The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (15 page)

A similar categorization of people operated among Paraguay’s Ache Indians (
Plate 10
). At the time of peaceful European contact the Ache numbered around 700 people, living in bands of 15 to 70 people each, and with several bands closely affiliated into a group of bands. There were four such groups, ranging in total number at the time of contact from 30 to 550 people. Ache referred to other members of their own group as
irondy
(meaning those who are customarily our people or brothers), and referred to Ache in the other three groups as
irolla
(meaning Ache who are not our people).

In modern large-scale societies whose citizens travel widely around their own country and around the world, we accumulate many friendships based on individual “chemistry” rather than on group affiliation. Some of our life-long friends are people with whom we grew up or went to school, but others are ones whom we met on our travels. What counts
in friendship is whether people like each other and share interests, not whether one’s group is politically allied with the other person’s group. We take this concept of personal friendship so much for granted that it was only after years of working in New Guinea that an incident made clear to me the different concept of friendship prevailing in traditional small-scale New Guinea societies.

The incident involved a New Guinean named Yabu, whose village in the Central Highlands had practised a traditional lifestyle until the local establishment of government control and the end of intertribal warfare about a decade previously. In the course of my bird studies I brought Yabu as one of my field assistants to a campsite in the Southeast Highlands, where we were visited for several days by a British schoolteacher named Jim. Yabu and Jim spent much time talking and joking with each other, recounted long stories to each other, and evidently enjoyed each other’s company. The Central Highlands town in which Jim taught school was located only a few dozen miles from Yabu’s village. When Yabu completed his fieldwork with me, he would return to his village by taking a plane flight to the airport of Jim’s town and then go on to his village by walking. Hence as Jim was leaving our camp and saying goodbye to Yabu and me, Jim did what seemed perfectly natural to me: he invited Yabu to stop and visit him while Yabu was traveling through Jim’s town.

Some days after Jim had gone, I asked Yabu whether he did plan to visit Jim on his way home. Yabu’s reaction was one of surprise and mild indignation at my suggestion of such a waste of time: “Visit him? What for? If he had work or a paid job to offer me, then I would. But he doesn’t have a job for me. Of course I’m not going to stop in his town and look him up just for the sake of ‘friendship’!” (This conversation took place in Papua New Guinea’s lingua franca of Tok Pisin; the Tok Pisin expression that I have translated here as “just for the sake of ‘friendship’” was “
bilong pren nating
”.) I was astonished to realize that I had been making an incorrect assumption of supposed human universals that it hadn’t even occurred to me to question.

Naturally, my realization shouldn’t be exaggerated. Of course, members of small-scale societies enjoy some individuals more than others within their own society. As small-scale societies become larger or gain exposure to non-traditional outside influences, traditional outlooks
change, including views of friendship. Nevertheless, I think that the difference between concepts of friendship in large-scale and small-scale societies, expressed in Jim’s invitation and Yabu’s reaction respectively, is on the average real. It’s not just an artifact of Yabu’s responding to a European differently from how he would have responded to a New Guinean. As one New Guinea friend familiar with both Western ways and traditional New Guinea ways explained it to me, “In New Guinea we don’t just go and visit someone without a purpose. If you’ve just met and spent a week with someone, it doesn’t mean that you’ve thereby acquired a relationship or friendship with that person.” In contrast, the vast array of choices in large-scale Westernized societies, and our frequent geographic moves, give us more scope—and more need—for relationships based on personal bonds of friendship rather than on kinship, marriage, and the geographic accident of proximity during childhood.

