Eavesdropping (12 page)

Authorities from various disciplines have commented on the need for a proper distance. Most species, according to ethologists
Peter Klopfer and Daniel Rubenstein, have “an equilibrium level” where even a small increase in privacy or exposure threatens rather than enhances reproductive success. Sociologist Barry Schwartz suggested that for humans there is “a threshold beyond which social contact becomes irritating for all parties.” Thomas Gregor, the anthropologist who studied the Mehinacu, referred to “a narrow optimum range between what constitutes too little and too much interaction and exposure.” Philosopher Thomas Nagel has written that “social life would be impossible if we expressed all our lustful, aggressive, greedy, anxious, or self-obsessed feelings in ordinary public encounters,” but “so would inner life be impossible if we tried to become wholly persons whose thoughts, feelings, and private behaviour could be safely exposed to public view.”
²

In this chapter we take a look at the initial reactions of humans to their own domestication, and especially their search for an optimal social distance—one that would enable the benefits of a proximal life without danger of over-exposure or friction, and periods of solitude without loss of social connection and support. We will see clear evidence that many individuals spent their lives attempting to establish this boundary, without ever succeeding.

The first humans to build and occupy walled domiciles were strongly conflicted about their use. Walls were a new technology, one that paradoxically threatened the security of human groups while offering tempting opportunities for relief from mounting external pressures. It would be difficult to overstate the effect of walls on social monitoring, for they snatched from eyes and ears material that was essential to the management of peaceful and morally tidy villages. But, as we will see, domestication never gave our ancestors complete control over how much of their private life would be truly private.

If we could take a tour of the world as it existed fifteen thousand years ago, we would be able to see a great many of the human beings then alive. The missing ones would be the foragers and lovers who happened to be off in some leafy glade or desert dunes
when we went by, doing something that could only be done there. The rest would be
at or near their home base
, but they would not be
in their homes
. They had no homes.

Contrast this with a different tour, one that could be conducted almost anywhere in the world today. If we were to drive through any number of cities, we would see only a fraction of the citizens who live there and were actually there at the time. But the invisible people would not be
away
some place. They would be
there, at
home,
inside
. Herein lies the appeal of our demon, Asmodeus, who offered readers the fantastic possibility of peering under the rooftops of Madrid’s finest residences. Why did our more recent ancestors build and occupy homes and the earlier ones not do so? Was it just to tantalize and tease all the outsiders?

The answer cannot be that
Homo sapiens
had no tools; even their own distant ancestor,
Homo ergaster
, could make these; nor can it be that they lacked building materials, because mud, wood, and stone were everywhere; or that they could not figure out how to build dwellings, because they had more than enough intelligence to do this.
³

But ecological factors were operating. At the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, some ten thousand years ago, most people were still nomadic. They lived on wild food of one kind or another, from plants to large animals, and wild food had a habit of moving whenever it saw someone chasing it; or its own source of nutrition went elsewhere; or there was a change of seasons or the weather.
⁴
To spend much time building anything, or to make it larger or more secure than necessary, would have made no sense.

It would be easy to rest our explanation here, content that we had provided a respectable account of human domestication. The openly living nomads, according to our story, had no real reasons for living transparently, it was just easier than constructing something that
would
coincidentally
have blocked the senses. But we already know that this is not correct. In the previous chapter we saw that our wild living ancestors craved sensory access to each other. Indeed, as egalitarians they would have had great difficulty living without it.

The need for constant relocation had to subside before it became labor-efficient to build permanent dwellings. Even when it did subside, however, dwellings were not built, and this suggests some degree of resistance to sensory interruption all along. We will discuss the source of this resistance shortly, but in the meantime we need to ask, what eroded our ancestors’ peripatetic ways?

Anthropologists differ as to the precise sequence of events, but certain factors can be identified.
⁵
One is the dissipation of large animal herds. Increasingly, hunters were returning with insufficient food to supply their small camps. A second factor—possibly related to the first—was an increase in the rate of population growth, increasing the competition for whatever large animals that remained. Fortunately, an alternative developed. It was
global warming
, a significant increase in temperature and rainfall, occurring between eleven and fifteen thousand years ago. This climate change stimulated the proliferation of annual cereals and legumes, giving our ancestors new nutritional possibilities on a more local scale. Where dwindling herds had necessitated a change in the human diet, these new plants enabled it. The new cuisine, small animals, vegetables, and wild cereals,
⁶
were less palatable than horse and reindeer, but they could be reliably found in one place.
⁷

These changes enabled people to get by, but the population continued to rise, and this increased competition for the new diet. Fortunately, solutions lay in the large and inventive human brain. Having enough intelligence to modify the natural environment, and more time to themselves than ever, our Holocene ancestors discovered that seeds and shoots, with proper handling, could become an important new source of nutrition. They also found ways to domesticate pigs, goats, and other animals. About twelve
thousand years ago, people began to herd, farm, and fish, and it was around this time that people began to settle down.
⁸

The new ways of acquiring food required little or no roaming. So for the first time in history, it made sense for most humans to develop fixed areas of residence. It was also discovered that farming was ideally pursued on a cooperative basis, with the possibility of formal systems of storage and exchange, and this led to the establishment of farming communities. Population centers arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as China, the Americas, Africa, and other places.
⁹

In time, agriculture and sedentism made their own contribution to population growth. When migration stopped, infants no longer needed to be carried from one place to another, reducing the rate of infanticide. With grain in their diets, it also became possible to wean infants earlier. This shortened the period of lactation, enabling women to bear more infants in their reproductive lifetime. Adults were also living longer. These additions to the populace encouraged even more sedentism and farming.

