The World Until Yesterday

A boundary

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 land-owner 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.

From my previous unpleasant experiences over perceived territorial trespassing in New Guinea, I realized that I had better take this situation seriously. Anyway, regardless of how I might assess the danger myself, the mountain people weren’t going to let me camp on that ridge without a strong escort. They demanded that I be accompanied by 12 men, and I responded with a proposal of 7 men. We ended up “compromising” between 12 and 7: by the time that our camp was established, I counted about 20 men staying in camp, all armed with bows and arrows, and joined by women to do cooking and to fetch water and firewood. Furthermore, I was warned not to step off the ridge-line trail into that nice-looking forest on the gentle south slope. That forest unequivocally belonged to the river people, and it would cause big trouble, really big trouble, if I were caught trespassing there, even if just to watch birds. Also, the mountain women in our camp couldn’t fetch water from the nearby gully on the south slope, because that would constitute not only trespass but also removal of valuable resources, for which a compensation payment would be due if the matter could be settled amicably at all. Instead, the women walked every day all the way back down to the village and carried 20-liter water containers 1,500 vertical feet uphill to our campsite.

On my second morning in camp there was some heart-pounding excitement that taught me how territorial relations between mountain people and river people were more complicated than just black-and-white claims of complete mutual exclusion from each other’s land. With one of the mountain men I went back to the trail T-junction and continued left along the ridge-line to clean up an old trail that had become overgrown. My mountain companion didn’t seem worried about our being there, and I figured that, even if river people found us there, they shouldn’t object to our standing on the ridge-line as long as we didn’t stray over to their side. But then we heard voices coming uphill from the south side. Uh-oh! River people!! If they carried on uphill as far as the ridge-line and T-junction, they would see the signs of fresh trail clearance and track us down, we’d be trapped there, they might consider us as violating their territory, and who knew what action they would take.

I listened anxiously and tried to follow the movements of the voices and estimate their location. Yes, they were indeed ascending towards the ridge-line from their side. Now, they must be at the T-junction, where they couldn’t fail to notice the signs of our fresh trail. Were they coming after us? I kept following the voices as they seemed to get louder, over the noise of my heart-beats throbbing in my ears. But then the voices didn’t come closer; they were definitely growing fainter. Were they returning towards the south side and the river people’s village? No! They were descending the north side towards our mountain village! Incredible! Was this a war raid? But there seemed to be only two or three voices, and they were talking loudly: hardly what one would expect from a stealthy raiding party.

There was nothing to worry about, explained my mountain companion; everything was really OK. We mountain people (he said) acknowledge the right of river people to descend our trail peacefully to our village, and then to walk from there to the coast in order to trade. River people aren’t permitted to get off the trail in order to gather food or cut wood, but just walking on the trail is OK. What’s more, two river men had actually married mountain women and resettled in the mountain village. That is, there wasn’t pure enmity between the two groups, but instead a tense truce. Some things were permitted and other things were forbidden by common consent, while still other things (such as land ownership at the abandoned hut and garden) were still in contention.

Two days later, I hadn’t heard voices of river people again nearby. I still hadn’t seen a river person and had no idea what they looked like and how they dressed. But their village was close enough that I once heard the sound of drums in their village coming up from the south watershed at the same time as I could hear faintly the sounds of shouting far below from the mountain village on the north watershed. As my mountain guide and I were walking back towards our campsite, we were making silly jokes with each other about what we would do to a river person if we caught one there. Suddenly, just as we turned a corner in the trail and were about to enter our camp, my guide stopped joking, raised his hand to his mouth, and warned me in a hushed voice, “Sh-h-h! River people!”

There, in our camp, was a group of our familiar mountain companions, talking with six people whom I had never seen before: three men, two women, and one child. There, at last, I saw the dreaded river people! They were not the dangerous monsters that I had been unconsciously imagining, but instead normal-looking New Guineans, no different from the mountain people who were my hosts. The river child and the two women were completely unintimidating. The three men carried bows and arrows (as did all the mountain men as well) but were wearing T-shirts and not looking as if they were dressed for war. The conversation between the river people and the mountain people seemed friendly and free of tension. It turned out that this group of river people was traveling down to the coast and had made a point of visiting our camp, perhaps just to make sure that their peaceful intent didn’t get misinterpreted and that we didn’t attack them.

To the mountain people and the river people, this visit was evidently a normal part of their complex relationship incorporating a broad range of behaviors: rarely, killings by stealth; more often, reputed killings by poison and sorcery; acknowledged reciprocal rights to do some things (such as passing in transit to the coast and making social visits) but not other things (such as gathering food and wood and water while in transit); disagreement about other things (such as that hut and garden) that sometimes flared into violence; and occasional intermarriage at about the same frequency as stealth murders (every couple of generations). All this between two groups of people who looked the same to me, spoke distinct but related languages, understood each other’s language, described each other in terms otherwise reserved for evil subhumans, and viewed each other as their worst enemies.

Mutually exclusive territories

In theory, the spatial relations between neighboring traditional societies could encompass a whole spectrum of outcomes, ranging at the one extreme from non-overlapping exclusive territories with definite patrolled boundaries and no shared use, to free access of everybody to all land and no recognized territories at the other extreme. Probably no society strictly conforms to either extreme, but some come close to the first extreme. For instance, my mountain friends whom I just described are not far from it: they do have territories with defined boundaries that they patrol, they do assert exclusive claim to resources within their territory, and they permit access by outsiders just for transit and rare intermarriage.

Other societies which approach that extreme of exclusive territories include the Dani (Plate 1) of the Baliem Valley of western New Guinea’s Highlands, the Iñupiat (an Inuit group)[4] of northwest Alaska, northern Japan’s Ainu, the Yolngu (an Aboriginal group of Arnhem Land in Northwest Australia), Shoshone Indians of Owens Valley in California, and Yanomamo Indians of Brazil and Venezuela. For instance, the Dani irrigate and till gardens separated by a garden-less no-man’s land from the gardens of the adjacent Dani group. Each group builds a line of wooden watch-towers up to 30 feet high on its own side of the no-man’s land, with a platform at the top big enough for one man to sit there (Plate 13). For much of each day, men take turns keeping watch from each tower, while companions sit at a tower’s base to protect it and the watchman, who scans the area to look out for stealthily approaching enemies and to give the alert in case of a surprise attack.

As another example, Alaska’s Iñupiat (Plate 9) consist of 10 groups with mutually exclusive territories. People from one territory caught trespassing on another territory were routinely killed, unless they proved to be related to the territory-owners who caught them trespassing. The two commonest causes of trespass were hunters crossing a boundary in hot pursuit of reindeer, and seal hunters hunting on an ice shelf that broke off and drifted away from land. In the latter case, if the ice subsequently drifted back to shore and the hunters found themselves landing in another territory, they were killed. To us non-Iñupiat, that seems cruelly unfair: those poor hunters were already taking a big risk to have gone out onto a floating ice shelf, they had the bad luck that their shelf broke off, they were then at risk of death from drowning or being carried out to sea, now they had the great good fortune to drift back to shore after all, they had no intentions of trespassing but were just carried innocently and passively by an ocean current—yet they were still killed just at the moment of their salvation from drowning or drifting to sea. But those were the rules of Iñupiaq life. Nevertheless, Iñupiaq territorial exclusivity wasn’t complete: outsiders occasionally were given permission to visit one’s territory for a specific purpose such as a summer trade fair, or to transit one’s territory for another specific purpose such as visiting or raiding a distant group living beyond the farther side of the transited territory.

When we collect the examples of societies (like my mountain friends, the Dani, and the Iñupiat) lying towards that extreme of mutually exclusive defended territories, we discover that that outcome arises under a combination of four conditions. First, defended territories require a population sufficiently large and dense that some people can be spared to devote time specifically to patrolling boundaries, so that the population doesn’t have to rely just on everyone casually keeping out an eye for trespassers while in the course of normal foraging. Second, exclusive territories require a productive, stable, predictable environment within which the territory-owners can count on usually finding most or all of their necessary resources, such that they rarely or never need to go outside their territory. Third, the territory must contain some valuable fixed resources or capital improvements worth defending and dying for, such as productive gardens, groves of fruit trees, or fishing weirs or irrigation ditches requiring much effort to build and maintain. Finally, group membership must be rather constant, and neighboring groups must be largely distinct, with little migration between groups—the main exception being movements of unmarried young people (more often women than men) leaving their natal group in order to marry into another group.

