The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (40 page)

However, we know that these rosy predictions are only partly true. Yes, parents usually do take care of their children, who in turn often take care of their parents, and the younger generation as a whole often takes care of its elders. But these conclusions don’t hold for at least some kids in most societies, nor for most kids in some societies. Why not? What was wrong with our reasoning?

Our naive error (which evolutionary biologists now avoid) was that we failed to consider conflicts of interest between generations. Parents shouldn’t always make unlimited sacrifices, kids shouldn’t always be grateful, love has its limits, and people aren’t Darwinian calculating devices that constantly evaluate optimum transmission of their genes and culture and behave accordingly. All people, including old people, want a comfortable life for themselves, not just for their kids. There often are limits to the sacrifices that parents are willing to endure for their kids. Conversely, kids often are impatient to enjoy a comfortable life. They reason, quite correctly, that the more parental resources that the parents themselves consume, the fewer resources will remain available for the kids to enjoy. Even insofar as kids do behave instinctively as Darwinian calculating devices, natural selection teaches us that kids
shouldn’t
always take care of their elderly parents. There are many circumstances under which kids can improve transmission of their own genes or cultures by being stingy to, abandoning, or even killing their parents.

In what sorts of society “should” (by this reasoning) and do children (and the younger generation in general) neglect, abandon, or kill their parents (and the older generation in general)? The many reported cases involve societies for which old people become a serious handicap endangering the whole group’s safety. This situation arises under two different sets of circumstances. One set applies to nomadic hunter-gatherers who must shift camp from time to time. Without beasts of burden, the nomads have to carry everything on their backs: babies, children under the age of four unable to walk at the group’s pace, weapons, tools, all other material possessions, and food and water for the journey. To add to that load old or sick people unable to walk at all is difficult or impossible.

The other set of circumstances arises in environments, especially Arctic regions and deserts, where severe food shortages periodically occur, and where food surpluses large enough to carry the group through the period of shortage cannot be accumulated. If there isn’t enough food to keep everyone fit or just alive, the society must sacrifice its least valuable or least productive members; otherwise, everybody’s survival will be endangered.

However, it is not the case that all nomads and Arctic and desert peoples sacrifice all of their elderly. Some groups (such as the !Kung and African Pygmies) seem more reluctant to do so than are other groups (such as the Ache, Siriono, and Inuit). Within a group, the treatment of a particular old person may depend on whether a close relative is available to care for and defend the old person.

How are burdensome old people jettisoned? At the risk of my using language that may appear unfeeling or gruesome, there are five methods that can be arranged in a sequence of increasingly direct action. The most passive method is merely to neglect old people until they die: to ignore them, give them little food, let them starve, let them wander off, or let them die in their own filth. For example, this method has been reported among the Inuit of the Arctic, the Hopi of the North American deserts, the Witoto of tropical South America, and Aboriginal Australians.

The next method, practised in various forms by the Lapps (Saami) of northern Scandinavia, the San of the Kalahari Desert, the Omaha and Kutenai Indians of North America, and the Ache Indians of tropical South America, is intentionally to abandon an old or sick person when the rest of the group shifts camp. A variant of this method among the Ache, reserved for old men (but not for old women, who are killed outright), is to take men out of the forest to a “white man’s road” and leave them to walk off and never be heard from again. More often, a weak person is left in a shelter or in the camp being evacuated, and provided with some fire-wood, food, and water, so that if the abandoned person recovers strength, he or she can try to catch up with the rest of the group.

