish, including tuna, which is valued say in Japan and gives ways to improve living standards, but abandon the traditional cultures, destroys them very fast. On a volcanic island in the Savu Sea so remote that other Indonesians call it "The Land Left Behind" live the Lamalerans: a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who are the world's last subsistence whalers. They have survived for half a millennium by hunting whales with bamboo harpoons and handmade wooden boats powered by sails of woven palm fronds. But now, under assault from the rapacious forces of the modern era and a global economy, their way of life teeters on the brink of collapse. Amazing. Before reading The Last Whalers, I didn't know of the Lamalerans, how (in)famous they were & how controversial their way of living. I have so many thoughts, many of which I want to share when I've organized it all in my head much better.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.” Me topé con este libro por casualidad en la biblioteca y me llamó la atención, así que decidí leerlo. Los últimos balleneros es una crónica de investigación periodística, aunque narrada como cualquier novela de ficción, en el que el autor nos descubre la vida de los lamarelanos, una tribu de la costa de Indonesia que se resiste a la globalización y al capitalismo. En su crónica, nos da a conocer a algunas de las personas que viven en esta tribu y, a través de sus experiencias, conocemos sus costumbres, su religión, su propio idioma, cultura y su modo de vida. Viven sin luz, sin agua, y sin apenas coches, motos, televisiones, móviles etc. Y su único modo de sustento es el trueque, sobre todo la pesca. Y la caza de ballenas. An immersive and absorbing chronicle that takes the reader deep into the lives of this tribe and is told with a richness of interior detail that renders their lives, and the choices they face, not just comprehensible but somehow familiar... Clark's writing about the ocean and its creatures is superb, so vivid that the reader can feel the sting of salt water up the nose...The magic in this work is Clark's decision to cede the story over to the Lamalerans themselves. In doing so, he captures the drama of the tribe as it attempts to navigate new opportunities that, while enticing, may bring about the extinction of their culture...Whether that culture will, in the end, withstand mounting pressures from the outside remains to be seen. If it doesn't, The Last Whalers will at least document all that has been lost."-- Gabriel Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

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Preserving the old ways and values in a changing world--it is what we all are dealing with, the universal challenge. The stories of the Lamalerans themselves are even more gripping--from a young orphaned whaler waiting for his big break to an aging legendary harpooner struggling to understand his son’s resistance to the traditional way of life. They bravely stand up to the forces of modernization, largely refusing modern technology that would make the hunts easier and far less dangerous, and relying on bartering and gift-giving instead of paper currency. They hold on to the ways of their ancestors, believing that their tradition--however inconvenient--contains their essence, and that by giving it up, they may lose what it means for them to live. The loss of a culture is as permanent as the loss of a life, but rather than one star darkening, it is a whole constellation burning out. It is the disappearance of every soul that has constituted it. It is the end of a past and a future. The Last Whalers is marvelous because readers come to know these people intimately. A young man dreams of becoming a harpooner, the most honored position in their society, yet also dreams of life in the city. A young woman receives an education but committed to care for her elders must return to the village. The elders must preserve the old ways and knowledge while accepting that change is inevitable. To leave the village is to also leave the unity of one family, one heart, one action, one goal. It is hard to walk away from the strength of community to live in isolation with only yourself to depend upon. The author describes their culture and life through some individual members of the tribe who we get to know, and through them the reader sees the stresses of balancing the ancestral ways with the impact of their collision with the modern world and their efforts to adjust to this new world.

A forceful debut...Clark's prose soars...Furthermore, his sympathy for and devotion to his subjects is real: he speaks both Indonesian and Lamaleran and fosters an intimacy that allows him to disappear entirely in the telling of their story. He brings us into his characters' lives, showing us the rhythms of Lamalera and the day-to-day tensions the villagers face...Clark successfully depicts these people in their full human complexity rather than as primitive tropes... His finely wrought, deeply reported, and highly empathetic account is a human-level testament to dignity in the face of loss and a stoic adherence to cultural inheritance in the face of a rapidly changing world."-- Tim Sohn, Outside Magazine Estar de acuerdo con el estilo de vida de este pueblo no es el punto del libro, como sí es dar a conocer una cultura distinta. Y sobre todo, el libro es una crónica que expone como la globalización y el capitalismo está absorbiendo y destruyendo a muchas comunidades con culturas, idiomas y religiones diferentes y propias, la pérdida de riqueza humana que eso supone. Y cómo existe esta que, aún adoptando formas de vida modernas, se resisten a desaparecer para ser un pueblo más dentro del sistema actual y continuar siendo ellos mismos. Y los dilemas y enfrentamientos internos y externos que eso les supone. Lembata, in Southeast Asia, is home to the Lamalerans who arrived there 500 years ago. They settled on the beach under a cliff, surviving by fishing for sperm whale and Manta ray and flying fish. Those who are successful in the hunt share with aging family members and community members. They are one of the few hunter-gatherer societies left in the world. But industrialized society is crowding in on them. Their children are enticed to the cities for education and jobs. Some remain for the air conditioning and running water. Outboard motors and smaller boats are replacing the handcrafted boats propelled by oar and the young carry cell phones. Over the course of three years, the author, a two-time Fulbright recipient, spent months at a time on the island of Lembata with the Lamalerans, a group of hunter-gatherers. Of the 1,500 members of the tribe, 300 are dedicated to hunting sperm whales as well as other marine mammals and fish. Scrupulously leaving himself out of the narrative, Clark focuses on a few individuals to tell the story of the group. Chief among them are two young men who aspire to become harpoonists, the most prestigious—and dangerous—position on the whaling boat. Jon, raised by his grandparents after his parents abandoned him, struggles to find a place in a society that scorns him. Ben, an expert harpooner and boatmaker, finds himself drawn by the attractions of life outside the island. The author also closely follows Ben’s father, Ignatius, and other older builders and masters of the long rowboats whose construction, unchanged for generations, is guided by the “Ways of the Ancestors.” Clark pays less attention to the women of the group, many of whom are sent away to be educated and work elsewhere in Indonesia, sometimes returning to care for elderly family members, though he does devote space to the daily life of Jon's sister Ika, who wants to marry a young man from another tribe. In between the stories of the individuals, the author chronicles the history of the group and the ceremonies he attended in a society that meshes Catholic faith and animistic religion. Perhaps surprisingly, among the chief villains of the narrative are the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, which promote whale-watching rather than whale-killing. The author argues that sperm whales are less endangered than the Lamaleran society. As subsistence whalers, their life is deeply entwined with the natural world, and the rhythms of that world. The description of the hunt, what an honor it is to be the harpooner of the whales, and the knowledge and skills needed to be successful, is compelling. The bravery of the crews, who hunt whales using traditional iron and bamboo harpoons to capture huge sperm whales, is astonishing. For someone from the Western world who is completely separated from the hunter/gatherer society its a brilliant picture of a different way of life.

