Part 4 consists of two chapters on dangers and our responses to them. I begin (Chapter 7) by describing three actually or apparently dangerous experiences that I survived in New Guinea, and what I learned from them about a widespread attitude of traditional peoples that I admire and term “constructive paranoia.” By that paradoxical expression, I mean routinely reflecting on the significance of small events or signs that on each occasion carry low risks but that are likely to recur thousands of times in one’s lifetime, and hence are ultimately likely to prove crippling or fatal if ignored. “Accidents” don’t just happen at random or through bad luck: everything is traditionally viewed as happening for a reason, so one must remain alert to the possible reasons and be cautious. The following Chapter 8 describes the types of dangers inherent in traditional life, and the diverse ways in which people respond to them. It turns out that our perceptions of dangers, and our reactions to them, are systematically irrational in several ways.
The concluding Part 5 comprises three chapters on three topics central to human life and changing rapidly in modern times: religion, language diversity, and health. Chapter 9, about the uniquely human phenomenon of religion, follows straight on from Chapters 7 and 8 about dangers, because our traditional constant search for causes of danger may have contributed to religion’s origins. Religion’s near-ubiquity among human societies suggests that it fulfills important functions, regardless of whether its claims are true. But religion has fulfilled different functions whose relative importance has changed as human societies have evolved. It is interesting to speculate about which functions of religion are likely to be strongest over the coming decades.
Language (Chapter 10), like religion, is unique to humans: in fact, it’s often considered the most important attribute distinguishing humans from (other) animals. While the median number of speakers of a language is only a few hundred to a few thousand individuals for most small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, members of many such societies are routinely multilingual. Modern Americans often assume that multilingualism should be discouraged, because it is supposed to hinder child language acquisition and immigrant assimilation. However, recent work suggests that multilingual people gain important life-long cognitive benefits. Nevertheless, languages are now disappearing so rapidly that 95% of the world’s languages will be extinct or moribund within a century if current trends continue. The consequences of this undoubted fact are as controversial as are the consequences of multilingualism: many people would welcome a world reduced to just a few widespread languages, while other people point to advantages that language diversity brings to societies as well as to individuals.
The last chapter (Chapter 11) is also the one of most direct practical relevance to us today. Most of us citizens of modern states will die of non-communicable diseases—diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, various cancers, and others—that are rare or unknown among traditional peoples, who nevertheless often proceed to acquire these diseases within a decade or two of adopting a Westernized lifestyle. Evidently, something about the Westernized lifestyle brings on these diseases, and we could minimize our risk of dying of these commonest causes of our deaths if we could minimize those lifestyle risk factors. I illustrate these grim realities by the two examples of hypertension and Type-2 diabetes. Both of these diseases involve genes that must have been advantageous to us under conditions of traditional lifestyles, but that have become lethal under conditions of the Westernized lifestyle. Many modern individuals have reflected on these facts, modified their lifestyles accordingly, and thereby extended their lifespans and improved their quality of life. Thus, if these diseases kill us, it is with our own permission.
Finally, the Epilogue comes full cycle from the Port Moresby airport scene with which my Prologue began. It’s not until my arrival at Los Angeles airport that I begin my emotional reimmersion in the American society that is my home, after months in New Guinea. Despite the drastic differences between Los Angeles and New Guinea’s jungles, much of the world until yesterday lives on in our bodies and in our societies. The recent big changes began only 11,000 years ago even in the world region where they first appeared, began just a few decades ago in the most populous areas of New Guinea, and have barely begun in the few remaining still-uncontacted areas of New Guinea and the Amazon. But for those of us who have grown up in modern state societies, modern conditions of life are so pervasive, and so taken for granted, that it’s hard for us to notice the fundamental differences of traditional societies during short visits to them. Hence the Epilogue begins by recounting some of those differences as they strike me upon arriving at Los Angeles airport, and as they strike American children, or New Guinea and African villagers, who grew up in traditional societies and then moved to the West as teen-agers or adults. I have dedicated this book to one such friend, Meg Taylor (Dame Meg Taylor), who grew up in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and spent many years in the United States as her country’s Ambassador and as Vice President of the World Bank Group. Page 468 briefly summarizes Meg’s experiences.
Traditional societies represent thousands of millennia-long natural experiments in organizing human lives. We can’t repeat those experiments by redesigning thousands of societies today in order to wait decades and observe the outcomes; we have to learn from the societies that already ran the experiments. When we learn about features of traditional life, some of them are ones that we feel relieved to be rid of, and that make us appreciate our own societies better. Other features are ones that we are likely to envy, or to view their loss wistfully, or to ask whether we could selectively adopt or adapt them for ourselves. For instance, we certainly envy the traditional lack of the non-communicable diseases associated with the Westernized lifestyle. When we learn about traditional dispute resolution, child-rearing, treatment of the elderly, alertness to dangers, and routine multilingualism, we may also decide that some of those traditional features would be desirable and feasible for us to incorporate.