We can observe how those four conditions are satisfied by the groups I’ve just mentioned as approaching the extreme of exclusive territories and defended boundaries. My New Guinea mountain friends have a significant investment in their year-round gardens, pigs, and forests, which traditionally gave them everything that they needed. Clearing forests and developing gardens are laborious for them, and are even more so for western New Guinea’s Dani, who dig and maintain elaborate systems of ditches to irrigate and drain their gardens. The Iñupiat and Ainu occupy rich year-round territories with abundant marine resources of salt-water fish, seals, whales, and seabirds, fresh-water fisheries and waterfowl, and inland areas with terrestrial mammals to hunt. Arnhem Land’s Yolngu similarly lived in dense populations made possible by the combination of productive coastal and inland resources. Owens Valley’s Shoshone Indians were hunter-gatherers living at relatively high densities in an area with ample water that let them irrigate land to increase its yields of edible wild grass seeds, and that provided storable harvests of pine nuts. Those food stores, pine groves, and irrigation systems were worth defending, and there were enough Owens Valley Shoshones to defend them. Finally, Yanomamo Indians maintain plantations of peach palm and plantain trees that produce their staple foods for many years and are also worth defending.

In areas with especially large and dense populations, such as those of the Dani and the Sudan’s Nuer, not only are there separate groups each with its own territory, but those territorial groups are further organized into hierarchies of three or more levels. Those hierarchies remind us of the hierarchical organization of land, people, and political control familiar to us in our modern state societies, starting with individual house plots, and ranging up through cities, counties, and states to the national government. For instance, the Nuer (Plate 7), numbering 200,000 people in an area of 30,000 square miles, are divided into tribes of 7,000 to 42,000 people each, each tribe divided and subdivided into primary and secondary and tertiary subtribes, down to villages of 50 to 700 people and separated by 5 to 20 miles. The smaller and hierarchically lower the unit, the fewer are the disputes about boundaries and other matters, the stronger are the pressures that relatives and friends bring to bear on disputants to settle disputes quickly and without violence, and the more limited is any fighting that does occur. For instance, the Nuer observe few restrictions in their treatment of neighboring Dinka tribes: they regularly raid the Dinka, steal Dinka livestock, kill Dinka men, and take home some Dinka women and children as captives while killing the others. But Nuer hostilities against other Nuer tribes consist only of sporadic cattle raids, killing of just a few men, and no killing or kidnapping of women and children.

Non-exclusive land use

The opposite extreme of less or no exclusivity is approached under conditions that are the mirror image of the conditions selected for exclusivity. One such condition is sparse and small populations that make patrolling (other than casually looking for trespassers while out doing other things) impossible. For instance, a society consisting of just a single family can’t afford dedicated patrols, because it can’t have its single adult man spending all day seated at the top of a watch-tower. A second condition involves unproductive, marginal, variable environments with sparse and unpredictable resources, such that any territory one might feasibly claim would often (at some seasons or in a bad year) not contain essential resources, and one would then periodically have to seek resources in another group’s territory and vice versa. Third, it doesn’t pay to risk one’s life defending a territory containing nothing worth dying for: if one’s territory is attacked, it would then be preferable just to move to another area. Finally, territories are likely to be non-exclusive if group membership is fluid, and if group members often visit or transfer to other groups. It makes no sense to keep out another group if half of its members are visitors or transferees from your own group anyway.

However, the usual form of land division under these conditions selecting for non-exclusivity isn’t the extreme of a free-for-all in which anybody can do anything anywhere. Instead, it still is the case that each group is identified with a specific core area. Non-exclusive societies differ from exclusive societies in that, instead of the Dani no-man’s land clearly delineated by watch-towers, recognized borders don’t exist, and land ownership just becomes increasingly vague as one moves increasing distances from one’s core area. Another distinction of non-exclusive from exclusive societies is that neighboring groups receive permission to visit your territory more often and for more different purposes—especially to obtain food and water at certain seasons or in certain years. Correspondingly, you can readily obtain permission to visit your neighbor’s territory when you are the one in need, so the arrangement becomes an exchange based on reciprocity and mutual benefit.

An example of non-exclusive land ownership that has been described in detail is the !Kung hunter-gatherers (Plate 6) of the Nyae Nyae area of the Kalahari Desert. When studied in the 1950s, they consisted of 19 bands, containing between 8 and 42 people per band, each band with its own “territory” (termed a n!ore) of between about 100 and 250 square miles in area. But boundaries between n!ores were vague: as anthropologists and !Kung informants walked together from the informants’ camp towards the next n!ore, the informants became increasingly uncertain, or disagreed increasingly with each other, about which n!ore they were now in, the further they got from the center of their n!ore. There were no watch-towers or ridge-line trails to mark n!ore boundaries.

!Kung n!ores are occupied non-exclusively because it is both necessary and possible to share n!ores’ resources. Resource sharing is necessary because water in the Kalahari Desert is scarce, and each band needs to spend much of its time near a waterhole. But there is unpredictable variation in rainfall between years. Many waterholes in the area go dry in the dry season. Only 2 waterholes in the area never failed during the period studied; 3 more were usually available throughout the year but failed in some years; 5 more lasted only occasionally through the dry season; and 50 were seasonal and always went dry for part of the year. Hence in the dry season, up to 200 people from various bands gather at a permanent waterhole with the permission of its owners, who in turn are permitted to visit and use resources of other n!ores when those are abundant. Thus, water considerations require the !Kung to have non-exclusive territories: it would be pointless to claim exclusive use of an area if that area might run out of water and thus become useless. Conversely, the seasonal superabundance of some resources permits non-exclusivity: it is pointless to offend potentially useful allies by keeping them out of your territory at a time when it is producing far more food than you yourself can eat. That’s especially true of the food staple of mongongo nuts seasonally available in enormous crops, and it’s also true of seasonal crops of wild beans and melons.

Supposedly, anyone from any band in the Nyae Nyae area can hunt anywhere, including outside of his own band’s n!ore. However, if you kill an animal outside your n!ore, you should give a present of its meat if you then encounter a member of the band owning that n!ore. But that freedom of access for hunting doesn’t apply to !Kung hunters from more distant areas. More generally, neighboring !Kung bands can readily obtain permission to use each other’s n!ore for other purposes as well, such as obtaining water, nuts, beans, and melons—but they must first ask for permission, and they incur an obligation to reciprocate later by permitting the hosts to visit the visitors’ n!ore. Fighting is likely to break out if they don’t ask for permission. More distant bands have to be especially careful in requesting permission, and should limit the length of their visit and the number of people visiting. Outsiders who have no recognized connection by blood or marriage to the n!ore’s owners cannot visit at all. Thus, non-exclusive territories certainly don’t mean a free-for-all.

Rights to use land and resources, whether exclusively or non-exclusively, imply the concept of ownership. Who owns the n!ore of a !Kung band? The answer is: the band’s k’ausi, meaning a core group of older people or else one older person descended from the people who have lived in that area for the longest time. But band composition is fluid and changes from day to day, because people often go visit relatives in other n!ores, people make seasonal visits to other n!ores for waterholes or for superabundant food, some people shift bands permanently for various reasons, and a new bridegroom plus his dependents (his old parents, and his first wife and children if he is now taking a second wife) may live with his new wife’s band for about a decade until he and his new wife have given birth to several children. As a result, many !Kung spend more time outside than inside their n!ore. In an average year 13% of the population shifts residence permanently from one camp to another, and 35% of the population is dividing its residential time equally between two or three camps. Under those circumstances the band in the neighboring n!ore consists partly of your own people; they’re not evil subhumans with whom the only inter-group transfers are just two intermarriages over the course of several generations, as in the case of my New Guinea mountain friends. You’re not going to take a hard-line exclusive approach to your resources when many of the “intruders” are actually your siblings and cousins, your adult children, and your aged parents.

