DANGER AND
RESPONSE
CHAPTER 7
Constructive Paranoia
Attitudes towards danger A night visit A boat accident Just a stick in the ground Taking risks Risks and talkativeness
Attitudes towards danger
On one of my first trips to New Guinea, when I was still inexperienced and incautious, I spent a month with a group of New Guineans, studying birds on a forest-covered mountain. After a week camped at low elevation and inventorying birds there, I wanted to identify the bird species living at higher elevation, so we moved our gear a few thousand feet up the mountain. For the campsite at which we would be based for the next week, I selected a gorgeous location in tall forest. It was on a long ascending ridge at a point where the ridge flattened and became broader, offering lots of gentle terrain nearby in which I could comfortably walk around and watch birds. From a nearby stream, we could obtain water without having to go far. The campsite was at one side of the flat ridge crest, overlooking a steep drop-off into a deep valley over which I would be able to watch soaring hawks, swifts, and parrots. As the place to erect our tents, I chose the base of a glorious giant of a forest tree, with a thick straight trunk covered with moss. Delighted at the prospect of spending a week in such beautiful surroundings, I asked my New Guinea companions to build a platform for our tents.
To my astonishment, they became agitated and refused to sleep there. They explained that the tall tree was dead, so it might fall over on our camp and kill us. Yes, I did see that the tree was dead, but I was still surprised at their overreaction and objected, “It’s a huge tree. It looks still solid. It’s not rotten. No wind could blow it over, and there isn’t wind here anyway. It will be years before this tree falls over!” But my New Guinea friends remained frightened. Rather than sleep in the shelter of a tent under that tree, they declared that they would instead sleep exposed out in the open, far enough away that the tree wouldn’t hit and kill them if it fell.
I thought then that their fears were absurdly exaggerated and verged on paranoia. But as my months of camping in New Guinea forests went on, I noticed that, at least once on almost every day, I heard a tree falling somewhere in the forest. I listened to stories of New Guineans killed by tree-falls. I reflected that these New Guineans spent much of their lives camped in the forest—perhaps a hundred nights a year, or about 4,000 nights over their 40-year expected lifespan. I eventually carried out the math. If you do something that involves a very low probability of killing a person—say, just once in a thousand times that you do that something—but you do it a hundred times per year, then you are likely to die in about 10 years, instead of living out your expected lifespan of 40 years. That risk of falling trees doesn’t deter New Guineans from going into the forest. But they do reduce the risk by being careful not to sleep under dead trees. Their paranoia makes perfect sense. I now think of it as “constructive paranoia.”
My choice of this oxymoronic, seemingly unpleasant term for a quality that I admire is intentional. We normally use the word “paranoia” in a pejorative sense, to include greatly exaggerated and baseless fears. That’s how New Guineans’ reactions to camping under dead trees initially struck me, and it’s true that usually a particular dead tree wouldn’t fall on the particular night that a person chose to camp under it. But, in the long run, that seeming paranoia is constructive: it’s essential to surviving under traditional conditions.
Nothing else that I have learned from New Guineans has affected me as deeply as that attitude. It’s widespread in New Guinea, and reported in many other traditional societies around the world. If there is some act that carries a low risk each time, but if you’re going to do it frequently, you had better learn to be consistently careful if you don’t want to die or become crippled at a young age. That’s an attitude that I’ve learned to adopt towards the low-risk but frequent hazards of American life, such as driving my car, standing in the shower, climbing a ladder to change a light bulb, walking up and down stairs, and walking on slippery sidewalks. My cautious behavior drives crazy some of my American friends, who consider it ridiculous. The Westerners who most share my constructive paranoia are three friends whose lifestyle made them, too, alert to the cumulative hazard of repeated low-risk events: one friend who piloted small airplanes, another who was an unarmed policeman on the streets of London, and a third who floats rubber rafts down mountain streams as a fishing guide. All three learned from examples of less cautious friends who were eventually killed after years of that job or activity.
