No scholar has claimed that Kaulong widow strangling was in any way beneficial to Kaulong society or to the long-term (posthumous) genetic interests of the strangled widow or her relatives. No environmental scientist has recognized any feature of the Kaulong environment tending to make widow strangling more beneficial or understandable there than on New Britain’s northern watershed, or further east or west along New Britain’s southern watershed. I don’t know of other societies practising ritualized widow strangling on New Britain or New Guinea, except for the related Sengseng people neighboring the Kaulong. Instead, it seems necessary to view Kaulong widow strangling as an independent historical cultural trait that arose for some unknown reason in that particular area of New Britain, and that might eventually have been eliminated by natural selection among societies (i.e., through other New Britain societies not practising widow strangling thereby gaining advantages over the Kaulong), but that persisted for some considerable time until outside pressure and contact caused it to be abandoned after about 1957. Anyone familiar with any other society will be able to think of less extreme traits that characterize that society, that may lack obvious benefits or may even appear harmful to that society, and that aren’t clearly an outcome of local conditions.
Yet another approach towards understanding differences among societies is to recognize cultural beliefs and practices that have a wide regional distribution, and that spread historically over that region without being clearly related to the local conditions. Familiar examples are the near-ubiquity of monotheistic religions and non-tonal languages in Europe, contrasting with the frequency of non-monotheistic religions and tonal languages in China and adjacent parts of Southeast Asia. We know a lot about the origins and historical spreads of each type of religion and language in each region. However, I am not aware of convincing reasons why tonal languages would work less well in European environments, nor why monotheistic religions would be intrinsically unsuitable in Chinese and Southeast Asian environments. Religions, languages, and other beliefs and practices may spread in either of two ways. One way is by people expanding and taking their culture with them, as illustrated by European emigrants to the Americas and Australia establishing European languages and European-like societies there. The other way is as the result of people adopting beliefs and practices of other cultures: for example, modern Japanese people adopting Western clothing styles, and modern Americans adopting the habit of eating sushi, without Western emigrants having overrun Japan or Japanese emigrants having overrun the U.S.
A different issue about explanations that will recur frequently throughout this book is the distinction between the search for proximate explanations and the search for ultimate explanations. To understand this distinction, consider a couple consulting a psychotherapist after 20 years of marriage, and now intending to get divorced. To the therapist’s question, “What suddenly brings you to see me and seek divorce after 20 years of marriage?,” the husband replies: “It’s because she hit me hard in the face with a heavy glass bottle: I can’t live with a woman who did that.” The wife acknowledges that she did indeed hit him with a glass bottle, and that that’s the “cause” (i.e., the proximate cause) of their break-up. But the therapist knows that bottle attacks are rare in happy marriages and invite an inquiry about their own cause. The wife responds, “I couldn’t stand anymore all his affairs with other women, that’s why I hit him—his affairs are the real [i.e., the ultimate] cause of our break-up.” The husband acknowledges his affairs, but again the therapist wonders why this husband, unlike husbands in happy marriages, has been having affairs. The husband responds, “My wife is a cold, selfish person, and I found that I wanted a loving relationship like any normal person—that’s what I’ve been seeking in my affairs, and that’s the fundamental cause of our break-up.”
In long-term therapy the therapist would explore further the wife’s childhood upbringing that caused the wife to become cold and selfish (if that really is true). However, even this brief version of the story suffices to show that most causes and effects really consist of chains of causes, some more proximate and others more ultimate. In this book we shall encounter many such chains. For example, the proximate cause of a tribal war (Chapter 4) may be that person A in one tribe stole a pig from person B in another tribe; A justifies that theft in terms of a deeper cause (B’s cousin had contracted to buy a pig from A’s father but hadn’t paid the agreed-on price for the pig); and the ultimate cause of the war is drought and resource scarcity and population pressure, resulting in not enough pigs to feed the people of either tribe.
Those, then, are broad approaches that scholars take towards trying to make sense of differences among human societies. As for how scholars have acquired our knowledge about traditional societies, our sources of information can be divided somewhat arbitrarily into four categories, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, and blurring into each other. The most obvious method, and the source of most of the information in this book, is to send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people, and to carry out a study focusing on some specific topic. A major limitation in this approach is that scientists are usually not able to settle among a traditional people until the people have already been “pacified,” reduced by introduced diseases, conquered and subjected to control by a state government, and thus considerably modified from the people’s previous condition.