In large hierarchical societies in which thousands or millions of people live together under the umbrella of a chiefdom or state, it’s normal to meet strangers, and doing so is safe and non-threatening. For example, every time that I walk across my University of California campus or along the streets of Los Angeles, I encounter without fear or danger hundreds of people whom I have never seen before, and may never see again, and with whom I have no traceable relationship by either blood or marriage. An early stage in this changed attitude towards strangers is illustrated by the Sudan’s Nuer people, whom I already mentioned as numbering about 200,000 and organized in a hierarchy of several levels from villages up to tribes. Obviously, no Nuer knows or has heard of all 199,999 other Nuer. Political organization is weak: each village has a figurehead chief with little real power, to be described in
Chapter 2
. Nevertheless (in the words of anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard), “Between Nuer, wherever they hail from, and though they be strangers to one another, friendly relations are at once established when they meet outside their country, for a Nuer is never a foreigner to another as he is to a Dinka or a Shilluk. Their feeling of superiority and the contempt they show for all foreigners and their readiness to fight them are a common bond of communion, and their common tongue and values permit ready intercommunication.”

Thus, compared to smaller-scale societies, the Nuer regard strangers no longer as threatening but instead as neutral or even as potentially
friendly—provided that they are Nuer. Strangers who are not Nuer are either attacked (if they are Dinka) or merely despised (if they belong to any other type of people). In still larger societies with market economies, strangers have a potential positive value as prospective business partners, customers, suppliers, and employers.

For traditional small-scale societies, the division of the world into friends of one’s own and neighboring groups, neighboring enemies, and more distant strangers resulted in knowledge of the world being very local. People knew their own core area or territory, and they knew much about the first surrounding tier of neighboring territories as a result of visits under reciprocal rights of use or during intermittent truces. But people were unlikely to know the next (the second) surrounding tier of nearby territories: intermittent hostilities with people of the first tier meant that you couldn’t cross that first tier during times of war to reach the second tier; and at times when you were at peace with a people of the first tier, they might in turn be at war with their neighbors in the second tier, again preventing you from visiting those neighbors.

Even travel into the territories of your immediate neighbors (the first tier) at presumed times of peace posed dangers. You might not realize that those neighbors had just started a war with some other allies of your people and therefore considered you now to be an enemy. Your hosts and relatives in that neighboring society might then be unwilling or unable to protect you. For instance, Karl Heider, Jan Broekhuijse, and Peter Matthiessen described an incident that happened on August 25, 1961, among the Baliem Valley’s Dugum Dani people. The Dani were divided into several dozen confederations, of which two, called the Gutelu Alliance and the Widaia Alliance, fought over the Dugum neighborhood. Nearby was the separate Asuk-Balek confederation, founded by a Gutelu split-off group that had abandoned its original land and taken refuge along the Baliem River after battles. Four Asuk-Balek men allied to the Widaia Alliance visited a Gutelu hamlet called Abulopak, where two of the Asuk-Balek men had relatives. But the visitors did not realize that the Widaia had recently
killed two Gutelus, that the Gutelus had been unsuccessful in recent attempts to even the score by killing a Widaia, and that tension among the Gutelus was high.

The arrival of the unsuspecting Asuk-Baleks, allied to the Widaia, provided the Abulopak Gutelus with the next-best opportunity for revenge, second only to killing a Widaia. The two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were spared, but the two without relatives were attacked. One managed to escape. The other took refuge in a hut’s sleeping loft, but was dragged down and speared. That attack triggered an explosion of general rejoicing among the Abulopaks, who dragged the not-yet-dead Asuk-Balek’s body along a muddy path to their dance ground. The Abulopaks then danced with joy that night around the corpse and finally threw it into an irrigation ditch, pushed it under water, and covered it with grass. On the following morning the two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were permitted to retrieve the corpse. The incident illustrates the need for prudence verging on paranoia while traveling.
Chapter 7
will say more about this need for what I term “constructive paranoia.”

