The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

by Jared Diamond

  As for the effects of trade and intermarriage, anecdotal evidence again suggests that a traditional society’s enemies are often the same people as their partners in trade and marriage. As Lawrence Keeley put it, “Many societies tend to fight the people they marry and to marry those they fight, to raid the people with whom they trade and to trade with their enemies.” The reasons are the same as the reasons producing this result for nations: propinquity fosters trade and marriage, but also war; and trade and marriage give rise to disputes for members of small-scale societies, just as for modern states. Among so-called trade relations, neighboring societies may actually exchange goods at prices and exchange rates varying along a continuum from real trade (mutually voluntary exchanges between equally strong parties at fair prices), through “extortion” (unequal exchanges at unfair prices between a strong and a weak party, whereby the weak party gives up goods at low prices so as to buy peace), to raiding (one party “supplies” goods and the other party gives nothing in exchange, whenever one party’s weakness enables the other to raid and thereby to obtain goods for no price at all). Famous “raiders,” such as the Apache of the U.S. Southwest and the Tuareg of northern Africa’s deserts, actually practised a sophisticated mixture of such fair trade, extortion, and raiding, depending on the capacity of their partners at the moment to defend themselves.

  As for marriage between bands and tribes, it often precipitates war for reasons similar to the reasons for wars resulting from trade agreements gone sour. One tribe’s baby girl is promised at birth as a bride to an older male of another tribe, and is paid for, but isn’t delivered on reaching the age of puberty. A bride-price or dowry is owed and initially paid in installments, until an installment is missed. Disputes over quality of “goods” (e.g., adultery, spouse abandonment, divorce, or inability or refusal to cook or garden or fetch firewood) produce demands for refund of the bride-price, but the demand is refused because the alleged quality defect is disputed, or else the payment received has already been traded away or (if it was a pig) eaten. Any consumer, business owner, exporter, or importer reading this paragraph will recognize analogies with the problems facing traders in modern states.

  Frequent results of fighting the people with whom you intermarry are divided loyalties in times of war. Some of the enemy are one’s in-laws and blood relatives. When shooting an arrow or throwing a spear, a warrior must aim, insofar as possible, so as to avoid hitting a relative on the other side. When an Inuit woman moves upon marriage to her husband’s group, if her blood relatives in her natal society then plan a raid against her husband’s people, the blood relatives may warn her in advance to stay out of the way of the raid and not get killed herself. Conversely, if she learns from her husband’s people that they are getting ready to raid her blood relatives, she may warn the latter—or she may not; she may side with either her in-laws or her blood relatives. Similarly, a Fore man who hears that his own clan is planning to attack the village to which his sister has moved in marriage may warn her and then expect a payment from her husband. Conversely, he may hear from his sister that the village into which she has married is going to attack his own village, whose members he warns and who give him presents in gratitude.

  Forgetting Pearl Harbor

  Finally, let’s return to the theme of revenge, with which small-scale societies may seem to us inordinately pre-occupied, giving it as their commonest explanation for going to war. We citizens of modern states commonly ignore how strong can be the thirst for vengeance. Among human emotions, it ranks along with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that vengeful feelings are primitive, to be ashamed of, and something that we should transcend. Our society inculcates those beliefs in order to discourage us from seeking personal vengeance.

  There is no doubt that it would be impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow citizens of the same state, if we did not forswear the right to personal vengeance, and if we did not leave punishment to the state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in most non-state societies. But even for us Westerners who are wronged and who do receive satisfaction from the state, torment remains because of the lack of personal satisfaction. One friend of mine whose sister was murdered by robbers is still angry, decades afterwards, although the state did capture, try, and imprison the robbers.

  We state citizens are thereby left in a bind that we are unable to acknowledge. The state’s insistence on its sole right to punish is essential to our living in peace and safety. But that gain for us comes at a severe personal cost. My conversations with New Guineans have made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes constantly hammer into us the message that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings has to be prevented, acknowledging those feelings should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction: by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused; in some cases, to address the judge or jury (Chapter 2); to meet privately with the criminal, through the restoration justice system (Chapter 2); or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

  Readers who haven’t spent years talking with New Guinea Highlanders may still find themselves wondering: How did these societies come to be apparently so unlike us, and to revel in and reward killing? What sort of warped ogres are they, to talk so unabashedly of their pleasure in killing enemies?

