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

by Jared Diamond

  Besides multilingualism, child-rearing by traditional societies offers many other model options from which we can choose. All prospective parents should ask themselves which of the following options make sense for them: a period of on-demand nursing insofar as it’s practical, late weaning, maintaining physical contact between the infant and some adult, co-sleeping (get a firm mattress or a crib in your bedroom, and discuss it with your pediatrician!), transporting infants vertically and facing forwards, much allo-parenting, responding quickly to a child’s crying, avoiding physical punishment, giving your child freedom to explore (appropriately monitored!), multi-age playgroups (valuable for both the younger and the older children), and helping your kids learn to entertain themselves rather than stifling them with manufactured “educational toys” and video games and other pre-packaged entertainment. You may find individual adoption of some of these measures difficult if your neighborhood or local society as a whole doesn’t change: when all of the kids on the block have video games and only your house doesn’t, you may find your children wanting to spend all their time in other kids’ homes. But it’s worth thinking seriously about these choices: the independence, security, and social maturity of children in traditional societies impress all visitors who have come to know them.

  Still another thing that we can do individually is to assess realistically the dangers inherent in our lifestyles, and to adopt New Guinea–style constructive paranoia selectively. My New Guinea friends figured out not to sleep underneath dead trees in the jungle, and to pay attention to seemingly innocent-looking broken sticks in the ground—even though the odds are that they could sleep for dozens of nights under a dead tree and ignore dozens of seemingly innocuous sticks without getting into trouble. But they know that, if they adopt those incautious practices hundreds of times, the odds will eventually catch up with them. For most of us Westerners, life’s major hazards aren’t dead trees or sticks in the ground, but they also aren’t terrorists, nuclear reactors, plane crashes, and the other spectacular but realistically insignificant hazards that we obsess about. Instead, accident statistics show that most of us should be constructively paranoid about cars (driven by ourselves or by other people), alcohol (consumed by ourselves or by other people), and (especially as we get older) stepladders and slipping in showers. For each of us, there are some other risks that we should also be thinking about, depending on our particular individual lifestyle.

  Our religion (or lack of religion) is yet another choice that we make as individuals. Many of us go through difficult periods of life when we re-assess our religious beliefs. At such times, it’s worth remembering that our choice of religion is a broader and more complex matter than just adopting metaphysical beliefs that we’ve decided are true, or rejecting beliefs that we’ve decided are false. As I write these lines, I’m reflecting on the different choices made by three friends whom I’ve known for decades: one, a life-long Unitarian for whom her church has been a central focus of her life; the second, a life-long Jew for whom his religion and his wrestling with his relationship to Israel have been a core of his identity; and the third, a German friend raised a Catholic, living in an overwhelmingly Catholic area of Germany, who recently astonished me by converting at age 40 to Protestantism. In all three cases, my friends’ decisions to maintain or to change their religion have depended on roles of religion other than as a source of beliefs. Those various roles have waxed and waned at different times for my friends through their lifetimes, just as they have waxed and waned in different historical periods for societies over the millennia. The roles include the search for satisfying explanations of ultimate questions about the physical world; dealing with anxiety and stressful situations; making sense of the death of a loved one, of the prospect of one’s own death, and of other painful events; justifying one’s moral principles of behavior, and one’s obedience or disobedience to authority; and identifying oneself as a member of a group whose ideals one shares. For those of us going through a period of religious turmoil, perhaps it might help clarify our thinking to remember that religion has meant different things to different societies, and to be honest with ourselves about what religion does or might mean specifically to us.

  Turning now to admired features of traditional societies whose implementation requires both individual action and societal action, I already mentioned one example: reduction of dietary salt intake, a goal towards which we can make some progress as individuals, but which requires actions by governments and food manufacturers if we are also to reduce our cryptic salt intake in processed foods. We can similarly reduce our individual risk of diabetes by exercise and appropriate diets, but governments can also contribute in ways such as public awareness campaigns and regulating sales of fattening foods in public school cafeterias. As for how society (and not just bilingual parents of infants) can foster multilingualism and combat language extinction, some governments (e.g., Switzerland’s) work hard to preserve their language diversity; other governments (e.g., that of the U.S.) only recently stopped working hard to eradicate their nation’s diversity of native languages; and still other governments (e.g., the French in the region of Brittany) continue to oppose retention of a native language.

  The status of the elderly also depends on both individual and societal decisions. Increasing numbers of older people make themselves valuable in new ways, ease the lives of their working adult children, and enrich the lives of their grandchildren and of themselves, by providing high-quality one-on-one child care to their grandchildren. Those of us who are parents between the ages of 30 and 60 may be starting to wonder what quality of life we shall enjoy, and how our children will treat us, when we reach old age. We should remember that our children are now watching how we care for our own elderly parents: when it comes our own time to be receiving rather than giving care, our children will remember and be influenced by our example. Society can enrich the lives of the elderly as a group, and can enrich society itself, by not requiring retirement at some arbitrary age for people able and eager to continue working. Mandatory retirement policies have been falling by the wayside in the United States in recent decades, have not led to incapable older people clinging to jobs as initially feared, and have instead retained the services of the most experienced members of our society. But far too many European institutions still require employees at the peak of their productivity to retire, just because they have reached some arbitrary age in the absurdly low range of 60 to 65 years.

