Tribal Wives

This show is truly a first of it's kind, it documents the events that occur when British women have decided to temporarily put their lives on hold within the UK and journey to a distant and usually remote location to live for a time with members of various tribes.

This show delivers on it's potential to document in great detail, the every day life of the tribe the British women are sent to; The emotional, physical and spiritual impact upon the British women is plainly obvious to see.

From the initial culture shock the women begin to connect with members of the tribe, even through the use of a translator and some slowly begin to realise that the fast paced lives back in the UK tend to be unnecessarily stressful and complicated, often leaving them feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

While on their journey to a foreign land they seem to connect with something deep and meaningful that only an isolated and technologically deprived tribe could offer, an interdependent and accepting family.

When I saw series one advertised I thought it looked like yet another variant of the ubiquitous 'reality television' format with its central idea of taking an ordinary British woman and seeing how she will cope with a month living with family in a remote tribe. Thankfully I was wrong and it turned out to be a very interesting series which not only shows us cultures alien to own own but also reveals a few truths about ourselves which a conventional documentary would not show. Inevitably the women tend to be overwhelmed by the culture they find themselves immersed but over their time they grow to accept cultural differences and by the time they come to leave both they and the host family are sad to say good bye.

As an example of the sort of things that the women experience the latest episode featured a woman called Charlie going to stay with a nomadic family of goatherds in Turkey. When she gets there she is expected to change into local clothing which means she must wear a head scarf as they are Muslims. She learns that here the women are expected to get up early and do most of the work, something she finds almost as shocking as she is by the fact that the man has two wives. Her reaction to seeing one of the goats being slaughtered was what one would expect from a Westerner... even seeing it on television made me squirm a bit while also serving to remind me that we don't expect to see animals being slaughtered even though most westerners eat far more meat than this family who only killed two goats in the time Charlie was there.

Each episode has similarities but the tribes are all different enough to keep the series fascinating. The BBC did a good job selecting the woman for the series none of the ones I've seen so far appeared to be putting on a performance for the cameras and they all had what it took to live in an alien culture without being so up for it that there were no difficulties. I certainly look forward to seeing later episodes.