Another interesting illustration of non-exclusive territories involves North America’s Great Basin Shoshone, Native Americans belonging to the same language group as the Owens Valley Shoshone whom I already mentioned as illustrating exclusive territories. Their Great Basin cousins differed in land use because of differences between the environments. Whereas Owens Valley land was well watered, suitable for irrigation, and worth defending, the Great Basin is a harsh dry desert, very cold in the winter, with sparse and unpredictable resources and little opportunity for food storage. Human population densities in the Great Basin were only about one person every 16 square miles. The Great Basin Shoshone lived in separate families for much of the year, aggregating in the winter into camps of 5 or 10 families near springs and pine nut groves, and infrequently aggregating into larger groups of up to 15 families for communal hunts of antelopes and rabbits. They did not maintain well-marked territories. Instead, individual families owned specific sites such as pine groves, which could be shared with other families but only by agreement: trespassers who attempted to harvest pine nuts without an agreement were driven off by a barrage of stones. Other plant and animal resources were shared under flexible non-exclusive rights.

Finally, a minimum in recognizing and patrolling territories was achieved by Peru’s Machiguenga Indians and Bolivia’s Siriono Indians in tropical forested areas. At the times that those groups were studied by anthropologists, the Machiguenga were gardeners living at only modest population densities, possibly because a previously denser population had crashed from effects of European-introduced diseases or else killings during the rubber boom, and also because agriculture in their area offered only low yields. The Machiguenga undertook seasonal movements for wild foods and cleared slash-and-burn gardens that produced food for just a few years and weren’t worth fighting over. There were no territories: in theory all resources of all forests and rivers were open to all Machiguengas. In practice, multi-family groups maintained some distance from each other’s home ranges. Similarly, the Siriono Indians studied by Allan Holmberg lived by hunting-gathering and some casual agriculture in bands of 60 to 80 people possessing no defined territories. But if one band came across hunting tracks made by another band, it chose not to hunt in that other band’s area. That is, there was informal mutual avoidance.

Thus, traditional land use ranged over a spectrum, from well-marked territories that were patrolled and defended and from which outsiders were excluded on pain of death, through fuzzy home ranges without clear boundaries and which outsiders could use by mutual agreement, to home areas kept separate just by informal mutual avoidance. No traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern Americans or European Union citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere within the U.S. or European Union and can travel in many other countries as well merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a border passport control officer. (Of course the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack has pushed Americans back towards a traditional suspicion of strangers and has resulted in restrictions on free travel, such as no-fly lists and airport security checks.) But one could also argue that our modern system of relatively open access is an upscale extension of traditional access rights and restrictions. Traditional peoples, living in societies of a few hundred individuals, obtain access to others’ lands by being known individually, by having individual relationships there, and by asking permission individually. In our societies of hundreds of millions, our definition of “relationship” is extended to any citizen of our state or of a friendly state, and the asking of permission is formalized and granted en masse by means of passports and visas.

Friends, enemies, and strangers

All those restrictions on free movement cause members of small-scale societies to divide people into three categories: friends, enemies, and strangers. “Friends” are the members of your own band or village, and of those neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on peaceful terms at the moment. “Enemies” are members of neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on hostile terms at the moment. Nevertheless, you probably know at least the names and relationships, and possibly the appearances, of many or most individuals in those hostile bands, because you’ll have heard of them or actually met them in the course of negotiations for compensation, periods of peace resulting from shifting alliances, and exchanges of brides (or occasionally grooms) during those truces. An example is those two river men who had married into the village of my mountain friends.

The remaining category is “strangers”: unknown individuals belonging to distant bands with which your band has little or no contact. Rarely or never do members of small-scale societies encounter strangers, because it’s suicidal to travel into an unfamiliar area to whose inhabitants you are unknown and completely unrelated. If you do happen to encounter a stranger in your territory, you have to presume that the person is dangerous, because (given the dangers of traveling to unfamiliar areas) the stranger is really likely to be scouting in order to raid or kill your group, or else trespassing in order to hunt or steal resources or kidnap a marriageable woman.

In a small-scale local population numbering several hundred people, you’ll certainly know all members by name and face, the details of all their relationships by blood and marriage and adoption, and how they are related to you. When you add to your own band the several neighboring friendly bands, your potential universe of “friends” may number over a thousand people, including many whom you’ve heard of but never actually seen. Hence suppose that, while out alone away from your core area or near the boundary of your territory, you meet a person or people whom you don’t recognize. If there are several of them and just one of you, you’ll run away, and vice versa. If there is one of you and one of them, and if the two of you see each other at a distance, both of you may run away if a glance suggests a balance of strength (e.g., two adult men, rather than a man confronting a woman or a child). But if you come around a corner and suddenly confront another person unexpectedly, and it’s too late to run away, that’s a recipe for a tense situation. It can be resolved by the two of you sitting down, each of you naming yourself and your relatives and exactly how you are related to them, and continuing in an effort to identify a relative in common, such that the two of you would have some relationship to each other and wouldn’t have grounds to attack each other. But if after several hours of such a conversation the two of you still can’t identify any relative in common, then you can’t just turn around and say, “It was nice to meet you, goodbye.” Instead, you or he or both of you must consider the other a trespasser without a relationship justifying a visit, and a chasing-off or a fight becomes likely.

Speakers of the Central !Kung dialect within the Nyae Nyae area refer to other such speakers as jũ/wãsi, where jũ means “person,” si is the plural suffix, and wã approximately means “true, good, honest, clean, not harmful.” Back-and-forth visits between kin within the Nyae Nyae area create personal familiarities that unite all 19 bands and all thousand or so members of the area and make them all jũ/wãsi to each other. The opposite term jũ/dole (where dole has the sense of “bad, strange, harmful”) is applied to all whites, all black Bantu people, and even !Kung people speaking the same dialect but belonging to a distant group among which you have no relatives or acquaintances. Like members of other small-scale societies, the !Kung are apprehensive of strangers. In practice, they succeed in finding some kin term to apply to almost every !Kung whom they meet. But if you meet a strange !Kung and can’t discover any relationship to him after you’ve traced out your relationships and he has traced out his, then he is a trespasser whom you should drive off or kill.

For example, a !Kung man named Gao, at the request of the anthropologist Lorna Marshall, went on an errand for her to a place called Khadum, lying outside but not far north of the Nyae Nyae area. Gao had never visited Khadum, and very few other Nyae Nyae !Kung had ever been there either. The !Kung at Khadum at first called Gao a jũ/dole, which meant at minimum a frosty reception and possibly trouble. But Gao quickly said that he had heard that the father of someone living at Khadum had the same name as Gao’s own father, and that someone else at Khadum had a brother named Gao, like Gao himself. The !Kung at Khadum then said to Gao, “So, you are Gao’s [i.e., our Gao’s] !gun!a.” (!gun!a is a relationship term.) They then accepted Gao at their campfire and gave him a present of food.

A similar categorization of people operated among Paraguay’s Ache Indians (Plate 10). At the time of peaceful European contact the Ache numbered around 700 people, living in bands of 15 to 70 people each, and with several bands closely affiliated into a group of bands. There were four such groups, ranging in total number at the time of contact from 30 to 550 people. Ache referred to other members of their own group as irondy (meaning those who are customarily our people or brothers), and referred to Ache in the other three groups as irolla (meaning Ache who are not our people).

In modern large-scale societies whose citizens travel widely around their own country and around the world, we accumulate many friendships based on individual “chemistry” rather than on group affiliation. Some of our life-long friends are people with whom we grew up or went to school, but others are ones whom we met on our travels. What counts in friendship is whether people like each other and share interests, not whether one’s group is politically allied with the other person’s group. We take this concept of personal friendship so much for granted that it was only after years of working in New Guinea that an incident made clear to me the different concept of friendship prevailing in traditional small-scale New Guinea societies.

The incident involved a New Guinean named Yabu, whose village in the Central Highlands had practised a traditional lifestyle until the local establishment of government control and the end of intertribal warfare about a decade previously. In the course of my bird studies I brought Yabu as one of my field assistants to a campsite in the Southeast Highlands, where we were visited for several days by a British schoolteacher named Jim. Yabu and Jim spent much time talking and joking with each other, recounted long stories to each other, and evidently enjoyed each other’s company. The Central Highlands town in which Jim taught school was located only a few dozen miles from Yabu’s village. When Yabu completed his fieldwork with me, he would return to his village by taking a plane flight to the airport of Jim’s town and then go on to his village by walking. Hence as Jim was leaving our camp and saying goodbye to Yabu and me, Jim did what seemed perfectly natural to me: he invited Yabu to stop and visit him while Yabu was traveling through Jim’s town.