Traditional distances of travel and of local knowledge were low in areas of high human population density and environmental constancy, and high in areas with sparse human population and variable environments. Geographic knowledge was very local in Highland New Guinea, with its dense populations and relatively stable environment. Travel and knowledge were wider in areas with stable environments but lower populations (such as the New Guinea lowlands and the African rainforests inhabited by African Pygmies), and were still wider in areas with variable environments and low populations (such as deserts and inland Arctic areas). For example, Andaman Islanders knew nothing about Andaman tribes living more than 20 miles distant. The known world of the Dugum Dani was largely confined to the Baliem Valley, most of which they could see from hilltops, but they could visit only a fraction of the valley because it was divided up by war frontiers that it was suicidal to cross. Aka Pygmies, given a list of up to 70 places and asked which of them they had visited, knew only half of the places lying within 21 miles and only one-quarter of the places within 42 miles. To place these numbers in perspective, when I lived in England in the 1950s and 1960s, it was still true that many rural English people had spent their lives in or near their
villages, except possibly for traveling overseas as soldiers during World War I or II.

Thus, knowledge of the world beyond one’s first or second neighbors was nonexistent or only second-hand among traditional small-scale societies. For instance, no one in the densely populated mountain valleys of the main body of New Guinea had seen or even heard of the ocean, lying at distances of only 50 to 120 miles. New Guinea Highlanders did receive in trade marine shells and (after European arrival on the coast) a few steel axes, which were prized. But those shells and axes were traded from one group to another and passed through many successive hands in covering that distance from the coast to the Highlands. Just as in the children’s game of telephone, in which children sit in a row or circle, one child whispers something to the next child, and what the last child hears bears no relation to what the first child said, all knowledge of the environment and people that supplied the shells and axes was lost by the time that they reached the Highlands.

For many small-scale societies, those traditional limitations on knowledge of the world were ended abruptly by so-called first contacts, when the arrival of European colonialists, explorers, traders, and missionaries proved the existence of a previously unknown outside world. The last peoples remaining “uncontacted” today are a few remote groups in New Guinea and tropical South America, but by now those remaining groups at least know of the outside world’s existence, because they have seen airplanes flying overhead and have heard of outsiders from neighboring “contacted” New Guinea groups. (By “contacted,” I mean contacted by distant outsiders such as Europeans
and Indonesians; of course the “uncontacted” groups have been in contact with other New Guineans or South American Indians for thousands of years.) For example, when I was in western New Guinea’s mountains in the 1990s, my hosts, who had first been contacted by the Dutch a few decades previously, told me of a group to the north of them that had not yet been contacted, in the sense that they hadn’t yet been visited by missionaries or other outsiders. (Missionaries usually adopt the precaution of sending an emissary from a contacted neighboring group to ask whether a missionary would be welcomed, rather than expose themselves to the danger of walking in unannounced.) But those “uncontacted” mountaineers must have known of Europeans and Indonesians from “contacted” neighboring groups with which the uncontacted group did have contact. In addition, the uncontacted group had for many years seen airplanes flying over, such as the plane in which I arrived at the village of their contacted neighbors. Hence the world’s last remaining uncontacted groups do know that there is an outside world.

Conditions were different when Europeans began expanding over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and “discovered” people long before there were any airplane overflights to alert them to an outside world. The last large-scale first contacts in world history will prove to be those that took place in the New Guinea Highlands, where from the 1930s to the 1950s patrols by Australian and Dutch government and army reconnaissance expeditions, miners on prospecting trips, and biological expeditions “discovered” a million Highlanders of whose existence the outside world hadn’t known and vice versa—even though Europeans had by then been visiting and settling the coasts of New Guinea for 400 years. Until the 1930s, first contacts in New Guinea were made by Europeans exploring overland or by river, and the first evidence of Europeans’ existence to Highlanders was the Europeans’ physical arrival. Increasingly from the 1930s onwards, airplane overflights preceded the overland parties and warned Highlanders that there was something new out there. For example, the densest Highland population in western New Guinea, the approximately 100,000 people in the Baliem Valley, was “discovered” on June 23, 1938, when an airplane belonging to a joint expedition of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Dutch colonial government, financed by oil heir Richard Archbold and exploring New Guinea for animals and plants, flew over mountain terrain previously assumed to be rugged, forest-covered, and uninhabited. Archbold and his team instead were astonished to find themselves looking down on a broad, flat, deforested valley criss-crossed by a dense network of irrigation ditches and resembling thickly populated areas of Holland.