The World Until Yesterday

These suggestions of some selected references are for those interested in reading further. Rather than listing extensive bibliographies, I have favored citing recent publications that do provide extensive bibliographies of the earlier literature. In addition, I cite some key earlier books and articles that I think may be of particular interest to readers, or that I specifically quote in my text. A journal title (in italics) is followed by the volume number, followed after a colon by the first and last page numbers, and then by the year of publication in parentheses. Because this book is aimed at a wide audience, I have not footnoted individual statements in the text, and the references instead are designed to supplement individual topics and whole chapters. To reduce this book’s cost, I print here only the references of most general relevance: those to the whole book, and those to the Prologue. The remaining references, to Chapters 1–11 and to the Epilogue, are posted online on a freely available Web site (http://www.jareddiamondbooks.com).

References applicable to this whole book

I provide here three sets of references or comments: references to a few books especially useful for the purposes of this volume, because they provide explicitly comparative information on many societies; explanation of references to the names of individuals whom I met; and references for 39 traditional societies around the world from which I have frequently drawn examples in my book.

General comparative references. An excellent comparative study of human societies around the world especially appropriate to readers of my book is Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). This volume compares many aspects of human societies at different levels of organization, summarizes case studies of 19 specific societies, provides many references to the literature on each of those societies, and uses a more finely divided classification of societies than my four-fold classification into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. An equally excellent comparative account of Aboriginal Australian societies is Ian Keen, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004). As do Johnson and Earle for the world, Keen provides seven case studies sampling the range of geography, environment, and social organization of Native Australians. Three books that specifically survey hunter-gatherer societies around the world are Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine, 1968); Frances Dahlberg, ed., Woman the Gatherer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Richard Lee and Richard Daly, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). A valuable cross-cultural survey often consulted by cultural anthropologists is a project of the Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Center established at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of George Murdock. For hundreds of pre-industrial societies around the world, it coded over a thousand cultural variables. Tabulations of its data include George Murdock, Ethnographic Atlas (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967); Herbert Barry III and Alice Schlegel, Cross-Cultural Samples and Codes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); and the Web sites http://www.yale.edu/hraf, http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu, and http://ehrafarchaeology.yale.edu.

Names of individual New Guineans. My text includes numerous anecdotes of conversations or events that transpired while I was bird-watching or chatting with individual New Guinea friends. While an anecdote by itself doesn’t establish anything, it can be a useful way to illustrate, and to put a human face on, a general point. It is standard practice among journalists to provide the true names, identifying details, and localities of individuals mentioned, so that others may contact and further question the individual and thereby obtain new knowledge. That was also formerly the practice among anthropologists, and it was my practice in the past.

However, anthropologists now appreciate that their informants may be vulnerable and may suffer harm if their behavior and views become known. Cultural misunderstandings can easily arise, for example when a New Guinea villager is contacted out of the blue by a stranger with whom the New Guinean does not have an on-going relationship, and whose motives and explanations are unclear, and who may mislead or exploit the New Guinean. Hence it is now anthropological and sociological practice to change (fictionalize) or conceal the names of study locations and informants. In any ethnographic research one is now expected to avoid revealing details that would make it possible to trace a specific source for social data. As one anthropologist friend explained it to me, “The idea behind this practice is to protect informants from others who may want to find them or harm them for a variety of reasons.” The code of ethics of the American Anthropological Association now states, “Anthropological researchers have primary ethical obligations to the people…with whom they work. Those obligations can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge.” For these reasons, throughout this book I have followed current anthropological practice, and I have consistently removed or changed names and identifying details when I recount stories or events in the lives of my New Guinea friends.

Frequently cited studies. For the reasons explained in the Prologue, I have repeatedly cited studies of a sample of 39 traditional societies around the world, so that readers can gain a sense of how different aspects of a particular society fit together. I group together here some references for accounts of these societies, rather than providing references one by one under the chapter in which I first mention that particular society. The 39 societies include 10 from New Guinea and neighboring islands, 7 from Australia, 5 each from Eurasia and Africa and South America, and 7 from North America.