  In contrast to eating slowly and providing crib bilingualism, which we can do independently ourselves while waiting for changes in society as a whole, combining the advantages of traditional justice with the advantages of state justice will mostly require societal decisions. Two mechanisms that I discussed are restorative justice and mediation. Neither is a panacea, both appear useful under some circumstances but not other circumstances, and both require policy decisions by our court systems. If you see possible value in these options, your role as an individual is to join movements promoting these mechanisms in courts; you can’t adopt them by yourself. But you may be able to utilize by yourself the New Guinea emphasis on informal mediation, emotional clearance, and reestablishment of relationships (or of non-relationships) in disputes the next time that you find yourself in a private dispute where tempers are rising.

  The societies to which most readers of this book belong represent a narrow slice of human cultural diversity. Societies from that slice achieved world dominance not because of a general superiority, but for specific reasons: their technological, political, and military advantages derived from their early origins of agriculture, due in turn to their productive local wild domesticable plant and animal species. Despite those particular advantages, modern industrial societies didn’t also develop superior approaches to raising children, treating the elderly, settling disputes, avoiding non-communicable diseases, and other societal problems. Thousands of traditional societies developed a wide array of different approaches to those problems. My own outlook on
life has been transformed and enriched by my years among one set of traditional societies, that of New Guinea. I hope that you readers as individuals, and our modern society as a whole, will similarly find much to enjoy and adopt from the huge range of traditional human experience.

  Acknowledgments

  I acknowledge with pleasure my debts to many colleagues and friends for their help with this book. I owe special thanks to eight friends who critiqued the entire manuscript and poured time and effort into suggestions for improving it: my wife Marie Cohen, Timothy Earle, Paul Ehrlich, Alan Grinnell, Barry Hewlett, Melvin Konner, Michael Shermer, and Meg Taylor. Those same thanks and more are due to my editors Wendy Wolf at Viking Penguin (New York) and Stefan McGrath at Penguin Group (London), and to my agent John Brockman, who not only read the whole manuscript but also helped in innumerable ways at every stage from the book’s conception through all stages of its production.

  Michelle Fisher-Casey typed and retyped the whole manuscript, many times. Boratha Yeang tracked down sources. Ruth Mandel tracked down photographs, and Matt Zebrowski prepared the maps.

  I presented much of the material of this book to my classes of undergraduates at the University of California at Los Angeles, where I teach in the Geography Department. Those students constantly confronted me with fresh and stimulating outlooks. The department’s faculty members and staff have provided me with a constantly supportive environment. At a workshop that James Robinson and I co-organized at Harvard University, participants brainstormed about many topics of this book.

  Earlier versions of some paragraphs or material of several chapters appeared as articles in Natural History magazine, Discover magazine, Nature magazine, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

  Over the last half-century, thousands of New Guineans, Indonesians, and Solomon Islanders shared with me their insights, life stories, and world views, and lived with me the experiences that I relate in this book. My debt to them for enriching my life is enormous. I have dedicated this book to one such friend, Meg Taylor (Dame Meg Taylor), who was born in New Guinea’s Wahgi Valley and grew up in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Her mother was Yerima Manamp Masi of the Baiman Tsenglap clan, while her father was the Australian patrol officer James Taylor, leader of the famous Bena-to-Hagen patrol in 1933 and the 1938–1939 Hagen-to-Sepik patrol. After studying law at the University of Papua New Guinea and Melbourne University (Australia), Meg became private secretary to the first Chief Minister and then Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, Sir Michael Somare, as the country transitioned from self-government to independence in 1975. She practised law in Papua New Guinea, served as a member of the Law Reform Commission, and pursued further studies in law at Harvard as a Fulbright Scholar. Meg was Ambassador of Papua New Guinea to the United States, Mexico, and Canada from 1989 to 1994. She has served on the boards of international conservation and research organizations; Papua New Guinea companies in the natural resources, financial, and agricultural sectors; and companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. In 1999 Meg was appointed to the post of Vice President Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman of the World Bank Group. Meg is the mother of her daughter Taimil, and aunt to many young family members in the Highlands. She will return home upon completion of her current World Bank assignment in Washington, D.C.