Of course, not just New Guinea life but also Western life has its dangers, even if one isn’t a pilot, bobby, or river guide. But there are differences between the perils of modern Western life and of traditional life. Obviously, the types of dangers are different: cars and terrorists and heart attacks for us, lions and enemies and falling trees for them. More significantly, the overall level of danger is much lower for us than for them: our average lifespan is double theirs, meaning that the average per-year risk that we face is only about half as great. The other significant difference is that the effects of many or most accidents that we Americans suffer can be repaired, whereas accidents in New Guinea are much more likely to prove crippling or fatal. On the sole occasion when I became incapacitated and unable to walk in the United States (from slipping on an icy Boston sidewalk and breaking my foot), I hobbled to a nearby pay phone to call my physician father, who picked me up and took me to a hospital. But when I injured my knee in the interior of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island and became unable to walk, I found myself stranded 20 miles inland from the coast, without any means to obtain outside help. New Guineans who break a bone can’t get it set by a surgeon and are likely to end up with an improperly set bone that leaves them permanently impaired.
In this chapter I shall describe three incidents that befell me in New Guinea, and that illustrate constructive paranoia or the lack of it. At the time of the first incident, I was too inexperienced even to recognize signs of mortal danger nearby: I was operating as a normal Westerner, but in a traditional world that required a different mind-set. In the next event, over a decade later—the one that finally taught me to embrace constructive paranoia—I was forced to acknowledge that I had made a mistake that nearly cost me my life, while another, more cautious man facing the same choice at the same time didn’t make my mistake and thus didn’t experience the trauma of coming close to death. In the remaining incident, yet another decade later, I was with a New Guinea friend who reacted with constructive paranoia to a seemingly inconsequential detail that I had overlooked. He and I were never able to decide whether the apparently innocent stick on the ground that my friend spotted really did mark the presence of hostile people (as my friend feared), but I was impressed by his cautious attention to minutiae. In the following chapter I’ll discuss the types of danger faced by traditional societies, and the ways in which people estimate, misestimate, and deal with danger.
A night visit
One morning, I set out from a large village with a group of 13 New Guinea Highlanders to reach an isolated small village several days’ walk away. The region was in the foothill altitudinal zone with New Guinea’s lowest population densities, below the elevation of the densely populated Highland valleys suitable for intensive cultivation of sweet potatoes and taro, above the lowland elevations where sago palms grow well and fresh-water fish are plentiful, and in the altitudinal range with the highest incidence of cerebral malaria. I was told before setting out that our journey would take about three days, and that we would be constantly in forests that were completely uninhabited. The whole region had a very sparse population and had come only a few years previously under government control. Warfare had been occurring until recently, and endocannibalism (eating of one’s dead relatives) was reported as still being practised. Some of my New Guinea companions were local, but most of them came from another district of the Highlands and knew nothing about this district.
The first day’s
walk was not bad. Our route wound around the slopes of a mountain, gradually gained in elevation to cross a ridge, and then began to descend again along the course of the river. But the second day was one of the most grueling hikes of my career in New Guinea. It was already drizzling when we broke camp at 8:00 A.M. There was no trail: instead, we waded along a mountain torrent, climbing up and down over huge slippery boulders. Even for my New Guinea friends, accustomed to rugged Highland terrain, the route was a nightmare. By 4:00 P.M. we had descended over 2,000 vertical feet along the river and were exhausted. We pitched camp in the rain, erected our tents, cooked our rice and tinned fish for dinner, and went to sleep while the rain continued.