Some days after Jim had gone, I asked Yabu whether he did plan to visit Jim on his way home. Yabu’s reaction was one of surprise and mild indignation at my suggestion of such a waste of time: “Visit him? What for? If he had work or a paid job to offer me, then I would. But he doesn’t have a job for me. Of course I’m not going to stop in his town and look him up just for the sake of ‘friendship’!” (This conversation took place in Papua New Guinea’s lingua franca of Tok Pisin; the Tok Pisin expression that I have translated here as “just for the sake of ‘friendship’” was “bilong pren nating”.) I was astonished to realize that I had been making an incorrect assumption of supposed human universals that it hadn’t even occurred to me to question.

Naturally, my realization shouldn’t be exaggerated. Of course, members of small-scale societies enjoy some individuals more than others within their own society. As small-scale societies become larger or gain exposure to non-traditional outside influences, traditional outlooks change, including views of friendship. Nevertheless, I think that the difference between concepts of friendship in large-scale and small-scale societies, expressed in Jim’s invitation and Yabu’s reaction respectively, is on the average real. It’s not just an artifact of Yabu’s responding to a European differently from how he would have responded to a New Guinean. As one New Guinea friend familiar with both Western ways and traditional New Guinea ways explained it to me, “In New Guinea we don’t just go and visit someone without a purpose. If you’ve just met and spent a week with someone, it doesn’t mean that you’ve thereby acquired a relationship or friendship with that person.” In contrast, the vast array of choices in large-scale Westernized societies, and our frequent geographic moves, give us more scope—and more need—for relationships based on personal bonds of friendship rather than on kinship, marriage, and the geographic accident of proximity during childhood.

In large hierarchical societies in which thousands or millions of people live together under the umbrella of a chiefdom or state, it’s normal to meet strangers, and doing so is safe and non-threatening. For example, every time that I walk across my University of California campus or along the streets of Los Angeles, I encounter without fear or danger hundreds of people whom I have never seen before, and may never see again, and with whom I have no traceable relationship by either blood or marriage. An early stage in this changed attitude towards strangers is illustrated by the Sudan’s Nuer people, whom I already mentioned as numbering about 200,000 and organized in a hierarchy of several levels from villages up to tribes. Obviously, no Nuer knows or has heard of all 199,999 other Nuer. Political organization is weak: each village has a figurehead chief with little real power, to be described in Chapter 2. Nevertheless (in the words of anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard), “Between Nuer, wherever they hail from, and though they be strangers to one another, friendly relations are at once established when they meet outside their country, for a Nuer is never a foreigner to another as he is to a Dinka or a Shilluk. Their feeling of superiority and the contempt they show for all foreigners and their readiness to fight them are a common bond of communion, and their common tongue and values permit ready intercommunication.”

Thus, compared to smaller-scale societies, the Nuer regard strangers no longer as threatening but instead as neutral or even as potentially friendly—provided that they are Nuer. Strangers who are not Nuer are either attacked (if they are Dinka) or merely despised (if they belong to any other type of people). In still larger societies with market economies, strangers have a potential positive value as prospective business partners, customers, suppliers, and employers.

First contacts

For traditional small-scale societies, the division of the world into friends of one’s own and neighboring groups, neighboring enemies, and more distant strangers resulted in knowledge of the world being very local. People knew their own core area or territory, and they knew much about the first surrounding tier of neighboring territories as a result of visits under reciprocal rights of use or during intermittent truces. But people were unlikely to know the next (the second) surrounding tier of nearby territories: intermittent hostilities with people of the first tier meant that you couldn’t cross that first tier during times of war to reach the second tier; and at times when you were at peace with a people of the first tier, they might in turn be at war with their neighbors in the second tier, again preventing you from visiting those neighbors.

Even travel into the territories of your immediate neighbors (the first tier) at presumed times of peace posed dangers. You might not realize that those neighbors had just started a war with some other allies of your people and therefore considered you now to be an enemy. Your hosts and relatives in that neighboring society might then be unwilling or unable to protect you. For instance, Karl Heider, Jan Broekhuijse, and Peter Matthiessen described an incident that happened on August 25, 1961, among the Baliem Valley’s Dugum Dani people. The Dani were divided into several dozen confederations, of which two, called the Gutelu Alliance and the Widaia Alliance, fought over the Dugum neighborhood. Nearby was the separate Asuk-Balek confederation, founded by a Gutelu split-off group that had abandoned its original land and taken refuge along the Baliem River after battles. Four Asuk-Balek men allied to the Widaia Alliance visited a Gutelu hamlet called Abulopak, where two of the Asuk-Balek men had relatives. But the visitors did not realize that the Widaia had recently killed two Gutelus, that the Gutelus had been unsuccessful in recent attempts to even the score by killing a Widaia, and that tension among the Gutelus was high.

The arrival of the unsuspecting Asuk-Baleks, allied to the Widaia, provided the Abulopak Gutelus with the next-best opportunity for revenge, second only to killing a Widaia. The two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were spared, but the two without relatives were attacked. One managed to escape. The other took refuge in a hut’s sleeping loft, but was dragged down and speared. That attack triggered an explosion of general rejoicing among the Abulopaks, who dragged the not-yet-dead Asuk-Balek’s body along a muddy path to their dance ground. The Abulopaks then danced with joy that night around the corpse and finally threw it into an irrigation ditch, pushed it under water, and covered it with grass. On the following morning the two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were permitted to retrieve the corpse. The incident illustrates the need for prudence verging on paranoia while traveling. Chapter 7 will say more about this need for what I term “constructive paranoia.”

Traditional distances of travel and of local knowledge were low in areas of high human population density and environmental constancy, and high in areas with sparse human population and variable environments. Geographic knowledge was very local in Highland New Guinea, with its dense populations and relatively stable environment. Travel and knowledge were wider in areas with stable environments but lower populations (such as the New Guinea lowlands and the African rainforests inhabited by African Pygmies), and were still wider in areas with variable environments and low populations (such as deserts and inland Arctic areas). For example, Andaman Islanders knew nothing about Andaman tribes living more than 20 miles distant. The known world of the Dugum Dani was largely confined to the Baliem Valley, most of which they could see from hilltops, but they could visit only a fraction of the valley because it was divided up by war frontiers that it was suicidal to cross. Aka Pygmies, given a list of up to 70 places and asked which of them they had visited, knew only half of the places lying within 21 miles and only one-quarter of the places within 42 miles. To place these numbers in perspective, when I lived in England in the 1950s and 1960s, it was still true that many rural English people had spent their lives in or near their villages, except possibly for traveling overseas as soldiers during World War I or II.

Thus, knowledge of the world beyond one’s first or second neighbors was non-existent or only second-hand among traditional small-scale societies. For instance, no one in the densely populated mountain valleys of the main body of New Guinea had seen or even heard of the ocean, lying at distances of only 50 to 120 miles. New Guinea Highlanders did receive in trade marine shells and (after European arrival on the coast) a few steel axes, which were prized. But those shells and axes were traded from one group to another and passed through many successive hands in covering that distance from the coast to the Highlands. Just as in the children’s game of telephone, in which children sit in a row or circle, one child whispers something to the next child, and what the last child hears bears no relation to what the first child said, all knowledge of the environment and people that supplied the shells and axes was lost by the time that they reached the Highlands.

For many small-scale societies, those traditional limitations on knowledge of the world were ended abruptly by so-called first contacts, when the arrival of European colonialists, explorers, traders, and missionaries proved the existence of a previously unknown outside world. The last peoples remaining “uncontacted” today are a few remote groups in New Guinea and tropical South America, but by now those remaining groups at least know of the outside world’s existence, because they have seen airplanes flying overhead and have heard of outsiders from neighboring “contacted” New Guinea groups. (By “contacted,” I mean contacted by distant outsiders such as Europeans and Indonesians; of course the “uncontacted” groups have been in contact with other New Guineans or South American Indians for thousands of years.) For example, when I was in western New Guinea’s mountains in the 1990s, my hosts, who had first been contacted by the Dutch a few decades previously, told me of a group to the north of them that had not yet been contacted, in the sense that they hadn’t yet been visited by missionaries or other outsiders. (Missionaries usually adopt the precaution of sending an emissary from a contacted neighboring group to ask whether a missionary would be welcomed, rather than expose themselves to the danger of walking in unannounced.) But those “uncontacted” mountaineers must have known of Europeans and Indonesians from “contacted” neighboring groups with which the uncontacted group did have contact. In addition, the uncontacted group had for many years seen airplanes flying over, such as the plane in which I arrived at the village of their contacted neighbors. Hence the world’s last remaining uncontacted groups do know that there is an outside world.