The anthropologist Allan Holmberg happened to be with a group of Bolivia’s Siriono Indians when such an abandonment occurred. Here is his account of what took place: “The band decided to make a move in the direction of the Rio Blanco. While they were making preparations for the journey, my attention was called to a middle-aged woman who was lying sick in her hammock, too sick to speak. I inquired of the chief what they planned to do with her. He referred me to her husband, who told me that she would be left to die because she was too ill to walk and because she was going to die anyway. Departure was scheduled for the following morning. I was on hand to observe the event. The entire band walked out of the camp without so much as a farewell to the dying woman. Even her husband departed without saying goodbye. She was left with fire, a calabash of water, her personal belongings, and nothing more. She was too sick to protest.” Holmberg himself was ill and went off to a mission station for medical treatment. When he came back to the campsite three weeks later, the woman was not there, so he followed a trail to the group’s next campsite, where he found the woman’s remains stripped to her bones by ants and vultures. “She had tried her utmost to follow the fortunes of the band, but had failed and had experienced the same fate that is accorded all Siriono whose days of utility are over.”

A third method for disposing of the elderly, reported for the Chukchi and the Yakut of Siberia, the Crow Indians of North America, the Inuit, and the Norse, involves the older individual choosing or being encouraged to commit suicide, by jumping off a cliff, going out to sea, or seeking death in battle. The New Zealand physician and sailor David
Lewis related how an aging friend of his, the navigator Tevake from the Reef Islands in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, made a formal farewell and then set off to sea alone on a boat journey from which he did not return and evidently did not intend to return.

Whereas that third method constitutes unassisted suicide, the fourth method can be described either as assisted suicide or else as killing with the victim’s cooperation, e.g., by strangling, stabbing, or burying alive. Old Chukchi people who submitted to voluntary death were praised and assured that they would receive one of the best dwelling places in the next world. The wife of the victim held his head on her knees, while two men on opposite sides pulled tight a rope around his neck. Among the Kaulong people of southwestern New Britain, strangling of a widow by her brothers or son immediately after her husband’s death was routine until the 1950s. This act was an obligation that, although emotionally shattering for the executioner, was considered shameful to avoid. One Kaulong son described to Jane Goodale how his mother humiliated him into doing it: “When I hesitated, my mother stood up and spoke loudly so all could hear and said that the reason I hesitated was that I wished to have sex with her.” Sick and old people in the Banks Islands begged their friends to end their suffering by burying them alive, and the friends did so as an act of kindness: “a man at Mota buried his brother, who was in extreme weakness from influenza; but he [the survivor] heaped the earth loosely over his [the victim’s] head, and wept, and went from time to time to ask him whether he were still alive.”

The final widespread method is to kill the victim violently without the victim’s cooperation or consent, again by strangling or burying alive, or else by suffocating, stabbing, delivering an ax blow to the head, or breaking the neck or back. One Ache Indian man interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado described his methods of killing old women (as mentioned above, old men were instead left to walk off): “I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts [classificatory aunts] when they were still moving (alive)…. I would step on them, then they all died, there by the big river…. I didn’t used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. When they were still moving I would break them [their backs or necks]…. I wouldn’t care for old women; all by myself I would stick them [with his bow].”

Our reaction to these accounts of spouses, children, brothers or sisters, or fellow band members killing or abandoning an old or sick person is likely to be one of horror—just as is our reaction to the accounts in
Chapter 5
of a mother killing her newborn baby if it is a twin or born damaged. But, just as in those cases of infanticide, we have to ask ourselves: what else could a nomadic society, or a society with not enough food for the whole group, do with its elderly? Throughout their lives, the victims have already watched old or sick people being abandoned or killed, and have probably already done it to their own parents. It is the form of death that they expect, and in which in many cases they cooperate. We are fortunate that we do not face that same ordeal ourselves as victim or suicide assister or killer, because we have the good fortune to live in societies with surplus food and medical care. As Winston Churchill wrote of the Japanese admiral Kurita, who had to choose between two equally awful courses of action in wartime, “Those who have endured a similar ordeal may judge him.” In fact, many of you readers of this book have endured or will endure a similar ordeal yourselves, when you find yourself forced to decide whether to tell the physician caring for your aged or sick parent in failing health that the time has come to halt further aggressive medical intervention, or just to administer pain-killers, sedatives, and palliative care.

