The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (14 page)

However, the usual form of land division under these conditions selecting for non-exclusivity isn’t the extreme of a free-for-all in which anybody can do anything anywhere. Instead, it still is the case that each group is identified with a specific core area. Non-exclusive societies differ from exclusive societies in that, instead of the Dani no-man’s land clearly delineated by watch-towers, recognized borders don’t exist, and land ownership just becomes increasingly vague as one moves increasing distances from one’s core area. Another distinction of non-exclusive from exclusive societies is that neighboring groups receive permission to visit your territory more often and for more different purposes—especially to obtain food and water at certain seasons or in certain years. Correspondingly, you can readily obtain permission to visit your neighbor’s territory when you are the one in need, so the arrangement becomes an exchange based on reciprocity and mutual benefit.

An example of non-exclusive land ownership that has been described in detail is the !Kung hunter-gatherers (
Plate 6
) of the Nyae Nyae area of the Kalahari Desert. When studied in the 1950s, they consisted of 19 bands, containing between 8 and 42 people per band, each band with its own “territory” (termed a
n!ore
) of between about 100 and 250 square miles in area. But boundaries between n!ores were vague: as anthropologists and !Kung informants walked together from the informants’ camp towards the next n!ore, the informants became increasingly uncertain, or disagreed increasingly with each other, about which n!ore they were now in, the further they got from the center of their n!ore. There were no watch-towers or ridge-line trails to mark n!ore boundaries.

!Kung n!ores are occupied non-exclusively because it is both necessary and possible to share n!ores’ resources. Resource sharing is necessary because water in the Kalahari Desert is scarce, and each band needs to spend much of its time near a waterhole. But there is unpredictable variation in rainfall between years. Many waterholes in the area go dry in the dry season. Only 2 waterholes in the area never failed during the period studied; 3 more were usually available throughout the year but failed in some years; 5 more lasted only occasionally through the dry season; and 50 were seasonal and always went dry for part of the year. Hence in the dry season, up to 200 people from various bands gather at a permanent waterhole with the permission of its owners, who in turn are permitted to visit and use resources of other n!ores when those are abundant. Thus, water considerations
require
the !Kung to have non-exclusive territories: it would be pointless to claim exclusive use of an area if that area might run out of water and thus become useless. Conversely, the seasonal superabundance of some resources
permits
non-exclusivity: it is pointless to off end potentially useful allies by keeping them out of your territory at a time when it is producing far more food than you yourself can eat. That’s especially true of the food staple of mongongo nuts seasonally available in enormous crops, and it’s also true of seasonal crops of wild beans and melons.

Supposedly, anyone from any band in the Nyae Nyae area can hunt anywhere, including outside of his own band’s n!ore. However, if you kill an animal outside your n!ore, you should give a present of its meat if you then encounter a member of the band owning that n!ore. But that freedom of access for hunting doesn’t apply to !Kung hunters from more distant
areas. More generally, neighboring !Kung bands can readily obtain permission to use each other’s n!ore for other purposes as well, such as obtaining water, nuts, beans, and melons—but they must first ask for permission, and they incur an obligation to reciprocate later by permitting the hosts to visit the visitors’ n!ore. Fighting is likely to break out if they don’t ask for permission. More distant bands have to be especially careful in requesting permission, and should limit the length of their visit and the number of people visiting. Outsiders who have no recognized connection by blood or marriage to the n!ore’s owners cannot visit at all. Thus, non-exclusive territories certainly don’t mean a free-for-all.

Rights to use land and resources, whether exclusively or non-exclusively, imply the concept of ownership. Who owns the n!ore of a !Kung band? The answer is: the band’s
k’ausi,
meaning a core group of older people or else one older person descended from the people who have lived in that area for the longest time. But band composition is fluid and changes from day to day, because people often go visit relatives in other n!ores, people make seasonal visits to other n!ores for waterholes or for superabundant food, some people shift bands permanently for various reasons, and a new bridegroom plus his dependents (his old parents, and his first wife and children if he is now taking a second wife) may live with his new wife’s band for about a decade until he and his new wife have given birth to several children. As a result, many !Kung spend more time outside than inside their n!ore. In an average year 13% of the population shifts residence permanently from one camp to another, and 35% of the population is dividing its residential time equally between two or three camps. Under those circumstances the band in the neighboring n!ore consists partly of your own people; they’re not evil subhumans with whom the only inter-group transfers are just two intermarriages over the course of several generations, as in the case of my New Guinea mountain friends. You’re not going to take a hard-line exclusive approach to your resources when many of the “intruders” are actually your siblings and cousins, your adult children, and your aged parents.

Another interesting illustration of non-exclusive territories involves North America’s Great Basin Shoshone, Native Americans belonging to the same language group as the Owens Valley Shoshone whom I already mentioned as illustrating exclusive territories. Their Great Basin cousins
differed in land use because of differences between the environments. Whereas Owens Valley land was well watered, suitable for irrigation, and worth defending, the Great Basin is a harsh dry desert, very cold in the winter, with sparse and unpredictable resources and little opportunity for food storage. Human population densities in the Great Basin were only about one person every 16 square miles. The Great Basin Shoshone lived in separate families for much of the year, aggregating in the winter into camps of 5 or 10 families near springs and pine nut groves, and infrequently aggregating into larger groups of up to 15 families for communal hunts of antelopes and rabbits. They did not maintain well-marked territories. Instead, individual families owned specific sites such as pine groves, which could be shared with other families but only by agreement: trespassers who attempted to harvest pine nuts without an agreement were driven off by a barrage of stones. Other plant and animal resources were shared under flexible non-exclusive rights.