Conditions were different when Europeans began expanding over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and “discovered” people long before there were any airplane overflights to alert them to an outside world. The last large-scale first contacts in world history will prove to be those that took place in the New Guinea Highlands, where from the 1930s to the 1950s patrols by Australian and Dutch government and army reconnaissance expeditions, miners on prospecting trips, and biological expeditions “discovered” a million Highlanders of whose existence the outside world hadn’t known and vice versa—even though Europeans had by then been visiting and settling the coasts of New Guinea for 400 years. Until the 1930s, first contacts in New Guinea were made by Europeans exploring overland or by river, and the first evidence of Europeans’ existence to Highlanders was the Europeans’ physical arrival. Increasingly from the 1930s onwards, airplane overflights preceded the overland parties and warned Highlanders that there was something new out there. For example, the densest Highland population in western New Guinea, the approximately 100,000 people in the Baliem Valley, was “discovered” on June 23, 1938, when an airplane belonging to a joint expedition of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Dutch colonial government, financed by oil heir Richard Archbold and exploring New Guinea for animals and plants, flew over mountain terrain previously assumed to be rugged, forest-covered, and uninhabited. Archbold and his team instead were astonished to find themselves looking down on a broad, flat, deforested valley criss-crossed by a dense network of irrigation ditches and resembling thickly populated areas of Holland.

Those final sites of large-scale first contacts of Highlanders with Europeans are described in three remarkable books. One, entitled First Contact by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, recounts the patrols by the miners Michael Leahy, Michael Dwyer, and Daniel Leahy, who were the first Europeans to enter some densely populated Highland valleys of eastern New Guinea between 1930 and 1935. (Lutheran missionaries had already reached the eastern fringe of the Highlands in the 1920s.) A second is Michael Leahy’s own account, Explorations into Highland New Guinea, 1930–1935. The remaining book is The Sky Travelers by Bill Gammage, describing the Australian government patrol led by Jim Taylor and John Black that trekked through the western portion of the Papua New Guinea Highlands in 1938 and 1939. Both expeditions took many photos, and Michael Leahy made motion pictures as well. The horrified expressions on the faces of New Guineans photographed at the moment of first contact convey the shock of first contact better than any words could (Plates 30, 31).

A virtue of the first and third of these books is that they relate the impressions made by first contact both on the New Guineans and on the Europeans involved. Both authors interviewed involved New Guineans 50 years after the events described. Just as older Americans will remember for the rest of their lives what they were doing at the moment of the three most traumatic events of modern American history—Japan’s attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001—so, too, New Guineans over 60 years old in the 1980s recalled clearly how they as children first saw whites of the Leahy-Dwyer patrol in 1930. Here is an account by one such New Guinean: “At that time, these bigger men [pointing to two old men]—they’re old now—were just young men, and unmarried. They hadn’t shaved yet. That’s when the white men came…. I was so terrified, I couldn’t think properly, and I cried uncontrollably. My father pulled me along by the hand and we hid behind some tall kunai grass. Then he stood up and peeped out at the white men…. Once they had gone, the people [we New Guineans] sat down and developed stories. They knew nothing of white-skinned men. We had not seen far places. We knew only this side of the mountains, and we thought we were the only living people. We believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to ‘that place’—the place of the dead. So when the strangers came we said: ‘Ah, these men do not belong to the earth. Let’s not kill them—they are our own relatives. Those who have died before have turned white and come back.’”

On first seeing Europeans, New Guinea Highlanders sought to fit these strange-looking creatures into known categories of their own world view. Questions that they asked themselves included: Are these creatures human? Why have they come here? What do they want? Often, New Guineans took whites to be “sky people”: people like New Guineans themselves, who were supposed to inhabit the sky, who traded and made love and war like New Guineans but were immortal, who were either spirits or ancestral ghosts, and who occasionally took human form and were then either red or white and descended to earth. At times of first contact, New Guineans carefully scrutinized Europeans, their behavior, and the debris that they left at their camps, for evidence about what they were. Two discoveries that went a long way towards convincing New Guineans that Europeans really were human were that the feces scavenged from their campsite latrines looked like typical human feces (i.e., like the feces of New Guineans); and that young New Guinea girls offered to Europeans as sex partners reported that Europeans had sex organs and practiced sex much as did New Guinea men.

Trade and traders

A remaining relationship between neighboring societies, besides defending boundaries and sharing resources and making war, is trade. I came to appreciate the sophistication of trading among traditional societies in the course of bird surveys that I was carrying out on 16 islands of Vitiaz Strait off northeastern New Guinea. Most of the islands were largely forest-covered, with only a few villages, each consisting of houses spaced dozens of feet apart and fronting on large open public spaces. Hence when I landed on an island called Malai, I was astonished by the contrast. I felt as if I had suddenly parachuted into a small-scale version of Manhattan. Crowded close to each other, almost side-by-side like a row of New York townhouses, were tall two-story wooden houses, veritable skyscrapers compared to the one-story huts prevailing elsewhere then on the Vitiaz Strait islands. Large wooden dugout canoes pulled up on the beach gave the sense of a First World marina all of whose berths had been rented out. In front of the houses were more people than I had seen gathered in a small area anywhere else in Vitiaz Strait. A 1963 census counted Malai’s population as 448 people, which when divided by Malai’s area of 0.32 square miles yields a population density of 1,400 people per square mile, higher than that of any European country. For comparison, even the Netherlands, Europe’s most densely populated nation, supports only 1,010 people per square mile.

That remarkable settlement belonged to the famous long-distance Siassi traders, who ranged in their sailing canoes up to 300 miles through rough seas, carrying pigs, dogs, pots, beads, obsidian, and other goods. They rendered a service to the communities they visited, by supplying them with those necessities and luxuries. While doing good for others, they did well themselves, acquiring some of their own food and becoming immensely rich by New Guinea standards, which measured wealth in pigs. One voyage could yield a 900% profit, by loading pigs at Malai, converting each pig at the first stop of Umboi Island into 10 packets of sago, converting those 10 packets at the second stop at Sio Village on the New Guinea mainland into 100 pots, and converting those 100 pots at the next stop on New Britain into 10 pigs, to be brought back to Malai and consumed in ceremonial feasting. Traditionally, no cash was exchanged, because all those societies lacked cash. Siassi twin-masted canoes, up to 60 feet long and 5 feet deep, with a cargo pay load of about two tons, were technological masterpieces of wooden sailing ships (Plate 32).

The archaeological record demonstrates that our Ice Age ancestors were already trading tens of thousands of years ago. Cro-Magnon sites in the interior of Pleistocene Europe contain Baltic marine amber and Mediterranean seashells transported a thousand miles inland, plus obsidian, flint, jasper, and other hard stones especially suitable for stone-tool-making and transported hundreds of miles from the sites where they had been quarried. Only a few modern traditional societies have been reported as largely self-sufficient and carrying out little or no trade, including Siberia’s Nganasan reindeer-herders and Bolivia’s Siriono Indians as studied by Allan Holmberg. Most traditional societies, like all developed societies, did import some goods. As we shall see, even traditional societies that could have been self-sufficient usually chose not to be so and instead preferred to acquire by trade some objects that they could have obtained or produced for themselves.

Most trade in traditional small-scale societies was short-range trade between neighboring groups, because intermittent warfare made it dangerous for people to make trading trips that passed through several different populations. Even Siassi long-distance canoe traders were careful to land only at villages where they had established trading relationships. If they got blown off course or dismasted and made a forced landing on a coast where they lacked such relationships, they were likely to be killed as trespassers, and to have their goods seized, by villagers who didn’t care about being nice and encouraging future visits.

