The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (33 page)

In Western state societies today, we grow up learning a universal code of morality that is promulgated every week in our houses of worship, and codified in our laws. The sixth commandment declares simply, “Thou shalt not kill”—with no distinction between how we should behave towards citizens of our own state and towards citizens of other states. Then,
after at least 18 years of such moral training, we take young adults, train them to be soldiers, give them guns, and command that they should now forget all of that former upbringing forbidding them to kill.

It’s no wonder that many modern soldiers can’t bring themselves in battle to point their gun at an enemy and fire. Those who do kill often suffer long-lasting post-traumatic stress disorder (e.g., about one-third of American soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan). When they come home, far from boasting about killing, they have nightmares and don’t talk about it at all, unless to other veterans. (Imagine how you, if you are not yourself a war veteran, would feel about an American soldier who described to you proudly the personal details of how he killed an Iraqi, or even how he killed a Nazi soldier in World War II.) In the course of my life I have had hundreds of conversations with American and European veterans, some of them close friends or close relatives, but not one has ever related to me how he killed, as have many of my New Guinea friends.

In contrast, traditional New Guineans from their earliest childhood onwards saw warriors going out and coming back from fighting, saw the dead bodies and the wounds of their relatives and clansmen killed by the enemy, heard stories of killing, heard fighting talked about as the highest ideal, and witnessed successful warriors talking proudly about their killings and being praised for it. Remember the Wilihiman Dani boys excitedly jabbing their small spears into the dying Asuk-Balek man, and the six-year-old Wilihiman Dani boys shooting arrows at six-year-old Widaia Dani boys under the tutelage of their fathers (
Chapter 3
). Of course New Guineans end up feeling unconflicted about killing the enemy: they have had no contrary message to unlearn.

On reflection, for Americans old enough to recall Japan’s 1941 bombing of our naval base at Pearl Harbor (viewed by us as a treacherous outrage, because it was not preceded by a declaration of war), the intense hatred of enemy people, and the craving for revenge, that traditional people learn from their elders should not feel so remote after all. We Americans of the 1940s grew up in an atmosphere saturated with demonization of the Japanese, who did indeed do unspeakably cruel things to us and to other peoples (think of the Bataan Death March, the Sandakan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, and other such events). Intense hatred and fear of Japanese became widespread even among American civilians who never saw
either a live Japanese soldier or the dead body of an American relative killed by the Japanese; my New Guinea friends did see the corpses of their relatives. Hundreds of thousands of American men volunteered to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, often in face-to-face combat, by brutal methods that included bayonets and flame-throwers. Soldiers who killed Japanese in particularly large numbers or with notable bravery were publicly decorated with medals, and those who died in combat were posthumously remembered as heroes who had died nobly.

Then, less than four years after Pearl Harbor, we Americans were told to stop hating and killing Japanese, and to forget the slogan that had dominated American life: “Remember Pearl Harbor!” Many Americans alive during those years have struggled for the rest of their lives with what they were taught and subsequently told to unlearn—especially if they were directly affected then, for instance through having survived the Bataan Death March, or through having had close friends and relatives who did not come back. Yet those legacies of American attitudes resulted from just four years of experience, for most of us second-hand. Having grown up during the anti-Japanese hysteria of World War II, I find it unsurprising that the Wilihiman Dani became so passionate about killing the Widaia Dani, when those attitudes were inculcated into them for decades by both teaching and extensive first-hand experience. The thirst for revenge isn’t nice, but it can’t be ignored. It has to be understood, acknowledged, and addressed—in ways other than actually taking revenge.

Comparisons of child-rearing
Childbirth
Infanticide
Weaning and birth interval
On-demand nursing
Infant-adult contact
Fathers and allo-parents
Responses to crying infants Physical punishment
Child autonomy
Multi-age playgroups
Child play and education
Their kids and our kids

On one of my visits to New Guinea I met a young man named Enu, whose life story struck me then as remarkable. Enu had grown up in an area where child-rearing was extremely repressive, and where children were heavily burdened by obligations and by feelings of guilt. By the time he was five years old, Enu decided that he had had enough of that lifestyle. He left his parents and most of his relatives and moved to another tribe and village, where he had relatives willing to take care of him. There, Enu found himself in an adoptive society with laissez-faire child-rearing practices at the opposite extreme from his natal society’s practices. Young children were considered to have responsibility for their own actions, and were allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. For example, if a baby was playing next to a fire, adults did not intervene. As a result, many adults in that society had burn scars, which were legacies of their behavior as infants.

Both of those styles of child-rearing would be rejected with horror in Western industrial societies today. But the laissez-faire style of Enu’s adoptive society is not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted, and who
are allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots, and fires (
Plate 19
).

Why should we be interested in child-rearing practices of traditional hunter-gatherer, farmer, and herder societies? One answer is an academic one: children account for up to half of a society’s population. A sociologist who ignored half of a society’s members couldn’t claim to understand that society. Another academic answer is that every feature of adult life has a developmental component. One can’t understand a society’s practices of dispute resolution and marriage without knowing how children become socialized into those practices.

Despite those good reasons for us to be interested in child-rearing in non-Western societies, it has received much less study than it deserves. Part of the problem is that many of the scholars who go out to study other cultures are young, don’t have children of their own, aren’t experienced in talking with or observing children, and mainly describe and interview adults. Anthropology, education, psychology, and other academic fields have their own ideologies, which at any given time focus on a certain range of research topics, and which impose blinders on what phenomena are considered worth studying.

Even studies of child development that claim to be broadly cross-cultural—e.g., comparing German, American, Japanese, and Chinese children—are actually sampling societies all drawn from the same narrow slice of human cultural diversity. All of those cultures just mentioned are similar in sharing centralized government, economic specialization, and socioeconomic inequality, and in being very atypical of the wide range of human cultural diversity. As a result, those and other state-level modern societies have converged on a small range of child-rearing practices that by historical standards are unusual. Those practices include systems of school education administered by a state (as opposed to learning as part of everyday life and play), protection of children by police and not just by parents, same-age playgroups (as opposed to children of all ages routinely playing together), children and parents sleeping in separate bedrooms (as opposed to sleeping together in the same bed), and mothers nursing infants (if the infants are nursed at all) on a schedule often set by the mother rather than by the infant.