The Iks Reflection

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“The Iks” by Lewis Thomas, is an essay of reflection on the book about the Iks. The Iks is a small tribe that is located in the mountain valleys of northern Uganda. Due to the fact that the government wanted to build a national park, the Iks were forced to move to the poor hillside soil and became farmers. This migration leads to their loss of land and working area. Thus, they do not know how to live without hunting and their life becomes miserable. As a result, they transformed themselves to unattached, brutish creatures. Each of the Iks becomes a self-constituency and treats other badly in order to survive. According to the anthropologist who wrote the book about Iks, the personalities that the Iks have are the same compare to human’s, which we are bad in our inner selves. However, Thomas disagrees with this idea. He thinks that the Iks are not the representatives of humanity of its core. Human are not born to be evil. He states that Iks Parris is the minister of the town; hence, he wants to keep his reputation good in order to make more people admire him. In Act one of the play, people pressure Parris to answer whether there is witchcraft going on. He does not want to tell other people about what he saw because his daughter Betty Parris and his niece Abigail Williams are the members of the witchcraft. It will ruin Parris’s reputation if people know his family members were practicing witchcraft. Parris says “they only thought that was a witch, and I am certain there be no element of witchcraft (143)”. He lies to the people in the town in order to keep his reputation. The living condition of Parris has changed to which he does not need worry about living. In order to fulfill his desire of having a good reputation, he lies to the people. Like the Iks, when Parris’s surrounding changes, he tends to have a different desire and his negative personality was therefore

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