The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (85 page)

As for why Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies are WEIRD by the standards of more traditional societies over the rest of the world, Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan explain the reasons briefly in “Most people are not WEIRD,”
Nature
466: 29 (2010), and at more length in “The Weirdest people in the world?,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
33: 61–135 (2010).

Chapter 14 of my book
Guns, Germs, and Steel
(New York: Norton, 1997) discusses the evolution of societies from bands to states according to the classification used in my present book, while Johnson and Earle (2000, cited above) discuss those transitions in more detail and with a more finely divided classification of societies. Classic accounts of the classification of human societies include two books by Elman Service:
Primitive Social Organization
(New York: Random House, 1962) and
Origins of the State and Civilization
(New York: Norton, 1975).

Some classic books of anthropology that provide examples of the different
approaches mentioned in my text to explain differences among human societies are as follows: John Bodley,
The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach
(London: Sharpe, 2003); Timothy Earle,
Bronze Age Economics
:
The Beginnings of Political Economies
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002); Timothy Earle, ed.,
Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Marvin Harris,
Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture
(New York: Random House, 1979); Marshall Sahlins,
Culture and Practical Reason
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973); Michel Foucault,
The Archaeology of Knowledge
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Marshall Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
(Chicago: Aldine, 1972); Marvin Harris,
The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture
(New York: Crow-ell, 1968); Claude Leví-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology
(New York: Doubleday, 1963); Julian Steward,
Theory of Culture Change
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955); Alfred Kroeber,
The Nature of Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

Kim Hill et al., “Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure,”
Science
331: 1286–1289 (2011) analyze the patterns of who is actually related to whom in 32 present-day foraging bands.

The quotation on
page 477
, about the difficulties of interpreting field observations of modern traditional societies, comes from
page 15
of Ian Keen’s 2004 book cited above.

Pioneering studies of methodologically rigorous oral history are two books by Jan Vansina:
Oral Tradition: a Study in Historical Methodology
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) and
Oral Tradition as History
(London: James Currey, 1985). For readers interested in exploring some fascinating aspects of societal variation that I do not discuss, thereby earning myself the gratitude of readers for reducing the length of this already long book, one suggestion is Richard Nisbett,
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why
(New York: Free Press, 2003). On his
page 43
Nisbett briefly discusses cognitive differences between hunter-gatherers, traditional farming peoples, and industrial peoples. Joseph Henrich et al., eds.,
Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) discuss differences among traditional and industrial societies in their sense of fairness, reciprocity, and pursuit of self-interest.

For a detailed case study illustrating the difficulties of transferring one society’s practices and lessons to another society, see Elizabeth Watson,
Living Terraces in Ethiopia: Konso Landscape, Culture, and Development
(Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2009).

On
pages 23
–
24
I briefly summarized our four sources of information, blurring into each other and each with its own advantages and disadvantages, about traditional societies. For readers (especially scholars) interested in learning more about these various sources, I now provide a more extended discussion.

The most obvious method, and the source of most of the information in this book, is to send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people, and to carry out a study focusing on some specific topic. The scientists variously identify themselves as practitioners of different disciplines, including anthropologists, biologists, economists, ethnographers, geneticists, historians, linguists, physicians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. The authors publish their results as scientific articles or books, often frame their study at the outset in terms of some particular question or hypothesis to be tested, and often (especially nowadays) gather quantitative data to be presented in tables of numbers. As applied to traditional human societies, this is the scientific approach that has evolved over centuries as the best approach for obtaining reliable knowledge of the real world, whether it’s the world of human societies, or else the worlds of bacteria, molecules, rocks, or galaxies.

Two main types of difficulty have arisen in applying this approach to the study of traditional human societies. Naturally, these difficulties do not invalidate such studies; they merely need to be borne in mind in interpreting the conclusions, and they explain why we resort to other sources of information as well. The Australian anthropologist Ian Keen introduced his book on Aboriginal Australian societies by summarizing these difficulties as follows: “The main issues of interpretation arising from the work of professionally trained anthropologists are that they are late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories, and particular paradigms strongly shape (and limit) their interpretations. However, within their fields of interest these works tend to be the most thorough and systematic.”

Keen’s warning about studies late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories refers to a dilemma inherent in cultural anthropology, analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in physics. That principle states, in effect, that any physical measurement inevitably perturbs the system being studied and thereby introduces uncertainty into what the true value would have been if the system had not been perturbed. (Specifically in particle physics, the principle states that it’s impossible to measure simultaneously the exact values of both a particle’s position and its velocity.) To appreciate the corresponding dilemma in cultural anthropology, recall that modern anthropological studies of Aboriginal Australia began in the 20th century, and ethnographic accounts began in the 19th century before the rise of modern professional anthropology. However, Europeans had already landed in Australia in 1616 and founded their first settlement in 1788, while Macassans (Indonesian fishermen) had regularly been visiting northern Australia for many centuries before European arrival, and unidentified Austronesian people from Indonesia somehow introduced dogs (dingoes) and possibly other life forms and technologies into Australia several thousand years ago.