New Guinea. Dani: books by Johan Broekhuijse, Karl Heider, Robert Gardner, and Peter Matthiessen, with details given under the Further Readings for Chapter 3. Daribi: Roy Wagner, The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and Alliance in New Guinea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) and Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Enga: Polly Wiessner and Akii Tumu, Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and Warfare in Papua New Guinea (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); plus references in Johnson and Earle (2000: see above), especially to the books and papers of Mervyn Meggitt. Fayu: Sabine Kuegler, Dschungelkind (München: Droemer, 2005). My quotations from that book are drawn from that German edition; its slightly shortened English translation appeared as Sabine Kuegler, Child of the Jungle (New York: Warner Books, 2005). Two other books by Kuegler that discuss the Fayu are Sabine Kuegler, Ruf des Dschungels (München: Droemer, 2006) and Sabine Kuegler, Jägerin und Gejagte (München: Droemer, 2009). Fore: Ronald Berndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among a New Guinea Mountain People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Hinihon: Angella Meinerzag, Being Mande: Personhood, Land, and Naming System Among the Hinihon in the Adelbert Range/Papua New Guinea (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 2007). Kaulong: Jane Goodale (not to be confused with the primatologist Jane Goodall), To Sing with Pigs Is Human: the Concept of Person in Papua New Guinea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). Mailu Island: Bronislaw Malinowski, Natives of Mailu (Adelaide: Royal Society of South Australia, 1915). Trobriand Islands: see bibliography by Johnson and Earle (2000, above). Tsembaga Maring: Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, 2nd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1984); plus bibliography by Johnson and Earle (2000, above).

Australia. Ian Keen (2004, above) gives bibliographies for seven societies: the Ngarinyin of the Northwest, the Yolngu of Arnhem Land, the Sandbeach of Cape York, the Yuwaaliyaay of interior New South Wales, the Kunai of the southeast, the Pitjantjatjara of the Western Desert, and the Wiil and Minong of the Southwest.

Eurasia. Agta of the Philippines: Thomas Headland, Why Foragers Do Not Become Farmers: A Historical Study of a Changing Ecosystem and Its Effect on a Negrito Hunter-Gatherer Group in the Philippines (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1986); John Early and Thomas Headland, Population Dynamics of a Philippine Rain Forest People: The San Ildefonso Agta (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). Ainu of Japan: Hitoshi Watanabe, The Ainu Ecosystem: Environment and Group Structure (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973). Andaman Islanders of the Bay of Bengal: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1948); Lidio Cipriani, The Andaman Islanders (New York: Praeger, 1966). Kirghiz of Afghanistan and Nganasan of Siberia: see bibliography by Johnson and Earle (2000, above).

Africa. Hadza of Tanzania: Frank Marlowe, The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Kristen Hawkes, James O’Connell, and Nicholas Blurton Jones, “Hadza children’s foraging: juvenile dependency, social arrangements and mobility among hunter-gatherers,” Current Anthropology 36: 688–700 (1995), “Hadza women’s time allocation, offspring provisioning and the evolution of post-menopausal lifespans,” Current Anthropology 38: 551–577 (1997), and “Hunting and nuclear families: some lessons from the Hadza about men’s work,” Current Anthropology 42: 681–709 (2001). !Kung of southwestern Africa: Nancy Howell, Demography of the Dobe !Kung, 2nd ed. (New York: Aldine de Gruiter, 2000) and Life Histories of the !Kung: Food, Fatness, and Well-being over the Life-span (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Richard Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Lorna Marshall, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). Nuer of the Sudan: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer of the Sudan: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). Pygmies of Central Africa (consisting actually of at least 15 ethnolinguistic groups of African forest foragers): Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Touchstone, 1962), for the Mbuti group; Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, ed., African Pygmies (Orlando: Academic Press, 1986); Barry Hewlett, Intimate Fathers: The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991) and Bonnie Hewlett, Listen, Here Is a Story: Ethnographic Life Narratives from Aka and Ngandu Women of the Congo Basin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), for the Aka group; and Barry Hewlett and Jason Fancher, “Central Africa hunter-gatherer research traditions,” in Vicki Cummings et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press), for an annotated bibliography. Turkana of Kenya: see bibliography by Johnson and Earle (2000, above).