A second method is to attempt to peel back those recent changes in modern traditional societies, by interviewing living non-literate people about their orally transmitted histories, and by reconstructing in that way their society as it was several generations in the past. A third method shares the goals of oral reconstruction, insofar as it seeks to view traditional societies before they were visited by modern scientists. The approach, however, is to utilize the accounts of explorers, traders, government patrol officers, and missionary linguists who usually precede scientists in contacting traditional peoples. While the resulting accounts tend to be less systematic, less quantitative, and less scientifically rigorous than accounts by scientifically trained field workers, they offer the compensating advantage of describing a tribal society less modified than when studied later by visiting scientists. Finally, the sole source of information about societies in the remote past, without writing, and not in contact with literate observers is archaeological excavations. These offer the advantage of reconstructing a culture long before it was contacted and changed by the modern world—at the cost of losing fine detail (such as people’s names and motives), and facing more uncertainty and effort in extracting social conclusions from the physical manifestations preserved in archaeological deposits.
For readers (especially for scholars) interested in learning more about these various sources of information on traditional societies, I provide an extended discussion on pages 476–481 of the Further Readings section at the back of this book.
A small book about a big subject
This book’s subject is, potentially, all aspects of human culture, of all peoples around the world, for the last 11,000 years. However, that scope would require a volume 2,397 pages long that no one would read. Instead, for practical reasons I have selected among topics and societies for coverage, in order to produce a book of readable length. I hope thereby to stimulate my readers to learn about topics and societies that I do not cover, by consulting the many other excellent books available (many of them cited in my Further Readings section).
As for the choice of topics, I picked nine fields for discussion in 11 chapters, in order to illustrate a spectrum of the ways in which we can use our understanding of traditional societies. Two topics—dangers and child-rearing—involve areas in which we as individuals can consider incorporating some practices of traditional societies into our own personal lives. These are the two areas in which the practices of some traditional societies among which I have lived have most strongly influenced my own lifestyle and decisions. Three topics—treatment of the elderly
, languages and multilingualism, and health-promoting lifestyles—involve areas in which some traditional practices may offer us models for our individual decisions, but may also offer models for policies that our society as a whole could adopt. One topic—peaceful dispute resolution—may be more useful for suggesting policies for our society as a whole than for guiding our individual lives. With respect to all of these topics, we must be clear that it is not a simple matter to borrow or adapt practices from one society into another society. For instance, even if you admire certain child-rearing practices of some traditional society, it may prove difficult for you to adopt that practice in rearing your own children if all other parents around you are rearing their children in the ways of most modern parents.
As regards the topic of religion, I don’t expect any individual reader or society to espouse some particular tribal religion as a result of my discussion of religions in Chapter 9. However, most of us in the course of our lives go through a phase or phases in which we are groping for resolution of our own questions about religion. In such a phase of life, readers may find it useful to reflect on the wide range of meaning that religion has held for different societies throughout human history. Finally, the pair of chapters on warfare illustrates an area in which, I believe, understanding of traditional practices may help us appreciate some benefits that state government has brought us, compared to traditional societies. (Don’t react instantly in outrage by thinking of Hiroshima or trench warfare and closing your mind to a discussion of the “benefits” of state warfare; the subject is more complicated than it may at first seem.)
Of course, this selection of topics omits many of the most central subjects of human social studies—such as art, cognition, cooperative behavior, cuisine, dance, gender relations, kinship systems, language’s debated influence on perceptions and thought (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), literature, marriage, music, sexual practices, and others. In defense, I reiterate that this book does not aim to be a comprehensive account of human societies, that it instead selects a few topics for the reasons given above, and that excellent books discuss these other topics from the perspective of other frameworks.
As for my choice of societies, it isn’t feasible in a short book to draw examples from all small-scale traditional human societies around the world. I decided to concentrate on bands and tribes of small-scale farmers and hunter-gatherers, with less on chiefdoms and still less on emerging states—because the former societies are more different from, and can teach us more by contrast with, our own modern societies. I repeatedly cite examples from a few dozen such traditional societies around the world (Plates 1–12). In that way, I hope that readers will build up a more complete and nuanced picture of these few dozen societies, and will see how different aspects of societies fit together: e.g., how child-rearing, old age, dangers, and dispute resolution play out in the same society.
Figure 1. Locations of 39 societies that will be discussed frequently in this book.
New Guinea and neighboring islands. 1 = Dani. 2 = Fayu. 3 = Daribi. 4 = Enga. 5 = Fore. 6 = Tsembaga Maring. 7 = Hinihon. 8 = Mailu Islanders. 9 = Trobriand Islanders. 10 = Kaulong.
Australia. 11 = Ngarinyin. 12 = Yolngu. 13 = Sandbeach. 14 = Yuwaaliyaay. 15 = Kunai. 16 = Pitjantjatjara. 17 = Wiil and Minong.
Eurasia. 18 = Agta. 19 = Ainu. 20 = Andaman Islanders. 21 = Kirghiz. 22 = Nganasan.
Africa. 23 = Hadza. 24 = !Kung. 25 = Nuer. 26 = African Pygmies (Mbuti, Aka). 27 = Turkana.