At minimum, I hope that you will come to share my fascination with the different ways in which other peoples have organized their lives. Beyond that fascination, you may decide that some of what works so well for them could also work well for you as an individual, and for us as a society.
* The terminology that has been applied to New Guinea is confusing. Throughout this book, I use the term “New Guinea” to refer to the island of New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island after Greenland, lying near the equator just north of Australia (page 26). I refer to the island’s diverse indigenous peoples as “New Guineans.” As a result of accidents of 19th-century colonial history, the island is now divided politically between two nations. The island’s eastern half, along with many adjacent smaller islands, forms the independent nation of Papua New Guinea, which arose from a former German colony in the northeast and a former British colony in the southeast and became administered by Australia until independence in 1975. Australians referred to the former German and British parts as New Guinea and Papua, respectively. The island’s western half, formerly part of the Dutch East Indies, has been since 1969 a province (renamed Papua, formerly Irian Jaya) of Indonesia. My own fieldwork in New Guinea has been divided almost equally between the two political halves of the island.
* By the terms “traditional” and “small-scale” societies, which I shall use throughout this book, I mean past and present societies living at low population densities in small groups ranging from a few dozen to a few thousand people, subsisting by hunting-gathering or by farming or herding, and transformed to a limited degree by contact with large, Westernized, industrial societies. In reality, all such traditional societies still existing today have been at least partly modified by contact, and could alternatively be described as “transitional” rather than “traditional” societies, but they often still retain many features and social processes of the small societies of the past. I contrast traditional small-scale societies with “Westernized” societies, by which I mean the large modern industrial
societies run by state governments, familiar to readers of this book as the societies in which most of my readers now live. They are termed “Westernized” because important features of those societies (such as the Industrial Revolution and public health) arose first in Western Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, and spread from there overseas to many other countries.
* Throughout this book, I’ll use the word “state” not only with its usual meaning of “condition” (e.g., “he was reduced to a state of poverty”), but also with its technical political meaning of a large society with centralized bureaucratic government, as described below.
PART ONE
SETTING THE STAGE
BY DIVIDING
SPACE
CHAPTER 1
Friends, Enemies, Strangers, and Traders
A boundary Mutually exclusive territories Non-exclusive land use Friends, enemies, and strangers First contacts Trade and traders Market economies Traditional forms of trade Traditional trade items Who trades what? Tiny nations
A boundary
Over much of the world today, citizens of many countries can travel freely. We face no restrictions on travel within our own country. To cross the border into another country, either we arrive unannounced and just show our passport (Plate 34), or else we have to obtain a visa in advance but can then travel without restrictions in that other country. We don’t have to ask permission to travel along roads or on public land. The laws of some countries even guarantee access to some private lands. For instance, in Sweden a land-owner can exclude the public from his fields and gardens but not from his woods. We encounter thousands of strangers every day and think nothing of it. All of these rights we take for granted, without reflecting on how unthinkable they were almost everywhere in the world throughout human history and still are in parts of the world today. I’ll illustrate traditional conditions of land access by my experiences while visiting a mountain village in New Guinea. Those traditional conditions set the stage for understanding war and peace, childhood and old age, dangers, and all the other features of traditional societies that we shall explore in the remainder of this book.
I had come to the village in order to survey birds on the ridge rising immediately to the south. On the second day after my arrival, a few villagers offered to guide me along an established trail up to the ridge crest, where I would pick a campsite for my surveys. The trail climbed through gardens above the village, then entered tall primary forest. After an hour and a half of steep climbing, we passed an abandoned hut in the middle of a small overgrown garden just below the ridge-line, at which the trail of our ascent ended in a T-junction. To the right from the junction, a good trail continued along the ridge-line.
Several hundred yards along that trail, I picked out a campsite just north of the ridge-line, i.e., on the side towards my new friends’ mountain village. In the opposite direction, to the south of the trail and ridge-line, the ridge sloped gently downhill through tall forests traversed by a gully in which I could hear from below the sound of a stream. I was delighted to have found such a beautiful and convenient site, at the highest local elevation and thus with the best chance of locating high-altitude bird species, offering easy access to gentle terrain good for bird-watching, as well as a nearby source of water for drinking, cooking, washing, and bathing. And so I proposed to my companions that, on the following day, I move up to the campsite and spend a few nights there along with two men to point out birds and to maintain the camp.
My friends nodded in agreement until I came to the mention of just two men staying in camp with me. At that point they shook their heads and insisted that this was a dangerous area, and that my camp had to be protected by many armed men. What a dreadful prospect for a bird-watcher! If there were many people, they would inevitably make noise, talk constantly, and scare birds away. Why, I asked, did I need such a large entourage, and what was so dangerous about this beautiful and innocent-looking forest?
The prompt answer: at the base of the ridge’s far side (its south side) were villages of bad people referred to as river people, enemies of my mountain friends. River people killed mountain people mainly by poison and sorcery, not by fighting openly with weapons. But the great-grandfather of one young mountain person had been shot and killed with arrows as he was sleeping in his garden hut some distance from the mountain village. The oldest man present during our conversation recalled seeing, as a child, the great-grandfather’s body with the arrows still in him after he had been brought back to the village, and recalled people crying over the body, and his own fear.