What useful services can old people perform for traditional societies? From a cold-blooded adaptive perspective, societies in which old people do remain useful will tend to prosper if those societies care for their elderly. More often, of course, young people who care for their elders couch their reasons not in terms of that evolutionary advantage but in terms of love, respect, and obligation. However, when a group of hunter-gatherers is starving and debating whom they can afford to feed, cold-blooded considerations may be voiced explicitly. Of the services rendered by older people, the first ones that I shall mention are also performed by younger people but are still within the power of older people, while other services involve skills perfected by long experience and hence especially suitable to old people.

People eventually reach an age at which men can no longer spear to death a lion, and women can no longer trot miles with a heavy load to and from the mongongo nut grove. Nevertheless, there are other ways in which older people can continue to obtain food for their grandchildren and thereby ease the provisioning burden on their children and children-in-law. Ache men continue to hunt and gather into their 60s by concentrating on small animals, fruit, and palm products and breaking trail when the band shifts camp. Older !Kung men set animal traps, gather plant food, and join younger men on hunts in order to interpret animal tracks and propose strategies. Among Hadza hunter-gatherer women of Tanzania, the age group working the hardest consists of post-menopausal grandmothers (
Plate 21
), who spend on the average seven hours a day foraging for tubers and fruit—even though they no longer have dependent children of their own to feed. But they do have hungry grandchildren, and the more time that a Hadza grandmother spends foraging for food, the faster her grandchildren gain weight as a result. Similar benefits have been described for 18th- and 19th-century Finnish and Canadian farmers: analyses of church and genealogical records show that more children survive to adulthood if they have a living grandmother than if both grandmothers are dead, and that every decade that a post-menopausal woman survives past age 50 is associated with her children producing on the average two extra children of their own (presumably because of the grandmother’s help).

Another service that older people can render even past the age of digging tubers seven hours a day is baby-sitting. That frees up the older person’s children and children-in-law to spend more time foraging unencumbered for their own children, the grandchildren of the older person. !Kung grandparents often take care of their grandchildren uninterruptedly for several consecutive days, thereby enabling their children to undertake overnight hunting and gathering trips on which the grandchildren would be an encumbrance. A main reason that elderly Samoans give today for migrating to the United States is to care for their grandchildren, and thus to enable their children to hold jobs outside the house and to face fewer burdens inside the house.

Old people can make things for their grown children to use, such as tools, weapons, baskets, pots, and woven textiles (
Plate 22
). For example,
older Semang hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula were noted for making blowguns. This is an area where the elderly not only try to hang on to earlier abilities but are likely to excel: the best basket-makers and potters are often older people.

Other areas in which abilities grow with age include medicine, religion, entertainment, relationships, and politics. Traditional midwives and medicine men are often old, as are magicians and priests, prophets and sorcerers, and the leaders of songs, games, dances, and initiation rites. Older people enjoy a huge social advantage, insofar as they have spent a lifetime building up a network of relationships, into which they can then introduce their children. Political leaders are usually older people, so much so that the phrase “tribal elders” has become virtually a synonym for tribal leaders. That remains generally true even in modern state societies: for instance, the average age on taking office is 54 for American presidents and 53 for American Supreme Court justices.

But perhaps the most important function of older people in traditional societies is one that may not have occurred to readers of this book. In a literate society the main repositories of information are written or digital sources: encyclopedias, books, magazines, maps, diaries, notes, letters, and now the Internet. If we want to ascertain some fact, we look it up in a written source or else online. But that option doesn’t exist for a pre-literate society, which must rely instead on human memories. Hence the minds of older people are the society’s encyclopedias and libraries. Time and time again in New Guinea, when I am interviewing local people and ask them some question to which they are unsure of the answer, my informants pause and say, “Let’s ask the old man [or the old woman].” Older people know the tribe’s myths and songs, who is related to whom, who did what to whom when, the names and habits and uses of hundreds of species of local plants and animals, and where to go to find food when conditions are poor. Hence caring for older people becomes a matter of life or death, just as caring for one’s hydrographic charts is a matter of life or death for modern boat captains. I’ll illustrate this value of old people by the story of a case involving knowledge essential for a tribe’s survival.