North America. Calusa of Florida: Randolph Widmer, The Evolution of the Calusa: A Nonagricultural Chiefdom on the Southwest Florida Coast (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). Chumash of the California mainland: Lynn Gamble, The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting among Complex Hunter-Gatherers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Island Chumash of California: Douglas Kennett, The Island Chumash: Behavioral Ecology of a Maritime Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Iñupiat of northwest Alaska: Ernest Burch Jr., The World System of the Iñupiaq Eskimos: Alliance and Conflict (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Alaska North Slope Inuit, Great Basin Shoshone, and Northwest Coast Indians: see bibliographies by Johnson and Earle (2000, above).

South America. Ache of Paraguay: Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996). Machiguenga of Peru: see bibliography by Johnson and Earle (2000, above). Piraha of Brazil: Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (New York: Pantagon, 2008). Siriono of Bolivia: Allan Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969). Yanomamo of Brazil and Venezuela: Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamo, 5th ed. (New York: Wadsworth, 1997); and bibliography by Johnson and Earle (2000, above).

References applicable to the Prologue: At the Airport

Gavin Souter, New Guinea: The Last Unknown (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964) provides a good account of the early exploration of New Guinea, in a book ending a dozen years before Papua New Guinea became independent. My online references for Chapter 1 give citations for books describing and illustrating first contacts between Australians and New Guinea Highlanders.

As for why Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies are WEIRD by the standards of more traditional societies over the rest of the world, Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan explain the reasons briefly in “Most people are not WEIRD,” Nature 466: 29 (2010), and at more length in “The Weirdest people in the world?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61–135 (2010).

Chapter 14 of my book Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997) discusses the evolution of societies from bands to states according to the classification used in my present book, while Johnson and Earle (2000, cited above) discuss those transitions in more detail and with a more finely divided classification of societies. Classic accounts of the classification of human societies include two books by Elman Service: Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962) and Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975).

Some classic books of anthropology that provide examples of the different approaches mentioned in my text to explain differences among human societies are as follows: John Bodley, The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach (London: Sharpe, 2003); Timothy Earle, Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of Political Economies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002); Timothy Earle, ed., Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York: Random House, 1979); Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972); Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Crowell, 1968); Claude Leví-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1963); Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955); Alfred Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

Kim Hill et al., “Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure,” Science 331: 1286–1289 (2011) analyze the patterns of who is actually related to whom in 32 present-day foraging bands.

The quotation on page 477, about the difficulties of interpreting field observations of modern traditional societies, comes from page 15 of Ian Keen’s 2004 book cited above.

Pioneering studies of methodologically rigorous oral history are two books by Jan Vansina: Oral Tradition: a Study in Historical Methodology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) and Oral Tradition as History (London: James Currey, 1985). For readers interested in exploring some fascinating aspects of societal variation that I do not discuss, thereby earning myself the gratitude of readers for reducing the length of this already long book, one suggestion is Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why (New York: Free Press, 2003). On his page 43 Nisbett briefly discusses cognitive differences between hunter-gatherers, traditional farming peoples, and industrial peoples. Joseph Henrich et al., eds., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) discuss differences among traditional and industrial societies in their sense of fairness, reciprocity, and pursuit of self-interest.

For a detailed case study illustrating the difficulties of transferring one society’s practices and lessons to another society, see Elizabeth Watson, Living Terraces in Ethiopia: Konso Landscape, Culture, and Development (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2009).

Sources of knowledge about traditional societies

On pages 23–24 I briefly summarized our four sources of information, blurring into each other and each with its own advantages and disadvantages, about traditional societies. For readers (especially scholars) interested in learning more about these various sources, I now provide a more extended discussion.

The most obvious method, and the source of most of the information in this book, is to send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people, and to carry out a study focusing on some specific topic. The scientists variously identify themselves as practitioners of different disciplines, including anthropologists, biologists, economists, ethnographers, geneticists, historians, linguists, physicians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. The authors publish their results as scientific articles or books, often frame their study at the outset in terms of some particular question or hypothesis to be tested, and often (especially nowadays) gather quantitative data to be presented in tables of numbers. As applied to traditional human societies, this is the scientific approach that has evolved over centuries as the best approach for obtaining reliable knowledge of the real world, whether it’s the world of human societies, or else the worlds of bacteria, molecules, rocks, or galaxies.