Finally, a minimum in recognizing and patrolling territories was achieved by Peru’s Machiguenga Indians and Bolivia’s Siriono Indians in tropical forested areas. At the times that those groups were studied by anthropologists, the Machiguenga were gardeners living at only modest population densities, possibly because a previously denser population had crashed from effects of European-introduced diseases or else killings during the rubber boom, and also because agriculture in their area offered only low yields. The Machiguenga undertook seasonal movements for wild foods and cleared slash-and-burn gardens that produced food for just a few years and weren’t worth fighting over. There were no territories: in theory all resources of all forests and rivers were open to all Machiguengas. In practice, multi-family groups maintained some distance from each other’s home ranges. Similarly, the Siriono Indians studied by Allan Holmberg lived by hunting-gathering and some casual agriculture in bands of 60 to 80 people possessing no defined territories. But if one band came across hunting tracks made by another band, it chose not to hunt in that other band’s area. That is, there was informal mutual avoidance.

Thus, traditional land use ranged over a spectrum, from well-marked territories that were patrolled and defended and from which outsiders were excluded on pain of death, through fuzzy home ranges without clear boundaries and which outsiders could use by mutual agreement, to home
areas kept separate just by informal mutual avoidance. No traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern Americans or European Union citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere within the U.S. or European Union and can travel in many other countries as well merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a border passport control officer. (Of course the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack has pushed Americans back towards a traditional suspicion of strangers and has resulted in restrictions on free travel, such as no-fly lists and airport security checks.) But one could also argue that our modern system of relatively open access is an upscale extension of traditional access rights and restrictions. Traditional peoples, living in societies of a few hundred individuals, obtain access to others’ lands by being known individually, by having individual relationships there, and by asking permission individually. In our societies of hundreds of millions, our definition of “relationship” is extended to any citizen of our state or of a friendly state, and the asking of permission is formalized and granted en masse by means of passports and visas.

All those restrictions on free movement cause members of small-scale societies to divide people into three categories: friends, enemies, and strangers. “Friends” are the members of your own band or village, and of those neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on peaceful terms at the moment. “Enemies” are members of neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on hostile terms at the moment. Nevertheless, you probably know at least the names and relationships, and possibly the appearances, of many or most individuals in those hostile bands, because you’ll have heard of them or actually met them in the course of negotiations for compensation, periods of peace resulting from shifting alliances, and exchanges of brides (or occasionally grooms) during those truces. An example is those two river men who had married into the village of my mountain friends.

The remaining category is “strangers”: unknown individuals belonging to distant bands with which your band has little or no contact. Rarely or
never do members of small-scale societies encounter strangers, because it’s suicidal to travel into an unfamiliar area to whose inhabitants you are unknown and completely unrelated. If you do happen to encounter a stranger in your territory, you have to presume that the person is dangerous, because (given the dangers of traveling to unfamiliar areas) the stranger is really likely to be scouting in order to raid or kill your group, or else trespassing in order to hunt or steal resources or kidnap a marriageable woman.

In a small-scale local population numbering several hundred people, you’ll certainly know all members by name and face, the details of all their relationships by blood and marriage and adoption, and how they are related to you. When you add to your own band the several neighboring friendly bands, your potential universe of “friends” may number over a thousand people, including many whom you’ve heard of but never actually seen. Hence suppose that, while out alone away from your core area or near the boundary of your territory, you meet a person or people whom you don’t recognize. If there are several of them and just one of you, you’ll run away, and vice versa. If there is one of you and one of them, and if the two of you see each other at a distance, both of you may run away if a glance suggests a balance of strength (e.g., two adult men, rather than a man confronting a woman or a child). But if you come around a corner and suddenly confront another person unexpectedly, and it’s too late to run away, that’s a recipe for a tense situation. It can be resolved by the two of you sitting down, each of you naming yourself and your relatives and exactly how you are related to them, and continuing in an effort to identify a relative in common, such that the two of you would have some relationship to each other and wouldn’t have grounds to attack each other. But if after several hours of such a conversation the two of you still can’t identify any relative in common, then you can’t just turn around and say, “It was nice to meet you, goodbye.” Instead, you or he or both of you must consider the other a trespasser without a relationship justifying a visit, and a chasing-off or a fight becomes likely.

Speakers of the Central !Kung dialect within the Nyae Nyae area refer to other such speakers as
jū/wãsi,
where
jū
means “person,”
si
is the plural suffix, and
wã
approximately means “true, good, honest, clean, not harmful.” Back-and-forth visits between kin within the Nyae Nyae area create personal familiarities that unite all 19 bands and all thousand or so mem
bers of the area and make them all jū/wãsi to each other. The opposite term
jū/dole
(where
dole
has the sense of “bad, strange, harmful”) is applied to all whites, all black Bantu people, and even !Kung people speaking the same dialect but belonging to a distant group among which you have no relatives or acquaintances. Like members of other small-scale societies, the !Kung are apprehensive of strangers. In practice, they succeed in finding some kin term to apply to almost every !Kung whom they meet. But if you meet a strange !Kung and can’t discover any relationship to him after you’ve traced out your relationships and he has traced out his, then he is a trespasser whom you should drive off or kill.

For example, a !Kung man named Gao, at the request of the anthropologist Lorna Marshall, went on an errand for her to a place called Khadum, lying outside but not far north of the Nyae Nyae area. Gao had never visited Khadum, and very few other Nyae Nyae !Kung had ever been there either. The !Kung at Khadum at first called Gao a jū/dole, which meant at minimum a frosty reception and possibly trouble. But Gao quickly said that he had heard that the father of someone living at Khadum had the same name as Gao’s own father, and that someone else at Khadum had a brother named Gao, like Gao himself. The !Kung at Khadum then said to Gao, “So, you are Gao’s [i.e., our Gao’s]
!gun!a
.” (
!gun!a
is a relationship term.) They then accepted Gao at their campfire and gave him a present of food.