The details of the layout of our two tents are relevant for understanding what happened during that night. My New Guinea friends slept under a large tarpaulin stretched over a central raised horizontal ridge-pole, and pulled down taut to the ground along both sides parallel to the ridge-pole, like an inverted V in cross-section. The tarpaulin’s two ends were open; one could walk into or out of the tarpaulin at its front and back ends, and the ridge-pole was high enough that one could stand up under the tarpaulin’s center. My own tent was a bright green Eureka pup-tent stretched over a light metal frame, and with a large front door flap and a small rear window flap both of which I zipped closed. My tent’s front door faced one of the two open ends (the “front”) of the New Guineans’ large tarpaulin, and was just a few yards away from it. Anyone walking out of the front of their tarpaulin would come first to the closed front door of my tent, then walk along the side of my tent, and finally pass my tent’s rear with its closed window flap. But to someone unfamiliar with Eureka pup-tents, it would have been unclear whether the actual entrance after unzipping a flap was the closed front door or the rear with a closed window. I slept with my head towards the rear and my feet towards the front door, but I would have been invisible from the outside of my tent because its walls were not transparent. The New Guineans kept a fire going inside their tarpaulin for warmth.
All of us quickly fell asleep, worn out from the long grueling day. I have no idea how much later it was that I became awakened by a soft sound of footsteps and a sense of the ground shaking from someone walking nearby. The sound and motion stopped, evidently because the unknown person was standing near the rear of my tent, near my head. I assumed that one of my 13 companions had just come out of the large tarpaulin shelter to urinate. It did seem strange that he had not gone out of the rear of the tarpaulin away from my tent for privacy, but had instead turned towards my tent, walked along its length, and was now standing at my tent’s rear and near my head. But I was sleepy, attributed no significance to where he had chosen to urinate, and dozed off. Within a short time I was awakened again, this time by voices from the shelter of the New Guineans who were talking, and by bright light from their fire, which they had stirred up. That wasn’t unusual; New Guineans often do wake up periodically during the night and talk. I called out asking them to be more quiet, and I went back to sleep. And that was the entirety of the apparently meaningless incident at night, as I experienced it.
When I woke up the next morning, I opened the front door flap of my tent and greeted the New Guineans under their tarpaulin a few yards away, starting to cook breakfast. They told me that their voices and their stirring up the fire at night had been caused by several of them being awakened by the presence of a strange man standing at the open front of their tarpaulin. When the stranger realized that he was being watched, he made a gesture, visible in the firelight, of stretching out one arm horizontally and letting its hand droop downwards at the wrist. At that gesture, some of the New Guineans called out in fear (for reasons that I shall mention in a moment). Their calling out was what I had sleepily mistaken as the noise of their talking during the night. At the sound of their calling, others of the New Guineans awoke and sat up. The strange man then ran off into the rainy night. My New Guinea friends pointed out some barefoot footprints in the wet mud where the man had stood. But I don’t recall my friends saying anything that alarmed me.
It was indeed unexpected to me that anyone would come at night in the rain to our camp in the middle of an uninhabited stretch of forest. However, I had become accustomed to the fact that things unexpected to me did often happen in New Guinea, and I had never felt that I was in any personal danger from any New Guinean. After we finished breakfast and folded up our tents, we resumed our journey, now on its third day. Our route climbed out of the awful river bed and followed a broad clear path through beautiful tall forests along the river bank. I felt as if I were walking in awe inside a high Gothic cathedral. I strolled on alone ahead of my New Guinea friends, in order to identify birds that hadn’t already been disturbed by them, and to enjoy in solitude the magical cathedral-like forests. It was only when I finally reached a larger river below the village that was our final destination that I sat down to wait for my friends to catch up. It turned out that I had walked a long distance ahead of them.
Our 10-day stay at the isolated small village was so interesting in its own way that I forgot about the incident of the prowler at night. When it finally became time to return to the large village from which we had set out, the local men among my 13 New Guinea friends proposed that we return by a completely different route, which they said bypassed the awful wading in a river. That new route proved to be a good dry trail going through forests. It took us only two days to get back to the large village, instead of the agonizing three days of our march out. I still have no idea why our local guides had inflicted the route with the grueling wading of the stream on themselves, as well as on the rest of us.