  Actually, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm, not the exception, and that members of those societies espousing those norms are often normal, happy, well-adjusted people, not ogres. What differs in many state-level societies is that we are taught to start embracing those traditional norms suddenly and only at a certain moment (upon a declaration of war), then to jettison them suddenly at a later moment (the conclusion of a peace treaty). The result is confusing: hatreds once acquired are not so easily jettisoned. Many of my European friends born like me in the 1930s—Germans, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Croats, British, Dutch, and Jews—were taught from birth to hate or fear certain other peoples, underwent experiences giving them good reason to do so, and are now still carrying those feelings more than 65 years later, even though my friends were subsequently taught that those feelings are no longer considered nice and are best not expressed unless you feel confident of your listeners’ approval.

  In Western state societies today, we grow up learning a universal code of morality that is promulgated every week in our houses of worship, and codified in our laws. The sixth commandment declares simply, “Thou shalt not kill”—with no distinction between how we should behave towards citizens of our own state and towards citizens of other states. Then, after at least 18 years of such moral training, we take young adults, train them to be soldiers, give them guns, and command that they should now forget all of that former upbringing forbidding them to kill.

  It’s no wonder that many modern soldiers can’t bring themselves in battle to point their gun at an enemy and fire. Those who do kill often suffer long-lasting post-traumatic stress disorder (e.g., about one-third of American soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan). When they come home, far from boasting about killing, they have nightmares and don’t talk about it at all, unless to other veterans. (Imagine how you, if you are not yourself a war veteran, would feel about an American soldier who described to you proudly the personal details of how he killed an Iraqi, or even how he killed a Nazi soldier in World War II.) I
n the course of my life I have had hundreds of conversations with American and European veterans, some of them close friends or close relatives, but not one has ever related to me how he killed, as have many of my New Guinea friends.

  In contrast, traditional New Guineans from their earliest childhood onwards saw warriors going out and coming back from fighting, saw the dead bodies and the wounds of their relatives and clansmen killed by the enemy, heard stories of killing, heard fighting talked about as the highest ideal, and witnessed successful warriors talking proudly about their killings and being praised for it. Remember the Wilihiman Dani boys excitedly jabbing their small spears into the dying Asuk-Balek man, and the six-year-old Wilihiman Dani boys shooting arrows at six-year-old Widaia Dani boys under the tutelage of their fathers (Chapter 3). Of course New Guineans end up feeling unconflicted about killing the enemy: they have had no contrary message to unlearn.

  On reflection, for Americans old enough to recall Japan’s 1941 bombing of our naval base at Pearl Harbor (viewed by us as a treacherous outrage, because it was not preceded by a declaration of war), the intense hatred of enemy people, and the craving for revenge, that traditional people learn from their elders should not feel so remote after all. We Americans of the 1940s grew up in an atmosphere saturated with demonization of the Japanese, who did indeed do unspeakably cruel things to us and to other peoples (think of the Bataan Death March, the Sandakan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, and other such events). Intense hatred and fear of Japanese became widespread even among American civilians who never saw either a live Japanese soldier or the dead body of an American relative killed by the Japanese; my New Guinea friends did see the corpses of their relatives. Hundreds of thousands of American men volunteered to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, often in face-to-face combat, by brutal methods that included bayonets and flame-throwers. Soldiers who killed Japanese in particularly large numbers or with notable bravery were publicly decorated with medals, and those who died in combat were posthumously remembered as heroes who had died nobly.

  Then, less than four years after Pearl Harbor, we Americans were told to stop hating and killing Japanese, and to forget the slogan that had dominated American life: “Remember Pearl Harbor!” Many Americans alive during those years have struggled for the rest of their lives with what they were taught and subsequently told to unlearn—especially if they were directly affected then, for instance through having survived the Bataan Death March, or through having had close friends and relatives who did not come back. Yet those legacies of American attitudes resulted from just four years of experience, for most of us second-hand. Having grown up during the anti-Japanese hysteria of World War II, I find it unsurprising that the Wilihiman Dani became so passionate about killing the Widaia Dani, when those attitudes were inculcated into them for decades by both teaching and extensive first-hand experience. The thirst for revenge isn’t nice, but it can’t be ignored. It has to be understood, acknowledged, and addressed—in ways other than actually taking revenge.