Would we have the “right,” I wondered, to camp on the ridge? The mountain people replied that the ridge-line itself formed the boundary between their own territory on the ridge’s north slope and the territory of the bad river people on the south slope. But the river people claimed some of the mountain people’s land beyond the ridge-line on the north side. Did I remember that abandoned hut and the overgrown garden just below the ridge-line? my friends asked. That hut and garden had been made by the evil river people, as a way of asserting their claim to land on the north side as well as on the south side of the ridge-line.
From my previous unpleasant experiences over perceived territorial trespassing in New Guinea, I realized that I had better take this situation seriously. Anyway, regardless of how I might assess the danger myself, the mountain people weren’t going to let me camp on that ridge without a strong escort. They demanded that I be accompanied by 12 men, and I responded with a proposal of 7 men. We ended up “compromising” between 12 and 7: by the time that our camp was established, I counted about 20 men staying in camp, all armed with bows and arrows, and joined by women to do cooking and to fetch water and firewood. Furthermore, I was warned not to step off the ridge-line trail into that nice-looking forest on the gentle south slope. That forest unequivocally belonged to the river people, and it would cause big trouble, really big trouble, if I were caught trespassing there, even if just to watch birds. Also, the mountain women in our camp couldn’t fetch water from the nearby gully on the south slope, because that would constitute not only trespass but also removal of valuable resources, for which a compensation payment would be due if the matter could be settled amicably at all. Instead, the women walked every day all the way back down to the village and carried 20-liter water containers 1,500 vertical feet uphill to our campsite.
On my second morning in camp there was some heart-pounding excitement that taught me how territorial relations between mountain people and river people were more complicated than just black-and-white claims of complete mutual exclusion from each other’s land. With one of the mountain men I went back to the trail T-junction and continued left along the ridge-line to clean up an old trail that had become overgrown. My mountain companion didn’t seem worried about our being there, and I figured that, even if river people found us there, they shouldn’t object to our standing on the ridge-line as long as we didn’t stray over to their side. But then we heard voices coming uphill from the south side. Uh-oh! River people!! If they carried on uphill as far as the ridge-line and T-junction, they would see the signs of fresh trail clearance and track us down, we’d be trapped there, they might consider us as violating their territory, and who knew what action they would take.
I listened anxiously and tried to follow the movements of the voices and estimate their location. Yes, they were indeed ascending towards the ridge-line from their side. Now, they must be at the T-junction, where they couldn’t fail to notice the signs of our fresh trail. Were they coming after us? I kept following the voices as they seemed to get louder, over the noise of my heart-beats throbbing in my ears. But then the voices didn’t come closer; they were definitely growing fainter. Were they returning towards the south side and the river people’s village? No! They were descending the north side towards our mountain village! Incredible! Was this a war raid? But there seemed to be only two or three voices, and they were talking loudly: hardly what one would expect from a stealthy raiding party.
There was nothing to worry about, explained my mountain companion; everything was really OK. We mountain people (he said) acknowledge the right of river people to descend our trail peacefully to our village, and then to walk from there to the coast in order to trade. River people aren’t permitted to get off the trail in order to gather food or cut wood, but just walking on the trail is OK. What’s more, two river men had actually married mountain women and resettled in the mountain village. That is, there wasn’t pure enmity between the two groups, but instead a tense truce. Some things were permitted and other things were forbidden by common consent, while still other things (such as land ownership at the abandoned hut and garden) were still in contention.
Two days later, I hadn’t heard voices of river people again nearby. I still hadn’t seen a river person and had no idea what they looked like and how they dressed. But their village was close enough that I once heard the sound of drums in their village coming up from the south watershed at the same time as I could hear faintly the sounds of shouting far below from the mountain village on the north watershed. As my mountain guide and I were walking back towards our campsite, we were making silly jokes with each other about what we would do to a river person if we caught one there. Suddenly, just as we turned a corner in the trail and were about to enter our camp, my guide stopped joking, raised his hand to his mouth, and warned me in a hushed voice, “Sh-h-h! River people!”
There, in our camp, was a group of our familiar mountain companions, talking with six people whom I had never seen before: three men, two women, and one child. There, at last, I saw the dreaded river people! They were not the dangerous monsters that I had been unconsciously imagining, but instead normal-looking New Guineans, no different from the mountain people who were my hosts. The river child and the two women were completely unintimidating. The three men carried bows and arrows (as did all the mountain men as well) but were wearing T-shirts and not looking as if they were dressed for war. The conversation between the river people and the mountain people seemed friendly and free of tension. It turned out that this group of river people was traveling down to the coast and had made a point of visiting our camp, perhaps just to make sure that their peaceful intent didn’t get misinterpreted and that we didn’t attack them.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 5