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Clark’s writing is supple but unshowy. Here’s an account of one harpooner’s encounter with a whale: A gripping story of a community struggling for its very survival, and of the clash between ancient and modern worlds. Clark has a graceful, almost poetic writing style, and his vivid portrait of the Lamalerans and their way of life evokes in the reader a stirring image of a lost world, an ancient society that has somehow stayed virtually untouched by the march of time...until now."-- David Pitt, Booklist Lamalera has also attracted the unwanted attention of conservation groups. In 2017, for example, the Nature Conservancy began working with the Indonesian government on a push to limit the hunt, arguing that the introduction of motorboats meant the Lamalerans had already given up their traditional culture. There is a dark irony here, that having escaped colonialism for five centuries, the Lamalerans could be forced to lay down their harpoons by the neocolonial effects of conservation. “For the Lamalerans, the very idea of conservation is foreign,” writes Clark, and they’re not wrong to be dubious. “History has shown time and again that depriving indigenous people of their livelihoods often leads directly to their end, as they lose their identities within a generation.”

I started the book with high hopes, and the first few chapters were very interesting. The author describes the life of a small group of whale hunters in a remote island in Indonesia. Apart from describing the high-adrenaline whale hunts and everyday life in the village, the author focuses on a couple of families in the village, all interrelated. He introduces us to a handful of people in the village, harpoonists and ship builders, a shaman, patriarchs. And, inevitably, we hear the modern world is encroaching on the village's traditions, with young men preferring to work in the cities and listen to pop music rather than to live on dried whale meat and participate in the old ceremonies. Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal. This was an extraordinary, and difficult, book to read. The Lamalareans are an indigenuous society, located at the far eastern tip of Indonesia. For centuries, their way of life had not changed, and their religion, culture and society were intertwined with the Way of the Ancestors. The Way provided them with all their physical and spiritual needs. And then the modern world intruded.

I was mesmerized in the beginning, but by the time I was halfway through, certain questions started to come up in my skeptical mind. How did the author know so much about what these villagers were thinking? Had they really confided their inmost secret longings, some of them considered shameful, to this foreigner? Had this American journalist really spent a considerable amount of time living with these folks? How come he stayed outside of the story altogether - there was nothing about how he came to live with them, or how he communicated with them. (Disclaimer : I stopped reading the book about half-way through, so if this information was introduced later, I simply didn't get that far.). I found it odd - don't chroniclers of specific populations typically describe how they got to meet them and how much time they spent with them, and who their informants were? The tribe of the Lamalerans (they live on the Lembata island, a remote Indonesian volcanic isle) They settled there around five centuries ago and because the land is quite poor, they cannot survive on agriculture. Therefore, they hunt the largest carnivore on Earth, the sperm whale. The book is based on studies of the author, who lived several years among the Lamalerans, and is structured around telling lives of several tribe members. A large part is about how globalization changes traditional centuries-old attitudes, how modern motors and cell phones can co-exist with belief in wizardry and keeping traditions. It should be noted, that the Lamalerans aren’t a newly discovered group, they were catholicized (while also keeping local beliefs) in the 1920s and say the names of almost all tribe members are usual for Catholics Ignatius or Jon (so they were influenced by the outside world for several generations already). However, during the last 30 years they got access to modern motors and ability to sell their catch for exports, as well as more strict rules about going to school or following other laws. Clark is hardly the first observer to study Lamaleran culture. Anthropologists and documentary filmmakers and others have been here before. But he brings empathy and literary skill to bear. This is a humbly told book, one in which the author’s first-person voice does not intrude. The Last Whalers is an absolutely extraordinary work. Clark’s portrayal of the Lamalerans, a hunter-gatherer tribe inhabiting a remote Indonesian island, is both fascinating and moving. He expertly shows how the Lamalerans hunt the largest carnivore in history, the sperm whale, using centuries-old technology. By having lived amongst the tribe across three years, the author is able to describe the hunts in stunning and dramatic detail, with the insight of someone intimately familiar with not only the mechanics of the process, but also the history, culture, and people of Lamalera.