  PART THREE

  YOUNG AND OLD

  CHAPTER 5

  Bringing Up Children

  Comparisons of child-rearing Childbirth Infanticide Weaning and birth interval On-demand nursing Infant-adult contact Fathers and allo-parents Responses to crying infants Physical punishment Child autonomy Multi-age playgroups Child play and education Their kids and our kids

  Comparisons of child-rearing

  On one of my visits to New Guinea I met a young man named Enu, whose life story struck me then as remarkable. Enu had grown up in an area where child-rearing was extremely repressive, and where children were heavily burdened by obligations and by feelings of guilt. By the time he was five years old, Enu decided that he had had enough of that lifestyle. He left his parents and most of his relatives and moved to another tribe and village, where he had relatives willing to take care of him. There, Enu found himself in an adoptive society with laissez-faire child-rearing practices at the opposite extreme from his natal society’s practices. Young children were considered to have responsibility for their own actions, and were allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. For example, if a baby was playing next to a fire, adults did not intervene. As a result, many adults in that society had burn scars, which were legacies of their behavior as infants.

  Both of those styles of child-rearing would be rejected with horror in Western industrial societies today. But the laissez-faire style of Enu’s adoptive society is not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted, and who are allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots, and fires (Plate 19).

  Why should we be interested in child-rearing practices of traditional hunter-gatherer, farmer, and herder societies? One answer is an academic one: children account for up to half of a society’s population. A sociologist who ignored half of a society’s members couldn’t claim to understand that society. Another academic answer is that every feature of adult life has a developmental component. One can’t understand a society’s practices of dispute resolution and marriage without knowing how children become socialized into those practices.

  Despite those good reasons for us to be interested in child-rearing in non-Western societies, it has received much less study than it deserves. Part of the problem is that many of the scholars who go out to study other cultures are young, don’t have children of their own, aren’t experienced in talking with or observing children, and mainly describe and interview adults. Anthropology, education, psychology, and other academic fields have their own ideologies, which at any given time focus on a certain range of research topics, and which impose blinders on what phenomena are considered worth studying.

  Even studies of child development that claim to be broadly cross-cultural—e.g., comparing German, American, Japanese, and Chinese children—are actually sampling societies all drawn from the same narrow slice of human cultural diversity. All of those cultures just mentioned are similar in sharing centralized government, economic specialization, and socioeconomic inequality, and in being very atypical of the wide range of human cultural diversity. As a result, those and other state-level modern societies have converged on a small range of child-rearing practices that by historical standards are unusual. Those practices include systems of school education administered by a state (as opposed to learning as part of everyday life and play), protection of children by police and not just by parents, same-age playgroups (as opposed to children of all ages routinely playing together), children and parents sleeping in separate bedrooms (as opposed to sleeping together in the same bed), and mothers nursing infants (if the infants are nursed at all) on a schedule often set by the mother rather than by the infant.

  A result is that generalizations about children by Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, pediatricians, and child psychologists are based heavily on studies of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) societies, especially on studies of their college undergraduates and children of college professors, and have been inappropriately generalized to the rest of the world. For example, Freud emphasized the sex drive and its frequent frustration. But that psychoanalytic view doesn’t apply to the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, nor to many other traditional societies, where willing sex partners are almost constantly available, but where hunger for food, and preoccupation with the food drive and its frequent frustration, are ubiquitous. Formerly popular Western child-rearing theories that stressed the need of infants for love and emotional support viewed other societies’ widespread practice of breast-feeding infants on demand as “overindulgence,” and classified it in Freudian terms as “excessive gratification at the oral stage of psychosexual development.” However, we shall see that breast-feeding on demand was formerly almost universal, that it has much to recommend it, and that the common modern practice of breast-feeding at infrequent intervals to suit the mother’s convenience is, f
rom a historical perspective, a rare exception.

  Those are academic reasons for us to be interested in traditional child-rearing practices. But there are compelling practical reasons for all of us non-academics to be interested as well. Small-scale societies offer us a vast database on child-rearing. They reveal the outcomes of thousands of natural experiments on how to rear children. Western state societies would not permit us to carry out the experiments that Enu lived through, of either extreme repression or extreme laissez-faire as the norm. While few readers of this book would consider it admirable to let children roll into fires, we shall see that many other traditional child-rearing practices do recommend themselves for consideration. Thus, another reason for studying them is that they can inform our own choices. They may suggest practices different from those now routine in the West, but that we may find appealing when we learn about their consequences for children.