North America. 28 = Calusa. 29 = Mainland Chumash. 30 = Island Chumash. 31 = Iñupiat. 32 = Alaska North Slope Inuit. 33 = Great Basin Shoshone. 34 = Northwest Coast Indians.
South America. 35 = Ache. 36 = Machiguenga. 37 = Piraha. 38 = Siriono. 39 = Yanomamo.
Some readers may feel that disproportionate numbers of my examples are drawn from the island of New Guinea and adjacent Pacific islands. Partly, that’s because it’s the area that I know best, and where I have spent the most time. But it’s also because New Guinea really does contribute a disproportionate fraction of human cultural diversity. It’s the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or were only recently influenced by state government. Its populations span a range of traditional lifestyles, from nomadic hunter-gatherers, seafarers, and lowland sago specialists to settled Highland farmers, composing groups ranging from a few dozen to 200,000 people. Nevertheless, I discuss extensively the observations of other scholars about societies from all of the inhabited continents.
So as not to deter potential readers from reading this book at all by its length and price, I have omitted footnotes and references for individual statements inserted into the text. Instead, I gather references in a Further Readings section organized by chapters. The portions of that section providing references applicable to the whole book, and references for this Prologue, are printed at the end of the text. The portions providing references for Chapters 1–11 and the Epilogue are not printed but are instead posted on a freely accessible Web site, http://www.jareddiamondbooks.com. Although the Further Readings section is much longer than most readers will want, it still does not pretend to be a complete bibliography for each chapter. Instead, I select recent works that will offer readers with specialized interests bibliographies of that chapter’s material, plus some classic studies that readers will enjoy.
Plan of the book
This book contains 11 chapters grouped into five parts, plus an epilogue. Part 1, consisting of the single Chapter 1, sets the stage on which the topics of the remaining chapters play out, by explaining how traditional societies divide space—whether by clear boundaries separating mutually exclusive territories like those of modern states, or by more fluid arrangements in which neighboring groups enjoy reciprocal rights to use each other’s homelands for specified purposes. But there is never complete freedom for anyone to travel anywhere, so traditional peoples tend to view other people as split into three types: known individuals who are friends, other known individuals who are enemies, and unknown strangers who must be considered as likely enemies. As a result, traditional people could not know of the outside world distant from their homeland.
Part 2 then comprises three chapters on dispute resolution. In the absence of centralized state governments and their judiciaries, traditional small-scale societies resolve disputes in either of two ways, one of which is more conciliatory, the other more violent, than dispute resolution in state societies. I illustrate peaceful dispute resolution (Chapter 2) by an incident in which a New Guinea child was killed accidentally, and the child’s parents and the killer’s associates reached agreement on compensation and emotional reconciliation within a few days. The goal of such traditional compensation processes is not to determine right or wrong, but instead to restore a relationship or non-relationship between members of a small society who will encounter each other repeatedly for the rest of their lives. I contrast this peaceful form of traditional dispute resolution with the operation of the law in state societies, where the process is slow and adversarial, the parties are often strangers who will never encounter each other again, the focus is on determining right or wrong rather than on restoring a relationship, and the state has its own separate interests which may not coincide with those of the victim. For a state, a governmental justice system is a necessity. However, there may be some features of traditional peaceful dispute resolution that we could usefully incorporate into state justice systems.
If a dispute in a small-scale society is not resolved peacefully between the participants, the alternative is violence or war, because there is no state justice to intervene. In the absence of strong political leadership and of the state’s assertion of a monopoly on the use of force, violence tends to lead to cycles of revenge killings. My brief Chapter 3 illustrates traditional warfare by describing an apparently tiny war among the Dani people of the western New Guinea Highlands. My lengthier Chapter 4 th
en reviews traditional warfare around the world, in order to understand whether it really deserves to be defined as war, why its proportionate death toll is often so high, how it differs from state warfare, and why wars are more prevalent among some peoples than among others.
This book’s third part consists of two chapters about opposite ends of the human life cycle: childhood (Chapter 5) and old age (Chapter 6). The range of traditional child-rearing practices is broad, from societies with more repressive practices to societies with more laissez-faire practices than are tolerated in most state societies. Nevertheless, some frequent themes emerge from a survey of traditional child-rearing. Readers of this chapter are likely to find themselves admiring some but being horrified at other traditional child-rearing practices, and asking whether some of the admirable practices could be incorporated into our own child-rearing repertoire.
As for treatment of the elderly (Chapter 6), some traditional societies, especially nomadic ones or those in harsh environments, are forced to neglect, abandon, or kill their elderly. Others afford their elderly far more satisfying and productive lives than do most Westernized societies. Factors behind this variation include environmental conditions, the utility and power of the elderly, and society’s values and rules. The greatly increased lifespans and apparently decreased utilities of the elderly in modern societies have created for us a tragedy, towards whose amelioration those traditional societies providing their elderly with satisfying useful lives may offer examples.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 4