The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (12 page)

Language (
Chapter 10
), like religion, is unique to humans: in fact, it’s often considered the most important attribute distinguishing humans from (other) animals. While the median number of speakers of a language is only a few hundred to a few thousand individuals for most small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, members of many such societies are routinely multilingual. Modern Americans often assume that multilingualism should be discouraged, because it is supposed to hinder child language acquisition and immigrant assimilation. However, recent work suggests that multilingual people gain important life-long cognitive benefits. Nevertheless, languages are now disappearing so rapidly that 95% of the world’s languages will be extinct or moribund within a century if current trends continue. The consequences of this undoubted fact are as controversial as are the consequences of multilingualism: many people would welcome a world reduced to just a few widespread languages, while other people point to advantages that language diversity brings to societies as well as to individuals.

The last chapter (
Chapter 11
) is also the one of most direct practical relevance to us today. Most of us citizens of modern states will die of non-communicable diseases—diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, various cancers, and others—that are rare or unknown among traditional peoples, who nevertheless often proceed to acquire these diseases within a decade or two of adopting a Westernized lifestyle. Evidently,
something about the Westernized lifestyle brings on these diseases, and we could minimize our risk of dying of these commonest causes of our deaths if we could minimize those lifestyle risk factors. I illustrate these grim realities by the two examples of hypertension and Type-2 diabetes. Both of these diseases involve genes that must have been advantageous to us under conditions of traditional lifestyles, but that have become lethal under conditions of the Westernized lifestyle. Many modern individuals have reflected on these facts, modified their lifestyles accordingly, and thereby extended their lifespans and improved their quality of life. Thus, if these diseases kill us, it is with our own permission.

Finally, the Epilogue comes full cycle from the Port Moresby airport scene with which my Prologue began. It’s not until my arrival at Los Angeles airport that I begin my emotional reimmersion in the American society that is my home, after months in New Guinea. Despite the drastic differences between Los Angeles and New Guinea’s jungles, much of the world until yesterday lives on in our bodies and in our societies. The recent big changes began only 11,000 years ago even in the world region where they first appeared, began just a few decades ago in the most populous areas of New Guinea, and have barely begun in the few remaining still-uncontacted areas of New Guinea and the Amazon. But for those of us who have grown up in modern state societies, modern conditions of life are so pervasive, and so taken for granted, that it’s hard for us to notice the fundamental differences of traditional societies during short visits to them. Hence the Epilogue begins by recounting some of those differences as they strike me upon arriving at Los Angeles airport, and as they strike American children, or New Guinea and African villagers, who grew up in traditional societies and then moved to the West as teen-agers or adults. I have dedicated this book to one such friend, Meg Taylor (Dame Meg Taylor), who grew up in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and spent many years in the United States as her country’s Ambassador and as Vice President of the World Bank Group.
Page 468
briefly summarizes Meg’s experiences.

Traditional societies represent thousands of millennia-long natural experiments in organizing human lives. We can’t repeat those experiments by redesigning thousands of societies today in order to wait decades and observe the outcomes; we have to learn from the societies that already
ran the experiments. When we learn about features of traditional life, some of them are ones that we feel relieved to be rid of, and that make us appreciate our own societies better. Other features are ones that we are likely to envy, or to view their loss wistfully, or to ask whether we could selectively adopt or adapt them for ourselves. For instance, we certainly envy the traditional lack of the non-communicable diseases associated with the Westernized lifestyle. When we learn about traditional dispute resolution, child-rearing, treatment of the elderly, alertness to dangers, and routine multilingualism, we may also decide that some of those traditional features would be desirable and feasible for us to incorporate.

At minimum, I hope that you will come to share my fascination with the different ways in which other peoples have organized their lives. Beyond that fascination, you may decide that some of what works so well for them could also work well for you as an individual, and for us as a society.

A boundary
Mutually exclusive territories
Non-exclusive land use
Friends, enemies, and strangers
First contacts
Trade and traders
Market economies
Traditional forms of trade
Traditional trade items
Who trades what?
Tiny nations

Over much of the world today, citizens of many countries can travel freely. We face no restrictions on travel within our own country. To cross the border into another country, either we arrive unannounced and just show our passport (
Plate 34
), or else we have to obtain a visa in advance but can then travel without restrictions in that other country. We don’t have to ask permission to travel along roads or on public land. The laws of some countries even guarantee access to some private lands. For instance, in Sweden a landowner can exclude the public from his fields and gardens but not from his woods. We encounter thousands of strangers every day and think nothing of it. All of these rights we take for granted, without reflecting on how unthinkable they were almost everywhere in the world throughout human history and still are in parts of the world today. I’ll illustrate traditional conditions of land access by my experiences while visiting a mountain village in New Guinea. Those traditional conditions set the stage for understanding war and peace, childhood and old age, dangers, and all the other features of traditional societies that we shall explore in the remainder of this book.

I had come to the village in order to survey birds on the ridge rising immediately to the south. On the second day after my arrival, a few villagers offered to guide me along an established trail up to the ridge crest,
where I would pick a campsite for my surveys. The trail climbed through gardens above the village, then entered tall primary forest. After an hour and a half of steep climbing, we passed an abandoned hut in the middle of a small overgrown garden just below the ridge-line, at which the trail of our ascent ended in a T-junction. To the right from the junction, a good trail continued along the ridge-line.

Several hundred yards along that trail, I picked out a campsite just north of the ridge-line, i.e., on the side towards my new friends’ mountain village. In the opposite direction, to the south of the trail and ridge-line, the ridge sloped gently downhill through tall forests traversed by a gully in which I could hear from below the sound of a stream. I was delighted to have found such a beautiful and convenient site, at the highest local elevation and thus with the best chance of locating high-altitude bird species, offering easy access to gentle terrain good for bird-watching, as well as a nearby source of water for drinking, cooking, washing, and bathing. And so I proposed to my companions that, on the following day, I move up to the campsite and spend a few nights there along with two men to point out birds and to maintain the camp.

My friends nodded in agreement until I came to the mention of just two men staying in camp with me. At that point they shook their heads and insisted that this was a dangerous area, and that my camp had to be protected by many armed men. What a dreadful prospect for a bird-watcher! If there were many people, they would inevitably make noise, talk constantly, and scare birds away. Why, I asked, did I need such a large entourage, and what was so dangerous about this beautiful and innocent-looking forest?

The prompt answer: at the base of the ridge’s far side (its south side) were villages of bad people referred to as river people, enemies of my mountain friends. River people killed mountain people mainly by poison and sorcery, not by fighting openly with weapons. But the great-grandfather of one young mountain person had been shot and killed with arrows as he was sleeping in his garden hut some distance from the mountain village. The oldest man present during our conversation recalled seeing, as a child, the great-grandfather’s body with the arrows still in him after he had been brought back to the village, and recalled people crying over the body, and his own fear.

Would we have the “right,” I wondered, to camp on the ridge? The mountain people replied that the ridge-line itself formed the boundary between their own territory on the ridge’s north slope and the territory of the bad river people on the south slope. But the river people claimed some of the mountain people’s land beyond the ridge-line on the north side. Did I remember that abandoned hut and the overgrown garden just below the ridge-line? my friends asked. That hut and garden had been made by the evil river people, as a way of asserting their claim to land on the north side as well as on the south side of the ridge-line.