The transition into sedentism increased the frequency and stealth of eavesdropping. For one thing, sedentary societies were larger, more complex and competitive, and more stressful than nomadic ones. In the event of a heated conflict—something that was increasing—it was harder for disputants to vote with their feet. Wars of words—which might once have remained at the verbal level—became violent. Moreover, many of these transitional groups were still attempting to live in a structurally flat, egalitarian way, and with no tribal leaders to resolve their conflicts, sedentist villages became more militant than nomadic ones had ever been.
¹⁰
These social changes encouraged the construction of more substantial dwellings. The walls were weight-bearing structures that supported the roof, protecting occupants from the sun and rain,
but they would also serve as shields, protecting residents from the perceptual invasion of others.

Having social as well as climatic functions, the new domestic walls could only have been regarded as a wonderful new invention. But it was not so simple. There was still a hidden factor, one that is missing in most anthropological and archaeological accounts of human domestication.

In some places, people
resisted the construction of dwellings. In
his book
House Form and Culture
anthropological architect Amos Rapoport described the housing that existed, or had existed, in a wide variety of places around the world. After surveying countless dwellings, he concluded that “house building
is not a natural act
and is not universal.”
¹¹
He based this on housing patterns in various places, from southeast Asia to South America and Australia, where tribes continued to live without houses.

One of the places was Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago off the southern tip of South America. The climate is almost arctic there, but the natives contented themselves with windbreaks made of seal or animal skins, sewn together and attached to a circular arrangement of poles that were stuck into the ground.
¹²
Very similar shields were built on the Pampas, in southern Buenos Aires Province, and by the aborigines in Tasmania. In many places where it was hot, however, people built elaborate houses. Witnessing these paradoxes, Rapoport concluded that from a climatic perspective, the housing pattern of primitive and peasant builders is “
irrational
.”
¹³
A similar conclusion was reached by Edmund Carpenter after he inspected Eskimo igloos that feature large open areas rather than the series of small internal enclosures that one expects in frigid climates. The Eskimos, wrote Carpenter, display “a magnificent disregard for environmental determinism.”
¹⁴

In places where people did build houses, many
resisted the temptation to live in them
. Sedentism had encouraged the construction of houses in some places, but it was not enough, by itself, to produce homes. Why? By modern standards, it seems strange that a person would go to the effort to build a house, store all of his possessions in it, spend the bulk of his free time around it, develop a sense of territoriality about the place and the structure, but continue living on the outside.

What was being resisted was the cessation of social transparency. Peter Wilson pointed out that this meaning of privacy, a by-product of domestication, was “not natural to human existence.”
¹⁵
Private living, in any form, drew curiosity and suspicion.

Evidence of this was acquired in the early 1970s, when anthropologists John Roberts and Thomas Gregor investigated the relationship between certain aspects of small-scale societies and the amount of privacy afforded members by their houses. Roberts and Gregor constructed a privacy index based on the permeability of dwellings to sight and sound, and the presence or absence of closable windows, doors, and internal partitions. It also took into account the number of persons that lived together under one roof, and the openness of the villages. By these criteria,
in fully three-quarters of the societies people were considered highly visible.
¹⁶

The residents of tiny villages were reluctant to live privately, but it is not as though their homes were luxurious. By modern standards they were cramped and dark, and in many parts of the world they were cold and damp. The early homes were also malodorous—domesticated animals slept inside with their owners—and none had tables, chairs, or beds. The new “insiders” slept on the ground. It was like camping “in.”

One might suppose that the new homeowners set about rectifying these problems as soon as they got the hang of indoor living. But there are no indications that they did. In fact, homes—what they were, physically, and what they afforded, psychologically—remained unchanged, essentially, for
thousands of years
. In seventeenth-century
England most lower middle-class families still had little or no furniture—they continued to sit and sleep on the floor—and in semi-rural areas the situation was little better a hundred years later.
¹⁷

With so little comfort in their homes, and so little interest in home improvement, one gathers that our ancestors were ambivalent about walled life. Were they, like porcupines, struggling to find the right place to draw the line between safety and warmth? Clues are available in two societies, the Sakalava and the Zinacantecos.

Some sort of domestic ambivalence was evident among the Sakalava people of Madagascar—a perfect society for us to examine since, by coincidence, they were in transition when anthropologist Gillian Feeley-Harnik studied them in the 1970s. At that time, Sakalava villages numbered between twenty and eighty people.
¹⁸
The interesting thing is that the Sakalava still subsisted on hunting and gathering, but had also begun to farm.

The primary dwelling place of the Sakalava was a one- or two-room structure with a doorway and no windows. Feeley-Harnik described it as “a portable set of walls, lashed to a timber frame and covered with thatch.”
¹⁹
The reference to “doorways” is because there was a taboo on the use of doors—or even, in most places, door curtains. The Sakalava also disapproved of fences around their houses. A house with curtains on the outside doors, or with fences and walls, was seen as a threat to normal sociality.

The Sakalava were generally to be found—and were supposed to be found—outside their houses, in the company of others. “To stay alone in the house,” wrote Feeley-Harnik, “is considered a sure sign of evil intent.”
²⁰
Even the house itself could pose problems, Feeley-Harnik wrote, since it is meant to remove the occupants from the larger social order. “Secrecy and separation,”
she continued, “indicate at best a lack of generosity, a suspiciously anti-social striving for distinction.”
²¹