Traditional trade differed in several respects from our modern equivalent method for acquiring goods from others, namely, by cash purchases at stores. For example, it would be unthinkable today for a customer buying a car at a new-car lot to drive off without paying anything or signing a contract, leaving the car salesman just to trust that at some time in the future the customer would decide to give him a gift of equal value. But that surprising modus operandi is common in traditional societies. However, a few features of traditional trade would be familiar to modern shoppers, especially the high proportion of our purchases devoted to functionally useless or unnecessarily expensive status symbols, such as jewelry and designer clothes. Hence let’s begin by picturing what traditional outsiders soon after first contact found strange in our market cash economy. Some just-contacted New Guinea Highlanders were flown out to New Guinea coastal towns for an experience in culture shock. What must those Highlanders have thought as they learned how our market economy operates?

Market economies

The first surprise for the Highlanders would have been to discover that our overwhelmingly prevalent method of acquiring an item is not by barter, but by paying for it with money (Plate 33). Unlike most items exchanged in traditional trade, money has no intrinsic value, nor is it considered a beautiful luxury item like our jewelry or a Siassi trade bowl, serving either to be exchanged or to be kept and admired and conferring status. Money’s sole use is to be spent and converted into other things. Also unlike a Siassi trade bowl, which any resident of certain villages possessing the necessary skill is permitted to carve, money is issued only by a government: if a First World citizen possessing the necessary skill plus a printing press attempts to exercise that skill by issuing money himself, he will be imprisoned as a counterfeiter.

The former traditional method of barter, in which two people exchange one desired object for another object face-to-face without the intermediary step of paying cash to a third party, now operates less frequently in modern societies. Conversely, some traditional societies used objects of arbitrary value in a way that sometimes approached our use of money. Examples included the use of gold-lipped pearl shells by New Britain’s Kaulong people, and of large stone disks by the inhabitants of Yap Island in Micronesia. New Guinea Highlanders used cowrie shells, and people in Vitiaz Strait used carved wooden bowls, as exchange items, including to pay part of a bride-price at a fixed rate: so-and-so-many shells or bowls, plus other goods, for one bride. But those objects still differed from money in that they were used to pay only for certain things (not to be wasted on sweet potatoes for lunch), and that they were also attractive luxury items to be kept and shown off. Unlike New Guinea Highlanders, Americans with $100 bills keep them hidden in a wallet until they are to be spent, and don’t strut around with a line of banknotes strung on a necklace around their neck for all to see.

A second feature of our market economy that would surprise many traditional peoples is that our process of buying something is conceived explicitly as an exchange, in which the buyer’s handing-over of something else (usually money) is considered a payment, not a reciprocal gift. Almost always, the buyer either pays at the time of acquisition, or at least agrees on a price if the payment will be made later or in installments. If the seller does agree to wait until later for part or all of the payment, as in the case of many new-car purchases, the payment is still a specified obligation, not a subsequent reciprocal gift at the buyer’s discretion. Contrast this procedure with the imaginary case of a car salesman “giving” a customer a car and expecting an unspecified future gift: we’d consider such a transaction absurd. But we’ll see that that’s exactly how trade does proceed in many traditional societies.

A third feature is that most of our market transactions take place between the buyer and a specialist professional middleman (“salesman”) in a specialist professional facility (“store”), rather than between the buyer and the ultimate supplier near the house of either one. A simpler model operating at the lowest level of our economic hierarchy consists of one-off direct transactions whereby a seller advertises his wares (by a sign in front of his house, a newspaper ad, or an eBay notice) and sells his house or car directly to a buyer who has scanned ads. Conversely, a complex model at the highest level of our economic hierarchy consists of sales from governments to governments, such as contracts between governments for oil deliveries, or weapon sales by First World countries to other countries.

While our market transactions do assume these varied forms, in all forms the buyer and the seller usually have little or no on-going personal relationship beyond the transaction. They may never have seen or dealt with each other before, they may never deal with each other again, and they care mainly about the items that change hands (the purchased goods and the money), not about their relationship. Even in cases where the buyer and the seller repeatedly carry out transactions with each other, as in the case of a shopper who visits the farmers’ market stall of some particular farmer every week, the transaction is primary, and the relationship is secondary. We shall see that this basic fact of market economies, which readers of this book take for granted, often does not apply to traditional small-scale societies, where the parties aren’t professional sellers or buyers, the relationship between the two parties is on-going, and they may consider the exchanged items to be of negligible significance compared to the personal relationship that the exchange serves to strengthen.

A fourth feature of market economies is related to that third feature: most professional markets operate either constantly or else regularly and often. Typically, a store is open daily except Sundays, while a farmers’ market operates weekly (e.g., on Wednesday mornings). In contrast, much traditional small-scale trade brings parties together infrequently, often just once a year or even once every several years.

The next-to-last feature of markets constitutes a similarity to rather than a difference from trading by traditional small-scale societies. In both cases the objects traded cover a spectrum from materially essential (“necessities”) to materially useless (“luxuries”). At one extreme are objects that facilitate or are indispensible for surviving, such as food, warm clothing, and tools and machines. At the opposite extreme are objects irrelevant to survival but prized as luxuries, as decorations, for entertainment, or for conferring status, such as jewelry and television sets. In the gray middle ground lie objects that are materially useful, but that are available either as minimum-cost low-prestige functional items or as expensive high-prestige items with the same function. For instance, a $10 synthetic tote bag and a $2,000 leather Gucci tote bag are equally suitable for toting, but the latter confers status and the former doesn’t. This example already hints that we shouldn’t dismiss materially “useless” luxury items as useless: the status that they confer may bring huge material benefits, such as business opportunities or the wooing of prospective trophy wives and husbands. This same spectrum of “usefulness” already existed in the earliest trade that can be documented archaeologically: Cro-Magnons tens of thousands of years ago traded obsidian spear points necessary for hunting meat, shells and amber useful purely for decoration, and beautiful finely finished spear points of translucent quartz. The Cro-Magnons presumably no more dreamed of using their quartz spear points in hunting and thereby risking breaking them than we would use our best Gucci tote bag to carry home our fish purchase dripping with redolent fish oil from the seafood market.

The remaining feature of modern markets is one that is often duplicated by traditional trade, but that traditional societies in other cases replace with a behavior that has little precedent among us moderns. We buy something mainly just because we want the thing purchased (rather than to cement a personal relationship with the seller), and we buy it from someone who complements us economically and can sell us something to which we don’t have access or that we don’t know how to make. For instance, ordinary non-farming consumers don’t have access to apples of their own: they have to buy apples from apple farmers or from grocery stores. Apple farmers in turn buy medical and legal services from physicians and lawyers who possess medical and legal knowledge lacking to apple farmers. No apple farmer would sell apples to and buy apples from other apple farmers merely to maintain the goodwill of other apple farmers. We shall see that traditional small-scale societies, like modern consumers and suppliers, often do trade objects to which one party has access and the other doesn’t (e.g., a type of stone available only locally), and they trade objects that one party knows how to make but the other doesn’t (e.g., sophisticated ocean-going wooden dugout canoes). But they also do much trading of objects equally available to either party, and they do that trading to maintain relationships for political and social reasons.

Traditional forms of trade

So far, we have considered trade from the perspective of members of traditional societies, and of what they would find different and surprising, or else familiar, in our market economies. Let’s examine the corresponding mechanisms in traditional trade. I already mentioned the replacement of our cash purchases by their exchanges of objects, and occasionally by their use of valued objects such as cowrie shells in a manner somewhat similar to money. Now, let’s consider the traditional equivalents of the other features of market economies that we just discussed.

While in some cases traditional societies negotiate explicit exchanges, and both items pass hands at the same time, in other cases one party presents a gift, and the recipient thereby incurs the obligation to provide a gift of comparable value at some unspecified time in the future. The simplest form of such reciprocal gifting occurs among Andaman Islanders (Plate 4), for whom there is little delay between the two halves of the transaction. A local group invites one or more other local groups to a feast that lasts a few days, and to which the visitors bring objects such as bows, arrows, adzes, baskets, and clay. A visitor gives an object to a host, who cannot refuse the gift but is then expected to give something of equal value. If the second gift does not meet the guest’s expectations, the guest may become angry. Occasionally a giver, on making a present, names the gift that he would like in return, but that’s exceptional. Among South America’s Yanomamo Indians (Plate 12), reciprocal gift-giving is also associated with feasts to which one group invites a neighboring group. Yanomamo reciprocal gifting differs from the Andaman custom in that the second gift, which must be a different type of item from the first gift, is presented at a subsequent feast. Each Yanomamo gift is remembered long afterwards. The delay between the first and second gifts means that the accumulated obligations serve as an on-going excuse for neighboring villages to visit each other for feasts, because some members of one village always owe gifts to some members of another village from their last meeting.