Modern studies of Aboriginal Australians have thus been of societies radically changed from their pre-European or pre-Macassan condition, because most of the population had already been killed by European-introduced and perhaps also Macassan-introduced diseases, conquered and subjected to the control of
Euro-Australian state government, prevented from exercising traditional fire management (i.e., burning) of their landscape, driven off their prime lands targeted for European settlement, and deprived of part of their subsistence base by the impacts on native animals and plants of European-introduced cats, foxes, sheep, and cattle and Austronesian-introduced dingoes. Similarly, while the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are often taken as models of hunter-gatherers, the detailed studies of the !Kung that began in the 1960s, and that I cite frequently in this book, have been of people who had already given up their traditional bone arrow-points for metal points, had stopped raiding each other, had recently been trading with and encroached on by Bantu herders, and must somehow have been influenced by other Bantu herders who reached southern Africa almost 2,000 years ago.

More generally, all 20th-century studies of hunter-gatherers have been of societies in actual or potential contact with food producers (farmers and/or herders). Until around 11,000 years ago, however, all human societies were hunter-gatherers, so that hunter-gatherers were in contact only with other hunter-gatherers. Only in a few parts of the world, such as Australia, the Arctic, and western North America, did even the first non-scientist Western explorers encounter hunter-gatherers still living in a world of hunter-gatherers. These facts have provoked heated arguments about the relevance of modern studies to past societies: are modern hunter-gatherers too different from past hunter-gatherers to have any relevance to understanding them? That view is surely too extreme: as anthropologist Melvin Konner has expressed it, if today one could take a group of Westerners and dump them naked and without tools in isolation somewhere in the African savannah, within two generations either they would all be dead or else they would have independently re-invented many observed features of hunter-gatherer societies. But at minimum, one must recognize that modern traditional peoples are not frozen models of the distant past.

As for Ian Keen’s other warning, within any science at any particular time there are preferred research areas for systematic study and funding, and other areas that remain neglected. For instance, until recently few anthropologists carried out studies focusing specifically on childhood or old age among traditional peoples. Field observers are discouraged from going out on scientific “fishing trips” and recording everything that they notice; they are expected to produce books and articles on some specific subject. At a given time there are also certain interpretations and phenomena that tend to be preferred, and others that are considered unpalatable. For example, there has been vigorous controversy over whether or not the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead skewed her descriptions of Pacific Islander sexual behavior to fit preconceptions held by a then-current school of anthropology; and there are still strong views that traditional peoples aren’t warlike, or that if they are warlike it’s an artifact of European contact, or that if they really are warlike one shouldn’t describe their wars because it’s politically harmful to do so.

A second source of knowledge about traditional societies seeks to peel back some recent changes in modern traditional societies, by interviewing living non-literate people about their orally transmitted histories, and by reconstructing in that way
their history over several generations. Naturally, this method poses its own problems, and its practitioners have gained much experience of techniques (pioneered especially by Jan Vansina) to cross-check and ensure the reliability of the information elicited.

For example, the American anthropologist Polly Wiessner and the Enga artist Akii Tumu collaborated to study the oral history of the Enga people, the largest language group in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. While written history began for the Enga only with the arrival of literate Europeans in the 1930s, the Enga are exceptional among New Guineans in keeping track of historical events through a body of historical traditions (termed
atone pii
) that they recognize as distinct from myths (termed
tindi pii
), and that go back 8 to 10 generations (250 to 400 years). Between 1985 and 1998 Wiessner and Tumu interviewed elders in 110 Enga tribes. They tested the correctness of the interview responses by looking for consistency between accounts given by different clans, and by different tribes; by examining whether accounts of wars and migrations given by descendants of participants on opposite sides of the war or migration, and given by neighboring groups, agreed; and by checking whether information offered about one sphere of life (e.g., ceremonial pig exchanges) corresponded to information offered about different spheres of life (e.g., land use and agricultural production). They also checked the oral accounts against two independently datable events that affected all Highland groups of Papua New Guinea, including the Enga: a massive volcanic eruption of nearby Long Island in the 17th century, which deposited a layer of chemically identifiable ash (tephra) all over the Eastern Highlands, and about which the Enga and other Highlanders have an oral tradition of a “time of darkness,” when ash darkened the sun for several days; and the arrival of the sweet potato, which transformed Highlands agriculture and societies between 250 and 400 years ago. By these cross-checking and cross-dating methods, Wiessner and Tumu were able to reconstruct detailed histories of tribe dispersals, population growth, population size, environmental conditions, agricultural subsistence, crops cultivated, trade, leadership, social organization, wars, migrations, and the development of ceremonies and cults over the last eight Enga generations, long before European arrival in the New Guinea Highlands.

This method of oral reconstruction is applicable to only some traditional peoples, perhaps just a minority of them, because many or most peoples do not retain detailed oral knowledge going back more than a few generations. That depends on factors such as their social organization, their degree of insistence on first-hand experience, who tells stories, the context of telling stories, and the degree of participation by listeners in story-telling. For example, the missionary linguist Daniel Everett found that Brazil’s Piraha Indians refused to discuss anything that they had not seen with their own eyes, and hence were scornful of Everett’s efforts to tell them about the life of Jesus: “Did you see him yourself? If not, how can you believe it?” Similarly, the many studies carried out among !Kung people from the 1960s onwards have failed to recover detailed information concerning events or conditions of !Kung life more than a few generations ago. On the other hand, among the Enga, historical stories are
recounted in the men’s house, listeners comment on and correct mistakes in the stories, and powerful individuals are not permitted to distort history in order to advance their own interests.