Two main types of difficulty have arisen in applying this approach to the study of traditional human societies. Naturally, these difficulties do not invalidate such studies; they merely need to be borne in mind in interpreting the conclusions, and they explain why we resort to other sources of information as well. The Australian anthropologist Ian Keen introduced his book on Aboriginal Australian societies by summarizing these difficulties as follows: “The main issues of interpretation arising from the work of professionally trained anthropologists are that they are late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories, and particular paradigms strongly shape (and limit) their interpretations. However, within their fields of interest these works tend to be the most thorough and systematic.”

Keen’s warning about studies late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories refers to a dilemma inherent in cultural anthropology, analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in physics. That principle states, in effect, that any physical measurement inevitably perturbs the system being studied and thereby introduces uncertainty into what the true value would have been if the system had not been perturbed. (Specifically in particle physics, the principle states that it’s impossible to measure simultaneously the exact values of both a particle’s position and its velocity.) To appreciate the corresponding dilemma in cultural anthropology, recall that modern anthropological studies of Aboriginal Australia began in the 20th century, and ethnographic accounts began in the 19th century before the rise of modern professional anthropology. However, Europeans had already landed in Australia in 1616 and founded their first settlement in 1788, while Macassans (Indonesian fishermen) had regularly been visiting northern Australia for many centuries before European arrival, and unidentified Austronesian people from Indonesia somehow introduced dogs (dingoes) and possibly other life forms and technologies into Australia several thousand years ago.

Modern studies of Aboriginal Australians have thus been of societies radically changed from their pre-European or pre-Macassan condition, because most of the population had already been killed by European-introduced and perhaps also Macassan-introduced diseases, conquered and subjected to the control of Euro-Australian state government, prevented from exercising traditional fire management (i.e., burning) of their landscape, driven off their prime lands targeted for European settlement, and deprived of part of their subsistence base by the impacts on native animals and plants of European-introduced cats, foxes, sheep, and cattle and Austronesian-introduced dingoes. Similarly, while the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are often taken as models of hunter-gatherers, the detailed studies of the !Kung that began in the 1960s, and that I cite frequently in this book, have been of people who had already given up their traditional bone arrow-points for metal points, had stopped raiding each other, had recently been trading with and encroached on by Bantu herders, and must somehow have been influenced by other Bantu herders who reached southern Africa almost 2,000 years ago.

More generally, all 20th-century studies of hunter-gatherers have been of societies in actual or potential contact with food producers (farmers and/or herders). Until around 11,000 years ago, however, all human societies were hunter-gatherers, so that hunter-gatherers were in contact only with other hunter-gatherers. Only in a few parts of the world, such as Australia, the Arctic, and western North America, did even the first non-scientist Western explorers encounter hunter-gatherers still living in a world of hunter-gatherers. These facts have provoked heated arguments about the relevance of modern studies to past societies: are modern hunter-gatherers too different from past hunter-gatherers to have any relevance to understanding them? That view is surely too extreme: as anthropologist Melvin Konner has expressed it, if today one could take a group of Westerners and dump them naked and without tools in isolation somewhere in the African savannah, within two generations either they would all be dead or else they would have independently re-invented many observed features of hunter-gatherer societies. But at minimum, one must recognize that modern traditional peoples are not frozen models of the distant past.

As for Ian Keen’s other warning, within any science at any particular time there are preferred research areas for systematic study and funding, and other areas that remain neglected. For instance, until recently few anthropologists carried out studies focusing specifically on childhood or old age among traditional peoples. Field observers are discouraged from going out on scientific “fishing trips” and recording everything that they notice; they are expected to produce books and articles on some specific subject. At a given time there are also certain interpretations and phenomena that tend to be preferred, and others that are considered unpalatable. For example, there has been vigorous controversy over whether or not the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead skewed her descriptions of Pacific Islander sexual behavior to fit preconceptions held by a then-current school of anthropology; and there are still strong views that traditional peoples aren’t warlike, or that if they are warlike it’s an artifact of European contact, or that if they really are warlike one shouldn’t describe their wars because it’s politically harmful to do so.

