Eavesdropping (13 page)

The language of the Sakalava also contained an interesting clue to some perceived linkage between domestication and personal dishonesty. The word
mody
meant “at home” or “heading home,” but it also meant “to pretend to be what one is not.”
²²
Later we will have opportunities to return to this intriguing connection when we examine a new being that was nurtured behind domestic walls—the public self.

A few years after Feeley-Harnik presented her study of the Sakalava, Leslie and John Haviland described the village of Nabenchauk, Mexico. Nabenchauk was one of a cluster of Indian villages known collectively as the township of Zinacantan, nestled in the high valleys of the mountains in southern Mexico.
²³

Like the Sakalava, the Zinacantecos had ambivalent feelings about privacy. “There are,” wrote the Havilands, “strict canons of privacy which pertain to the physical intrusion by others into private space.”
²⁴
These canons were implemented, in part, with fences. All the houses were fenced in, and villagers were forbidden from passing through the fence without permission. They also had no windows—if the Zinacantecos wanted more light they had to open the door. This was not a matter of neglect; it was due to active resistance. A few years earlier the government had given them houses with large, unshuttered windows. When the Indians moved in, they papered the windows over or bricked them in.

But as private as the Zinacanteco homes were built to be, staying indoors, or even closing the house door, was considered “a gross and open admission of being up to no good.” “Prying,” wrote the Havilands, “with the eyes and ears tuned to all goings on around one, is an ordinary behaviour in Nabenchauk. One expects that all one’s business that is carried on where it
could
be seen or overheard
is, in fact, seen and overheard. Similarly, one presumes that ignoring any aspect of others that can be perceived is simply foolish.”
²⁵

To escape this microscopic existence, the Zinacantecos avoided using the area outside the house—even seemed, in some sense, to be afraid of it. Entering truly public places like the waterhole, the village paths, and the shops was tantamount to going on stage, for “the eyes of any of fifty houses may be watching.”
²⁶
Even conversations were a contest in information control, with one party “trying his best to pump information from his interlocutor, while the interlocutor uses every ploy he can to evade and deflect the other’s purpose.”
²⁷

Clearly, the Zinacantecos and the Sakalava—two of many small-scale societies in which there was nervousness about personal information—were ambivalent about domestic walls. They were also hypocritical, for they were desperate to know what was going on behind the walls of others, but just as desperately fought to keep secret what was taking place behind their own. What was going on here? What were the
perceptual
consequences of living behind walls?

It helps to consider the structure of sedentary societies. Where tiny hunter-gatherer bands had been mostly egalitarian, the larger agriculture-based settlements were structured in a more hierarchical fashion.
²⁸
In such arrangements there is heightened competition to acquire resources. Those who succeed may be seen as selfish, their success occurring at the expense of others. It is likely that many of the early settlers were tempted to conceal obvious signs of success, including any unusual possessions, like scrub-jays that bury their food more strategically when other jays can see them, or Samoans who eat in closed houses.

This hierarchical structure was functional. As hunter-gatherers, they had used their eyes and ears to prevent squabbles from arising, frequently by nipping things in the bud. When disputes were irresolvable, they occasionally appealed to outside sources for mediation, or as Richard Lee said, “voted with their feet.”
But relocation was no longer an easy option when people began to see themselves as residential, with fixed addresses. In agricultural villages, leaders were needed to deal with the more complex issues arising within these larger communities, and to resolve the increased number of disputes.
²⁹

The new sedentists needed to keep an eye on each other, and they were acquiring new reasons for doing so.
³⁰
Less and less did they look
horizontally
at individuals who had to be reminded of the need to share, collaborate, and play by a common set of rules. Increasingly, they looked
vertically
at people who had achieved higher status, or at competitors who were aspiring to greater power.

Rapoport was not sure why people built houses in places where the weather was pleasant, but he speculated that the reasons may have had something to do with religion, status, or some “other” factor. In his book on
The Domestication of the Human Species
, New Zealand anthropologist Peter Wilson speculated on what this “other” factor might be. It was surveillance. When groups enlarged, he suggested, openly living people couldn’t stand the perceptual pressure.

It is widely known that human settlements, like primate colonies, have an optimum size. When they exceed this size, as the Kung camps occasionally did, they tend to fragment. Some of the members take off, a serious threat if the evacuees are skilled hunters. But Wilson had a different idea. “One immediate cause of such fission,” he suggested, is “the strain between neighbors unable to trust one another’s privacy or countenance one another’s surveillance … too diligent a scrutiny of the comings, goings, and doings of neighbors can quickly build to resentment, evasion, and the eruption of hostility.”
³¹

What Wilson’s idea boils down to is this. Life in transparent or even semi-transparent societies can become hard to handle. If it
does, continuous self-exposure is likely to be withdrawn when the objects of this attention—the other tribe members—cannot take it anymore. But it may not be enough to feign a preoccupation with objects, or face silently away from the group.

The most dramatic exercises in withdrawal occur in precisely those societies that display the greatest exposure. The Mehinacu pushed the two extremes about as far as they could. On a personal level, they had a number of ways to achieve social isolation. They could plunge into the forest that surrounded the village, taking any of the paths that led through the thick foliage to small clearings. There, the villagers were free to carry on clandestine activities with little fear of detection.

