The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (49 page)

My remaining example of the delicate balance between constructive paranoia and knowingly accepting risks involves Inuit hunters. An important Inuit method of hunting seals in the winter involves standing, sometimes for hours, over one of the seal’s breathing holes in a shelf of sea ice, in the hopes that a seal will surface at that hole for a quick breath and can then be harpooned. This technique poses the risk that the ice shelf may break off and drift out to sea, leaving the hunter stranded on the ice and facing likely death from ice break-up and drowning, exposure, or starvation. It would be much safer for hunters to remain on land and not place themselves at that risk. But that in turn would make death from starvation probable, because land hunting offers no rewards to match killing seals at breathing holes. While Inuit hunters attempt to select ice shelves unlikely to break off, even the most careful hunter cannot predict shelf break-off with certainty, and other hazards of Arctic life result in a short average lifespan for traditional Inuit hunters. That is, if a hockey
game lasted only 20 minutes, one would have to risk taking shots even if missed shots were penalized.

Finally, I would like to speculate about a possible connection between two features of traditional life: its risks, and what I have experienced as the talkativeness of traditional peoples. Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking. That makes it difficult for a Westerner like me, accustomed to nights spent in uninterrupted sleep and not punctuated with conversations, to get a good night’s rest in a hut shared with many New Guineans. Other Westerners have similarly commented on the talkativeness of the !Kung, of African Pygmies, and of many other traditional peoples.

Out of innumerable examples, here is one that stuck in my mind. One morning during my second trip to New Guinea, I was in a camp tent with two New Guinea Highland men, while other men from the camp were out in the forest. The two men belonged to the Fore tribe and were talking to each other in the Fore language. I had been enjoying learning the Fore language, and the men’s conversation was sufficiently repetitive and about a subject for which I had already acquired vocabulary that I was able to follow much of what they were saying. They were talking about the Highland staple food of sweet potato, for which the Fore word is
isa-awe.
One of the men looked at the large pile of sweet potatoes in the corner of the tent, assumed an unhappy expression, and said to the other man, “Isa-awe kampai.” (“There aren’t any sweet potatoes.”) They then counted how many isa-awe the pile actually contained, using the Fore counting system that mapped objects against
the 10 fingers of the two hands, then against the 10 toes, and finally against a series of points along the arms. Each man related to the other how many isa-awe he himself had eaten that morning. Then they compared notes on how many isa-awe the “red man” had eaten that morning (i.e., me: the Fore referred to Europeans as
tetekine,
literally “red man,” rather than as “white man”). The man who had spoken first now said that he was hungry for isa-awe, although he had eaten breakfast only an hour ago. The conversation went on to estimate how much longer that pile of isa-awe would last, and when the red man (me again) would buy some more isa-awe. There was nothing unusual about that conversation: it stands out in my mind only because it indelibly reinforced my memory of the Fore word
isa-awe,
and because I was struck at the time by how long the men were able to continue a conversation consisting of variants just on the single theme of isa-awe.

We may feel inclined to dismiss such talking as “mere gossip.” But gossip fulfills functions for us, and for New Guineans as well. One function in New Guinea is that traditional people have none of the means of passive entertainment to which we devote inordinate time, such as television, radio, movies, books, video games, and the Internet. Instead, talking is the main form of entertainment in New Guinea. Another function of New Guinea talking is to maintain and develop social relationships, which are at least as important to New Guineans as they are to Westerners.

In addition, I think that their constant stream of conversation helps New Guineans to cope with life in the dangerous world around them. Everything gets discussed: minute details of events, what has changed since yesterday, what might happen next, who did what, and why they did it. We get most of our information about the world around us from the media; traditional New Guineans get all their information from their own observations and from each other. Life is more dangerous for them than it is for us. By talking constantly and acquiring as much information as possible, New Guineans try to make sense of their world, and to prepare themselves better to master life’s dangers.

Of course, conversation serves that same function of risk avoidance for us as well. We, too, talk, but we have less need of talk, because we face fewer dangers and have more sources of information. I’m reminded of an American friend whom I’ll call Sara, and whom I admired for her own efforts to cope with a dangerous world around her. Sara was a single
mother, working full-time, living on a modest salary, and struggling to pay for her young son’s needs and her own needs. As a smart and sociable person, she was interested in meeting the right man to become a partner for her, a father for her son, a protector, and an economic contributor.

For a single mother, the world of American men is full of dangers that are difficult to assess accurately. Sara had encountered her share of men who proved to be dishonest or violent. That didn’t discourage her from continuing to date. However, like !Kung hunters who don’t give up when they find lions on a carcass, but who use all their experience to assess quickly the dangers posed by those particular lions, Sara had learned to size up men quickly and to be alert for small signs of danger. She regularly spent much time talking with women friends in similar situations, in order to share experiences of men and other opportunities and risks of life, and so they could help each other make sense of their observations.

Wayne Gretzky would understand why Sara kept exploring men, despite many missed shots. (I’m pleased to be able to report that Sara finally did make a happy second marriage, with a good man who was a single father when she met him.) And my New Guinea friends would understand Sara’s constructive paranoia, and all the time that she devoted to rehearsing with her friends the details of her daily life.

Dangers of traditional life
Accidents
Vigilance
Human violence
Diseases
Responses to diseases
Starvation
Unpredictable food shortages
Scatter your land
Seasonality and food storage
Diet broadening
Aggregation and dispersal
Responses to danger

The anthropologist Melvin Konner spent two years living with !Kung hunter-gatherers in a remote area of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, far from any roads or towns. The nearest town was a small one with few motor vehicles, such that a car appeared along the road through town on the average only every minute or so. Yet when Konner brought a !Kung friend named !Khoma to the town, the man was terrified at the prospect of having to cross the road, even when no car was visible in either direction. This was a man whose lifestyle in the Kalahari involved driving lions and hyenas off the carcasses of game animals.

Sabine Kuegler, the German missionary couple’s daughter who grew up with her parents among the Fayu tribe in Indonesian New Guinea’s swamp forests, where there are also no roads or motor vehicles or towns, related a similar reaction. At the age of 17 she finally left New Guinea to attend boarding school in Switzerland. “There were unbelievably many cars here, and they roared along so unbelievably fast! … Every time that we had to cross the street without a traffic light, I began to sweat. I couldn’t estimate the cars’ speed, and I was panicked that I would be run over…. Cars raced by from both directions, and when there was a small gap in the traffic, my friends ran across the street. But I stayed there, as if turned to
stone…. For five minutes I kept standing at the same place. My fear was just too great. I walked a huge detour until I finally found a street-crossing with a traffic light. From then on, all my friends knew that they had to plan crossing the street with me far in advance. To this day, I’m still afraid of rushing traffic in cities.” Yet Sabine Kuegler had become accustomed to watching out for wild pigs and crocodiles in New Guinea swamp forests.

These two similar stories illustrate several points. People in every society face dangers, but the particular dangers differ among societies. Our perceptions of both unfamiliar risks and familiar ones are often unrealistic. Konner’s !Kung friend and Sabine Kuegler were both correct, in that cars actually are the number-one danger in Western life. But American college students and women voters, asked to rank life’s dangers, both rated nuclear power as more dangerous than cars, despite nuclear power (even including the death tolls from the two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War II) having actually killed only a tiny fraction of the number of people that cars have killed. American college students also rate pesticides as extremely risky (close behind guns and smoking, in their opinion), and surgery as relatively safe, whereas in reality surgery is more dangerous than pesticides.