A second source of knowledge about traditional societies seeks to peel back some recent changes in modern traditional societies, by interviewing living non-literate people about their orally transmitted histories, and by reconstructing in that way their history over several generations. Naturally, this method poses its own problems, and its practitioners have gained much experience of techniques (pioneered especially by Jan Vansina) to cross-check and ensure the reliability of the information elicited.

For example, the American anthropologist Polly Wiessner and the Enga artist Akii Tumu collaborated to study the oral history of the Enga people, the largest language group in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. While written history began for the Enga only with the arrival of literate Europeans in the 1930s, the Enga are exceptional among New Guineans in keeping track of historical events through a body of historical traditions (termed atone pii) that they recognize as distinct from myths (termed tindi pii), and that go back 8 to 10 generations (250 to 400 years). Between 1985 and 1998 Wiessner and Tumu interviewed elders in 110 Enga tribes. They tested the correctness of the interview responses by looking for consistency between accounts given by different clans, and by different tribes; by examining whether accounts of wars and migrations given by descendants of participants on opposite sides of the war or migration, and given by neighboring groups, agreed; and by checking whether information offered about one sphere of life (e.g., ceremonial pig exchanges) corresponded to information offered about different spheres of life (e.g., land use and agricultural production). They also checked the oral accounts against two independently datable events that affected all Highland groups of Papua New Guinea, including the Enga: a massive volcanic eruption of nearby Long Island in the 17th century, which deposited a layer of chemically identifiable ash (tephra) all over the Eastern Highlands, and about which the Enga and other Highlanders have an oral tradition of a “time of darkness,” when ash darkened the sun for several days; and the arrival of the sweet potato, which transformed Highlands agriculture and societies between 250 and 400 years ago. By these cross-checking and cross-dating methods, Wiessner and Tumu were able to reconstruct detailed histories of tribe dispersals, population growth, population size, environmental conditions, agricultural subsistence, crops cultivated, trade, leadership, social organization, wars, migrations, and the development of ceremonies and cults over the last eight Enga generations, long before European arrival in the New Guinea Highlands.

This method of oral reconstruction is applicable to only some traditional peoples, perhaps just a minority of them, because many or most peoples do not retain detailed oral knowledge going back more than a few generations. That depends on factors such as their social organization, their degree of insistence on first-hand experience, who tells stories, the context of telling stories, and the degree of participation by listeners in story-telling. For example, the missionary linguist Daniel Everett found that Brazil’s Piraha Indians refused to discuss anything that they had not seen with their own eyes, and hence were scornful of Everett’s efforts to tell them about the life of Jesus: “Did you see him yourself? If not, how can you believe it?” Similarly, the many studies carried out among !Kung people from the 1960s onwards have failed to recover detailed information concerning events or conditions of !Kung life more than a few generations ago. On the other hand, among the Enga, historical stories are recounted in the men’s house, listeners comment on and correct mistakes in the stories, and powerful individuals are not permitted to distort history in order to advance their own interests.

A third approach to learning about traditional societies shares the goals of oral reconstruction, insofar as it seeks to view the societies before they were visited by modern scientists. While scientists have been among the first outsiders to contact some traditional peoples—such as the “discovery” of the Baliem Valley Dani by the Third Archbold Expedition from the American Museum of Natural History in 1938—more often scientists have been preceded by government patrols, traders, missionary linguists, or explorers. That was obviously true for the vast majority of traditional societies of the New World, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific islands, because they were “discovered” by Europeans from AD 1492 until the early 20th century, before modern anthropology had coalesced as a discipline doing fieldwork. Even the recent first contacts of New Guinea and Amazonian tribes from the 1930s until today have usually not been made by scientists, because of the resources required and the dangers involved. By the time scientists arrive, the tribal culture has already begun to change as a result of contacts.