When they were at home, villagers were protected by a code of etiquette that forbade spontaneous invasion.
³²
But the more significant feature of Mehinacu life was the existence of
formal seclusion rituals
when, by custom, villagers were expected to remove themselves from village life for extended periods of time. These intervals coincided with important stages in human life history, including infancy and adolescence, as well as important life events, such as parenthood and the loss of a spouse. These absences, according to Gregor, gave the Mehinacu “relief from socially abrasive interaction and surveillance.”
³³

Peter Wilson’s claim related to surveillance as suffered by the “victim.” But consider a reverse issue: the schedule of the observer. If small groups of openly living humans spent much of their time looking, then as their groups swelled, the lookers would eventually reach some outer limit on their capacity to observe, and something would have to give. The choice would not be an easy one, however. If individuals cut back on their looking time, in a short while the rising tide of humanity, and the machinations of an increasingly complex society, would leave them frightfully unaware, vulnerable, and out of step. If, on the other hand, they continued to crank up their vigilance in pace with population growth, they would soon be unable to do
anything else
.

With more and more strangers to keep track of, individuals living with free and easy sensory awareness were driven to distraction in the literal sense of the phrase. They needed a way of reducing the time they had been spending, like monkeys in small groups, looking up and over their shoulders every few seconds. Work—pounding grain, making clothes and tools, raising infants—was suffering, and the human nervous system can only take so much.

Before the construction of substantial walls, our historical ancestors had to keep an eye on the area around their encampment. Like the other primates, they needed to glance up every few seconds in order to survey the immediate area. Lacking perceptual shelter, they were susceptible to the scrutiny of others at any given time, and they had to continually look out for potentially meddlesome people. After their occupation of secure dwellings, the inhabitants were able, to an unprecedented degree, to relieve their senses of external responsibilities. But now there was no easy way to keep track of whatever was going on outside.

Withdrawal let all the watchers off the hook. “The value of isolation as an exposure-reducing device becomes much clearer,” wrote Gregor, “when we examine not only the relief afforded the individual in isolation, but also
the reduction in surveillance and exposure that his seclusion provides for the rest of the tribe
.”
³⁴
When an over-exposed member of the tribe sought perceptual refuge, it freed everyone else from the possibility of being observed and engaged by him. But walls, being bidirectional, also offered perceptual benefits to the insiders. At the same time, walls made it harder for outsiders to eavesdrop in, and for insiders to eavesdrop out. Walls enabled residents to quit looking up and around every few seconds, the way wild humans, and wild animals, do. Privacy in its first installment—social privation—gave everyone a break.

An important benefit that was enjoyed by the newly privatized was solitude—the freedom to rest, reflect, and enjoy one’s own
company, the feeling of peace that comes, in the words of Janna Malamud Smith, from “not having to take account of others.”
³⁵

Years later Sasha Weitman would write that privacy, though “ordinarily thought of as the right of a person against the encroachment of society,” is “also
society’s right
, that is to say,
the right of others
not to have to be subjected to the sights and sounds of desirable experiences that they have not been invited to share. In short, walls, fences, curtains, venetian blinds, doors, and generally, all the partitions erected to ensure privacy are just as necessary for those
outside
as they are for those
inside
.”
³⁶

In many of the new dwellings, the walls were made of mud or wattle-and-daub, a network of sticks and twigs that were woven together and covered with mud or clay. Others were made of stone.
³⁷
These new barriers could be trusted to block a great deal of visual information and suppress some of the sounds of speech. If eavesdroppers were to keep abreast of socially relevant events, they would have to look for structural faults, and to work harder than ever to extract what they needed.

Everyone was building. Walls were in. For the first time in their history, humans were on the road to domesticity. People, everywhere, were beginning to settle down. They pulled off this amazing feat in less than ten thousand years, from start to finish. But something was not quite right.

Our ancestors were discovering interior life, finding ways to reside within it, but the transition to domesticity was proving difficult. When the first settlers began to build walls, they were, unbeknownst to them, experimenting with social technology. To be sure, when the weather turned nasty they could go inside and momentarily escape discomfort. This satisfied what our elementary school teachers described as the basic human need for shelter. But when they
stayed
inside, these more committed domesticates were
interrupting a visual conversation that had been going on for the entirety of human history.

In this sense, the retreat to enclosures was an adventurous use of space, one that put into play whole new sets of physical and social meanings. When space is inhabited, as social geographers remind us, it is changed into a place that is bounded and controlled by rules. Going indoors was one thing, but living there could be inadvertently asocial. It was one thing to seek relief from bad weather. In the new cultures that were forming, this would only be seen as an exercise in good judgment. But what were outsiders to think when a person
remained inside
when it was not all that inclement or, indeed, was even pleasant? This lent itself to sinister interpretations, as when a neutral article of clothing like a balaclava is worn on a hot summer day or in the boarding area of an airline terminal.

When people occupied their homes
unnecessarily
, it aroused suspicions, as the Sakalava experience reveals. Privacy was inseparable from secrecy. What were people doing
in there
, people wondered, that they cannot do
out her
e? The partially domesticated mind could imagine almost anything, from sexual misconduct to child abuse—things that in the past were discouraged by community gaze. But this was not purely a matter of morality and personal safety. Civil beings had always granted each other “space,” had voluntarily extended necessary amounts of psychological freedom. When groups were small these concessions, along with the occasional furlough, were enough for people to keep things on an even keel. But walls were not a civil accommodation, granted by others.

As it turned out, the personal cost was surprisingly low for most of the visually deprived, at least in the short term, for the newly sequestered had an ability that the other primates lacked: they could talk, and privacy was extending the utility of this uniquely human talent. Speech enabled perceptual bystanders to pool their individual observations and piece together a complete story for each of their associates.