Subsequently, I recounted our adventures to a missionary who had been living in the area for several years, and who had also visited the isolated small village. In the following years I came to know better two of the local men who had been our guides on that trek. From the accounts of the missionary and of the two New Guineans, I learned that the prowler at night was well known in that district—as a crazy, dangerous, powerful sorcerer. He once threatened to kill the missionary with his bow and arrow, and once actually tried to do so with a spear at the same isolated village that I had visited, laughing as he jabbed his spear in earnest. He was reported to have killed numerous local people, including two of his wives, and also his eight-year-old son just because the boy ate a banana without his father’s permission. He behaved like a true paranoid, unable to distinguish reality from his imagination. Sometimes he lived in a village with other people, but at other times he lived alone in the area of forest where we had camped on that night, and where he had killed women who made the mistake of going there.
Despite the man being so obviously crazy and dangerous, local people didn’t dare interfere with him, because they feared him as a great sorcerer. The gesture that he made at night when detected by my New Guinea friends—outstretched arm with drooping wrist—conventionally symbolizes to New Guineans in that area the cassowary, New Guinea’s largest bird, which is believed to be actually a powerful magician who can turn himself into a bird. The cassowary is flightless, a distant relative of ostriches and emus, weighs 50 to 100 pounds, and terrifies New Guineans because it has stout legs with razor-sharp claws that it uses to disembowel dogs or people when attacked. That extended-arm, drooping-wrist gesture made by the sorcerer at night is believed to work powerful magic, and it mimics the shape of the neck and head of the cassowary held in the position when the bird is about to attack.
What was that sorcerer intending to do when he came into our camp that night? While your guess is as good as mine, his aims were probably not friendly. He knew or could infer that the green pup-tent would have a European inside it. As for why he came to the back rather than to the front door of my tent, I guess that that was either because he wanted not to be detected by the New Guineans in their shelter facing my tent’s front door as he tried to get into my tent, or because he was confused by my tent’s structure and mistook the back (with its small window flap zipped c
losed) for the front with its large door. If I had had the experience of New Guinea then that I do now, I would have practised constructive paranoia and screamed to my nearby New Guinea friends as soon as I heard and felt footsteps near the rear of my tent. I certainly wouldn’t have walked alone, far ahead of my New Guinea friends, on the next day. In retrospect, my behavior was stupid and put me in danger. But I didn’t know enough then to read the warning signs and to exercise constructive paranoia.
A boat accident
In the second incident, my New Guinea friend Malik and I were on an island off Indonesian New Guinea and wanted to get ourselves and our gear to the New Guinea mainland, separated from the island by a strait a dozen miles wide. Around 4:00 P.M. on a clear afternoon, slightly more than two hours before sunset, we joined four other passengers in a wooden canoe about 30 feet long, driven by two outboard motors mounted on the stern and with a crew of three young men. The four other passengers were not New Guineans: instead, they were a Chinese fisherman working on the New Guinea mainland, plus three men from the Indonesian islands of Ambon, Ceram, and Java respectively. The canoe’s cargo and passenger space was covered by a plastic awning about four feet high, stretched over a framework, loosely attached to each side of the canoe, and extending from about 4 feet in front of the stern forward to 10 feet behind the canoe’s prow. The three crew sat in the stern at the motors, and Malik and I sat just in front of them, facing the rear. With the awning over us and at our sides, there was little outside that we could see. The four other passengers sat at our backs, towards the canoe’s prow.
The canoe set off, and the crew soon had the engines up to full speed, through waves several feet high. A little water splashed into the canoe under the awning, then a little more, and the other passengers began groaning good-naturedly. As some more large quantities of water splashed in, one of the crew began bailing water immediately in front of me out the loose sides of the awning. More large quantities of water came in, soaking the luggage stored towards the front of the canoe. I put my binoculars for protection inside the small yellow knapsack that I was holding in my lap, and that contained my passport, money, and all of my field notes wrapped inside a plastic bag. Over the roar of the engines and the crashing of the waves, Malik and the other passengers began to shout loudly, now no longer good-naturedly, at the driver, telling him to slow down or turn back. (This and all the rest of the conversations during this whole incident were in the Indonesian language, the official language and the lingua franca of Indonesian New Guinea.) But he didn’t slow down, and more water splashed in. The accumulated weight of water was now causing the canoe to ride so low that water began pouring in over the sides.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 30