A Voice from the Peripheries: The Sentinel Counterculture

Abstract

Counterculture is a social and cultural movement that focuses on gaining freedom and exercising it. The Counterculture Commune of 1968 was short lived, but its filiations still incline in the present. The disillusionment experienced by certain sections of the society with the mainstream culture, led to a cultural revolution in 1960s which resulted in the emergence of Counterculture. One such community refused to conform to the mainstream culture and was infamously branded as the Stone Age Aboriginals by the anthropologists; they are the isolated and uncontacted tribe of North Sentinel island known as the Sentinelese tribe. Sentinelese tribe is a community that tends to be the voice of the peripheral sphere who doesnt want to break its cocoon and come out into the outside world of industry and technology, science and religion, customs and standards of a society. The paper is an attempt at understanding the Sentinelese tribe within the magnified glasses of Counterculture and it also tries to emphasize this aspect in the light of Xenophobia, Tolerance and Exotica.