But we may still learn a lot from the anecdotal descriptions left by those first scientifically untrained visitors. The obvious disadvantage is that their accounts are less systematic, less quantitative, and less informed by rigorous method and the existing body of knowledge about other tribes. A compensating obvious advantage is that the resulting information refers to a tribal society less modified than when encountered later by scientists. A less obvious advantage is that the unsystematic and unscientific nature of those first observations can actually be a strength. Untrained visitors often describe broadly whatever strikes them, and thereby may discuss facets of a society that would be ignored by a scientist sent out with research support to study some particular phenomenon.

An example is a remarkable book (Dschungelkind) about Indonesian New Guinea’s Fayu people, written by a German woman called Sabine Kuegler. During my first visit to Indonesian New Guinea in 1979, my helicopter pilot told me of a terrifying visit that he had recently made to a just-discovered group of Fayu nomads on behalf of a missionary couple, Klaus and Doris Kuegler. At the invitation of the Fayu, the Kueglers then brought their three young children to live among the Fayu and were the first outsiders that most Fayu saw. The Kueglers’ middle daughter, Sabine, thus grew up among the Fayu from ages 7 to 17, at a time when there were still no outsiders there other than the Kuegler family. On moving to Europe to pursue a European education and to become a European, Sabine published in 2005 a book about her experiences and observations.

Sabine’s book lacks data tables, tests of rival hypotheses, and summaries of the current state of some subfield of anthropology. Instead, readers of her book will gain a vivid sense of Fayu life just after first contact, including arrows whizzing through the air, dangers, accidents, and deaths. Because Sabine’s playmates were Fayu children and she grew up partly as a Fayu herself, her book approximates an autobiography of a Fayu, but one endowed with a dual perspective as a Fayu and a Westerner. Sabine was thus able to notice Fayu characteristics—such as their sense of time, physical difficulties of Fayu life, and the psychology of being a Fayu—that a Fayu would take for granted and not bother to mention. Equally moving is Sabine’s account of returning to Europe, and of seeing European society through her partly Fayu eyes, which let her notice features of European life (e.g., issues of dealing with strangers, or the dangers of crossing a road) that a European would take for granted. Perhaps, some day, a scientist will visit the Fayu and will describe some aspect of their society. But, by then, the Fayu will be drastically different people from those encountered by the Kueglers in 1979. No scientist will be able to repeat Sabine’s experience, and to describe what it was like to grow up with and to think and feel as a nearly traditional Fayu.

The remaining method for learning about traditional societies, and the sole source of information about past societies without writing and not in contact with literate observers, is archaeology, whose advantages and disadvantages are the opposites of those associated with modern observers. By excavating and radiocarbon-dating a site, archaeologists can reconstruct a culture up to tens of thousands of years before it was contacted and changed by the modern world. Thus, concerns about perturbing effects of modern contact and of the resident sociologist disappear completely. That’s a huge advantage. The corresponding disadvantage is that fine detail, such as daily events and people’s names, motives, and words, is lost. Archaeologists also face the disadvantage of more uncertainty and more required effort in extracting social conclusions from their physical manifestations preserved in archaeological deposits. For instance, archaeologists attempt to deduce individual inequality in social status and wealth indirectly from differences in the buried grave goods and sizes of tombs in cemeteries excavated laboriously over the course of several field seasons. A modern ethnographer might observe such inequalities directly in one day of fieldwork—but the results would apply to a society changed to an uncertain degree by modern contact.

Thus, our four methods for understanding traditional societies differ in their strengths and weaknesses. We can have increased confidence in conclusions if all four methods can be applied and yield similar results. For example, we have information about tribal wars from modern scientific observations (e.g., Jan Broekhuijse and Karl Heider’s detailed accounts of Dani warfare described in Chapter 3), from oral reconstructions (such as those by Polly Wiessner and Akii Tumu), from anecdotal accounts (such as Sabine Kuegler’s among the Fayu), and from archaeological evidence (such as excavated battle armor and skulls split by axes). When these four approaches disagree in their conclusions, we have to figure out why: perhaps the society changed with time or under contact.