>that tribals resist assimilation (if true) shows that there are
>people who do prefer that lifestyle when confronted with the wonders of
>modern technology and their benefits. are these stories untrue? are
>these tribals ill-informed?
It is interesting to note that in the area I am most familiar with - Melanesia - there has been a whole range of initial reactions to contact. (Many of the points below apply Africa and the Americas as well, but Melanesia is particularly good for this sort of argument because the contact history was comparatively benign.) Some people become extremely frustrated that they cannot have access to western material goods, which they almost universally recognise to be far superior (try cutting a tree down with a stone axe). Not everyone made the connection between those tools and white people - since the tools penetrated inland via trading networks many years ahead of the government patrols. Some people were simply indifferent. Others resisted violently.
Here is the catch, though: none of these people were in any position to make a well informed decision about whether or not to enter the world economy. For one thing, they didn't know they had been ensnared. Some of them were already in fact dependent on steel from Sheffield before they even heard of white people. So the problem with Ravi's point is that there is no exact moment of assimilation: economic dependence could preceede political subjugation.
Political subjugation itself was met with a predictable range of rensponses: some people were very upset, others 'adapted' very quickly and attained considerable power.
In many places in the archipelago, encounter with labour 'recruiters' preceeded colonization by decades. It is extremely hard to ascertain what the attitudes of the locals were to being whisked away on a boat and made to work for three years in indenture for a bunch of calicoes and a bush knife. Historical research has suggested everything, from the position that indentured labourers were doubly exploited - by their own kin, who sent them off in exchange for handsome 'beach payments' from the labour recruiters, and by the Queensland sugar mafia - to the somewhat fruity idea that the labour bargain was stacked in favour of the natives. The later is made somewhat less insane by the relative self-sufficiency of the communities. (One thing that makes the later position less than completely convincing is that calicoes and bush knifes (and before legislation was introduced in Australia, guns) were the Melanesian equivalent of ultra-high-tech, and people with these things could get seriously ahead in life. In a place like Malaita in the Solomon Islands, not having a gun could get you seriously dead. So there was a degree of compulsion to work build into the social field as soon as dependence on steel, or worse, guns arrived on the scene)
Returning to the main point... After a few years, when presumably the tribals were in a position to choose, the could no longer. The huge number of what are called "revitalization movements" in the American anthropological literature occur then. These, again, can range from ultra-modernisationist ones, preaching a complete break with pre-contact ways all the way to movements longing for a return to a golden age. One often find myths in the former about some special little secret the whites are withholding, which if known would allow for the immediate conversion of the local area into a huge city, or would allow for the magical creation of goods or factories. In New Britain, people thought that a secret passage of the bible, hidden by malicious missionaries would unlock the millenium - and the people would be able to go to "heaven" which was located in Sydney. Sometimes people would forgo traditional houses for new, Administration-approved ones, burn all their crops and hope that ships full of white man's food (like rice and tinned fish) would arrive. A striking feature of such movements is that even as they rejected traditional culture, such movements sought to reestablish some sort of control over daily life, usually cutting the whites out of the loop by telegraphing the ancestors directly (literally).
A crucial feature of such movements seems to be that western goods are seen as absolutely awesome, but western people are thought to be "rubis", rubbish men who don't keep up their side of the bargain, try to rip people off, don't share, don't give gifts.
So, in a nutshell: contact is not simple by any means, people have a hard time knowing they have been incorporated into the world economy, and they have a wide range of reactions. It is only much later, historically, that we find the emergence of a high regard for traditional 'culture' and traditional way of life. It takes a great degree of objectivization to realise one has a culture. The actual politics of such praise for the traditional way of life, or "Kastom" - what is perceived to be the traditional way of life - are extremely complex. It would , in my opinion, be hard to draw any inference from those to the relative merits of the actual pre-contact and post-contact ways of life.
Thiago