  Many friends and colleagues generously helped me in connection with individual chapters, by sending me articles and references, telling me of their experiences and conclusions, talking through ideas, and criticizing my chapter draft. They include: Gregory Anderson, Stephen Beckerman, Ellen Bialystok, David Bishop, Daniel Carper, Elizabeth Cashdan, Barbara Dean, Daniel Dennett, Joel Deutsch, Michael Goran, Mark Grady, K. David Harrison, Kristen Hawkes, Karl Heider, Dan Henry, Bonnie Hewlett, William Irons, Francine Kaufman, Neal Kaufman, Laurel Kearns, Philip Klemmer, Russell Korobkin, Ágnes Kovács, Michael Krauss, Sabine Kuegler, David Laitin, Francesca Leardini, Steven LeBlanc, Graham MacGregor, Robert McKinley, Angella Meierzag, Kenneth Mesplay, Richard Mills, Viswanatha Mohan, Elizabeth Nabel, Gary Nabel, Claire Panosian, Joseph Peckham, Lloyd Peckham, Dale Price, David Price, Samuel Price, Lynda Resnick, Jerome Rotter, Roger Sant, Richard Shweder, Charles Taylor, Minna Taylor, Eugene Volokh, Douglas White, Polly Wiessner, David Sloan Wilson, Lana Wilson, Bruce Winterhalder, Richard Wrangham, and Paul Zimmet.

  Support for these studies was generously provided by the National Geographic Society, Conservation International, Skip and Heather Brittenham, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the Summit Foundation, and the Eve and Harvey Masonek and Samuel F. Heyman and Eve Gruber Heyman 1981 Trust Undergraduate Research Scholars Fund.

  To all these people and organizations, I express my heartfelt thanks.

  Further Readings

  These suggestions of some selected references are for those interested in reading further. Rather than listing extensive bibliographies, I have favored citing recent publications that do provide extensive bibliographies of the earlier literature. In addition, I cite some key earlier books and articles that I think may be of particular interest to readers, or that I specifically quote in my text. A journal title (in italics) is followed by the volume number, followed after a colon by the first and last page numbers, and then by the year of publication in parentheses. Because this book is aimed at a wide audience, I have not footnoted individual statements in the text, and the references instead are designed to supplement individual topics and whole chapters. To reduce this book’s cost, I print here only the references of most general relevance: those to the whole book, and those to the Prologue. The remaining references, to Chapters 1–11 and to the Epilogue, are posted online on a freely available Web site (http://www.jared diamondbooks.com).

  References applicable to this whole book

  I provide here three sets of references or comments: references to a few books especially useful for the purposes of this volume, because they provide explicitly comparative information on many societies; explanation of references to the names of individuals whom I met; and references for 39 traditional societies around the world from which I have frequently drawn examples in my book.

  General comparative references. An excellent comparative study of human societies around the world especially appropriate to readers of my book is Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). This volume compares many aspects of human societies at different levels of organization, summarizes case studies of 19 specific societies, provides many references to the literature on each of those societies, and uses a more finely divided classification of societies than my four-fold classification into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. An equally excellent comparative account of Aboriginal Australian societies is Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004). As do Johnson and Earle for the world, Keen provides seven case studies sampling the range of geography, environment, and social organization of Native Australians. Three books that specifically survey hunter-gatherer societies around the world are Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968); Frances Dahlberg, ed., Woman the Gatherer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Richard Lee and Richard Daly, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). A valuable cross-cultural survey often consulted by cultural anthropologists is a project of the Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Center established at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of George Murdock. For hundreds of pre-industrial societies around the world, it coded over a thousand cultural variables. Tabulations of its data include George Murdock, Ethnographic Atlas (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967); Herbert Barry III and Alice Schlegel, Cross-Cultural Samples and Codes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); and the Web sites http://www.yale.edu/hraf, http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu, and http://ehrafarchaeology.yale.edu.
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br />   Names of individual New Guineans. My text includes numerous anecdotes of conversations or events that transpired while I was bird-watching or chatting with individual New Guinea friends. While an anecdote by itself doesn’t establish anything, it can be a useful way to illustrate, and to put a human face on, a general point. It is standard practice among journalists to provide the true names, identifying details, and localities of individuals mentioned, so that others may contact and further question the individual and thereby obtain new knowledge. That was also formerly the practice among anthropologists, and it was my practice in the past.

  However, anthropologists now appreciate that their informants may be vulnerable and may suffer harm if their behavior and views become known. Cultural misunderstandings can easily arise, for example when a New Guinea villager is contacted out of the blue by a stranger with whom the New Guinean does not have an on-going relationship, and whose motives and explanations are unclear, and who may mislead or exploit the New Guinean. Hence it is now anthropological and sociological practice to change (fictionalize) or conceal the names of study locations and informants. In any ethnographic research one is now expected to avoid revealing details that would make it possible to trace a specific source for social data. As one anthropologist friend explained it to me, “The idea behind this practice is to protect informants from others who may want to find them or harm them for a variety of reasons.” The code of ethics of the American Anthropological Association now states, “Anthropological researchers have primary ethical obligations to the people…with whom they work. Those obligations can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge.” For these reasons, throughout this book I have followed current anthropological practice, and I have consistently removed or changed names and identifying details when I recount stories or events in the lives of my New Guinea friends.