Among the northwest Alaska Inuit, the Agta of the Philippines (Plate 3), Trobriand Islanders, and the !Kung, each person has recognized trading partners with whom gifts are exchanged. Each Inuit has between one and six such partners. Agta and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers have relationships with Philippine and Bantu farmer families respectively, and those relationships are passed on from generation to generation. Each Trobriand Islander traveling on a canoe trading voyage has on each visited island a trade partner to whom he gives a gift, and from whom he then expects an equivalent gift on his next visit a year later. The so-called hxaro long-distance trade system of the !Kung is distinctive in that each individual has dozens of trade partners, and it’s also distinctive in the long interval between the giving of one gift and the receipt of an equivalent gift when the two parties next meet, typically months or years later.

Who are the traders, and under what circumstances and how often do they meet? In small-scale societies everybody trades. However, in large chiefdoms and early states with specialization of economic roles, professional traders like our modern ones emerge, as documented already by records from the dawn of writing 4,000 or 5,000 years ago in the Near East. Another modern phenomenon with precedents in simpler societies consists of entire societies specialized in trading. The Malai Islanders whose “skyscrapers” surprised me lived on an island too small to provide all their food needs, became middlemen and manufacturers and overseas traders, and thereby obtained the remainder of their food requirements. Malai Island thus serves as a model for modern Singapore.

The formats and frequencies of traditional trade encompass a spectrum. At the simplest level are the occasional trips made by individual !Kung and Dani to visit their individual trading partners in other bands or hamlets. Suggestive of our open-air markets and flea markets were the occasional markets at which Sio villagers living on the coast of northeast New Guinea met New Guineans from inland villages. Up to a few dozen people from each side sat down in rows facing each other. An inlander pushed forward a net bag containing between 10 and 35 pounds of taro and sweet potatoes, and the Sio villager sitting opposite responded by offering a number of pots and coconuts judged equivalent in value to the bag of food. Trobriand Island canoe traders conducted similar markets on the islands that they visited, exchanging utilitarian goods (food, pots, bowls, and stone) by barter, at the same time as they and their individual trade partners gave each other reciprocated gifts of luxury items (shell necklaces and armbands).

Andaman Island bands and Yanomamo Indian villages arranged to meet at irregular intervals for multi-day feasts that served as occasions for gifts. Northwest Alaska Inuit held summer trade fairs and winter messenger feasts at which groups that were passionate enemies for the rest of the year managed to sit down peacefully together for a week or two of trade and feasting. Specialized societies of canoe traders, such as the Siassi Islanders, Trobriand Islanders, southeast New Guinea’s Mailu Islanders, and Indonesians (Macassans) who visited northern Australia to obtain trepang (dried sea cucumbers) for the Chinese soup market, sent groups of merchants hundreds or even thousands of miles over the ocean on annual trading trips.

Traditional trade items

As for the objects exchanged in trading, one is tempted to begin by dividing them into two categories: utilitarian items (like food and tools) versus luxury items (like cowrie shells and diamond rings). But this dichotomy becomes gray as soon as one tries to apply it. As the economist Frank Knight wrote, “Of all the fallacious and absurd misconceptions which so largely vitiate economic and social discussion, perhaps the very worst is the notion… that an interpretation of utility, or usefulness, in biological or physical survival terms has any considerable significance at the human level.” For example, a BMW car is undoubtedly a luxury and a status symbol, but it can still be used to drive to the grocery store, and the image that it projects may be essential to its bearer in earning money by closing business deals and in wooing mates. The same is true for a beautiful Siassi wooden carved bowl, which is used to hold vegetables at feasts but is also a status symbol indispensable for buying a wife in the Vitiaz Strait region. As for pigs, they are by far the most valuable status symbol in New Guinea. That gave rise to Thomas Harding’s remark, “It can be said of pigs, too, that the least important thing one can do is simply to eat them.”

Table 1.1. Objects traded by some traditional societies

Despite all those strictures, if one is presented with a list of 59 trade items, it is still useful to categorize them rather than to lump them all into an undivided laundry list. Hence Table 1.1 gives examples of trade items in 13 small-scale societies, partitioned into four categories: objects immediately useful for survival, obtaining subsistence, and daily life, further divided into raw materials versus manufactured objects; luxuries or decorative objects not immediately useful for survival; and an intermediate category of objects that are used but that also convey status raising their value far above the material value of an object with the same utility but not conveying status (e.g., a cashmere jacket compared to a cheap synthetic jacket of similar size and warmth).

Table 1.1 shows that certain types of useful raw materials have been traded by many societies around the world: especially stone, and more recently metal, for making tools and weapons; plus salt, food, wood, animal hides and furs, pitch for caulking, and clay for making pots. Commonly traded useful manufactured objects include finished tools and weapons, baskets and other containers, fiber for weaving, bags and nets and ropes, cloth and clothing, and processed foods such as bread, sago, and pemmican. The long list of luxury and decorative items, sometimes traded as raw materials, more often worked into manufactured objects, includes bird feathers; shells of mollusks and turtles, raw or worked into necklaces and armbands; amber; dog, pig, and shark teeth; elephant and walrus ivory; beads; paints and paint bases, such as red ocher and black manganese oxide; tree oil; and stimulants such as tobacco, alcohol, and betelnut. For example, by 2,000 years ago long-distance specialist traders from Asia were bringing bird-of-paradise plumes from New Guinea to China, and the plumes were thence traded as far as Persia and Turkey. Finally, trade objects that are simultaneously useful and luxurious include pigs, trepang, spices, and other prestige foods (the traditional equivalents of our caviar); and beautiful but useful manufactured goods such as pottery, carved bows and arrows, and decorated bags, clothing, and mats.

Table 1.1 and the preceding discussion omit two other important categories of things that one people may offer to another people but that we don’t normally count among trade goods: labor and spouses. African rainforest Pygmies and Agta forest Negritos of the Philippines, and more recently some !Kung, intermittently work for neighboring Bantu farmers, Philippine farmers, and Bantu herders respectively. That’s a big part of the quid pro quo arrangement under which those groups of foragers receive iron plus garden crops or milk from those neighboring food-producers, in return for hunted and gathered products plus labor. Most neighboring peoples exchange spouses, occasionally as direct simultaneous exchanges (you give me your sister and I’ll give you my sister), more often as separate acts (you give me your sister now, and I’ll give you my little sister when she reaches the age of menarche). Between African rainforest Pygmies (Plate 8) and neighboring Bantu farmers such movements of spouses are virtually one way, with Pygmy women becoming wives of Bantu men but not vice versa.

Those are the main categories of objects exchanged. As for who trades what to whom, New Guinea’s Daribi people, living at low population densities in a still heavily forested area at the edge of the densely populated and deforested Highland valleys, exported to Highlanders the plumes of birds of paradise, abundant in Daribi forests, in exchange for salt and polished stone axes imported from the Highlands. Pygmy groups of African rainforests export forest products such as honey, game meat, and mushrooms to neighboring Bantu farmers, from whom they import garden-grown foods, pots, iron, tobacco, and alcohol. In the Vitiaz Strait region the islanders export pig tusks, dogs, sago, betelnut, mats, beads, obsidian, and red ocher to mainlanders, from whom they import pigs, dog teeth, taro, tobacco, pots, net bags, bows and arrows, and black paint. In trade between coastal and inland Inuit of Alaska’s north slope, coastal people could offer marine mammal products such as seal oil for fuel and food, seal and walrus skins, whale blubber, and walrus ivory, plus beach driftwood and wooden vessels, plus pottery and bags that they made. Inlanders could in turn supply caribou hides and legs and antlers, furs of wolves and other terrestrial mammals, pitch for caulking, and pemmican and berries.

Who trades what?

These examples of objects exchanged illustrate a pattern that we moderns take for granted, because it describes almost all trade today: each partner supplies objects that it has or can readily make, and that the other partner lacks. Raw materials, and the skills required to manufacture finished products, are both unevenly distributed around the world. For example, the United States is the world’s leading exporter of raw foods and manufactured aircraft, because we can grow food and build airplanes in excess of our own needs. However, we are an importer of oil, because we don’t produce enough of it for our needs, while some other countries (such as Saudi Arabia) produce oil in excess of their needs. Such imbalances of raw materials and of skills also characterize much, but not all, traditional trade.

As for unevenly distributed raw materials, a common pattern is for neighboring peoples occupying different habitats each to supply the other with raw materials confined to or more abundant in the exporter’s habitat. Many examples include trade between coastal and inland peoples. In each such case, as I detailed two paragraphs above for Alaska’s Inuit, the coastal partner has preferential or sole access to marine or coastal resources such as marine mammals and fish and shells, while the inland partner has preferential or sole access to terrestrial resources such as game, gardens, and forests.

Another common pattern consists of trade in very local raw materials not tied to specific habitat types, notably salt and stone. The Dugum Dani obtained all of their salt from the Iluekaima brine pool, and all of their stone for axes and adzes from a single quarry in the Nogolo Basin, while for much of the Southwest Pacific the main source of obsidian (the volcanic glass used to make the sharpest stone artifacts) was quarries near Talasea on the island of New Britain. Talasea obsidian became traded over an expanse of more than 4,000 miles, from Borneo 2,000 miles west of Talasea to Fiji 2,000 miles east of Talasea.

The remaining common pattern of trade in different types of raw materials involves neighboring groups with different subsistence strategies, giving them access to different materials. In many places around the world, hunter-gatherers trade meat, honey, resins, and other forest products that they hunt and gather to nearby village farmers in return for crops that the villagers grow. Examples include plains bison hunters and Pueblo farmers of the U.S. Southwest, Semang hunters and Malay farmers of peninsular Malaysia, and numerous hunter-farmer associations of India, as well as the African Pygmy hunters and Bantu farmers, and the Agta hunters and Philippine farmers whom I’ve already described. There are similar trade relations between herders and farmers in many parts of Asia and Africa, and between herders and hunter-gatherers in Africa.

Traditional trade, like modern trade, often also involves unevenly distributed skills. An example is the virtual local monopolies of pottery and ocean-going canoes enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mailu Island off the coast of southeast New Guinea, studied by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski. While pottery was initially also produced by nearby New Guinea mainlanders, the Mailu achieved an export monopoly by figuring out how to mass-produce finer, thinner, stylistically standardized pots. Such pots were advantageous both to Mailu pot-makers and to their pot-using customers. Thin pots enabled the pot-makers to produce more pots from a given quantity of clay, to dry the pots faster, and to reduce the risk of damage while the pots were being fired. As for pot-using consumers, they preferred thin Mailu pots because less fuel was required for cooking in them, and the contents boiled faster. Mailu Islanders similarly acquired a monopoly on making and operating long-distance ocean-going canoes, which were more complicated and required more skill to construct than did the simpler canoes with which mainlanders were confined to making short trips in more sheltered coastal waters. Comparable manufacturing monopolies were enjoyed a thousand years ago by Chinese porcelain- and paper-makers, until their manufacturing secrets leaked out or were duplicated. In our modern times of industrial espionage and diffusion of knowledge, it has become difficult to maintain monopolies for long. However, the United States briefly (for four years) enjoyed a monopoly of making atomic bombs (which we didn’t export), and the United States and Europe today dominate the world market in very large commercial jet aircraft (which we do export).

The remaining type of traditional trade, which scarcely has a parallel today, has been called “conventional monopolies.” This term refers to trade in an item which either of the two trade partners could obtain or manufacture, but which one side chooses to rely on the other partner to supply, as an excuse for maintaining trade relations. For example, among the items that the Dugum Dani receive from the Jalemo area are wooden arrows with elaborate barbs and decorations, plus net bags with bright orchid fibers woven around the strings. The Dani make simple undecorated arrows and bags themselves. With a Jalemo arrow or bag in front of them, the Dani could perfectly well duplicate it, because the level of carving or weaving skill required is not high. But the Dani instead continue to depend on the Jalemo area for imported arrows and bags, as well as for forest materials that the Jalemo area has in more abundance than does the Dani homeland. Dani recognition of the Jalemo “conventional monopoly” of decorated arrows and bags is advantageous to both parties by helping to even out effects of fluctuations in supply and demand. The Jalemo people can continue to obtain salt from the Dani even if Jalemo harvests of forest products should temporarily decline, and the Dani can continue to sell salt to the Jalemo people even if Dani demand for forest products is temporarily glutted.

More elaborate conventional monopolies prevail among Brazil’s and Venezuela’s Yanomamo Indians, and among Brazil’s Xingu Indians. Each Yanomamo village could be self-sufficient, but it isn’t. Instead, each village specializes in some product that it provides to its allies, including arrow points, arrow shafts, baskets, bows, clay pots, cotton yarn, dogs, hallucinogenic drugs, or hammocks. Similarly, each Xingu village specializes in producing and exporting bows, pottery, salt, shell belts, or spears. Lest you think that most Yanomamo villagers really couldn’t make the crude and undecorated Yanomamo pottery, consider recent changes in how the Yanomamo village of Mömariböwei-teri obtained pots. Initially, Mömariböwei-teri imported pots from another politically allied village, Möwaraöba-teri. In explanation, Mömariböwei-teri villagers vigorously insisted then that they didn’t know how to make pots, that they formerly did make pots but had long ago forgotten how to do so, that the clay in their area was no good for making pots anyway, and that they got all the pots that they needed from Möwaraöba-teri. But then a war interrupted the alliance between Mömariböwei-teri and Möwaraöba-teri, so that Mömariböwei-teri could no longer import pots from Möwaraöba-teri. Miraculously, Mömariböwei-teri villagers suddenly “remembered” how they had long ago made pots, suddenly “discovered” that the hitherto scorned clay in their area was perfectly good for making pots, and resumed making their own pots. Thus, it’s clear that the Mömariböwei-teri villagers had previously been importing pots from Möwaraöba-teri out of choice (to cement a political alliance), not out of necessity.

It’s even clearer that !Kung engage in extensive trade of arrows out of choice, because all !Kung make similar arrows, which they nevertheless trade back and forth between each other. Anthropologist Richard Lee asked four !Kung men to tell him who owned each of the 13 to 19 arrows in each of their quivers. Of the four men, only one (Kopela Maswe) had no arrows from other men. One man (/N!au) had 11 arrows from a total of four other men, and only two arrows of his own. The other two men (/Gaske and N!eishi) had no arrows of their own: instead, each was carrying the arrows of six other men.

What is the point of these conventional monopolies and of arrow-for-arrow trading, seemingly senseless to us Westerners accustomed to trading only for objects that we can’t readily provide for ourselves? Evidently, traditional trade has social and political as well as economic functions: not merely to obtain items for their own sake, but also to “create” trade for advancing social and political goals. Perhaps the foremost such goal is to strengthen an alliance or bond on which one can call if the need arises. Trade partners among the northwest Alaska Inuit had the obligation of supporting each other if necessary: should a famine arise in your district, you have the right to go to live with your trade partner in another district. Agta hunters “trading” among themselves or with Philippine farmers regard their exchanges as based on need rather than on supply and demand: it’s assumed that different partners are likely to have surpluses or needs at different times, and that it will balance out in the long run, so a strict accounting is not kept. Each side in an Agta exchange makes major sacrifices at a time of crisis for the partner, such as at the time of a wedding or funeral ceremony, a typhoon, or a crop or hunting failure. For the Yanomamo, embroiled in constant warfare, the alliances developed through trade’s regularly bringing neighbors together under friendly circumstances are far more important to survival than are the traded pots and hammocks—even though no Yanomamo would openly say that trade’s real function is to maintain alliances.

Some trade networks and ceremonies—such as the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders, the Tee ceremonial exchange cycle of Highland New Guinea’s Enga people, and the Siassi trade network upon which I stumbled at Malai Island—became the major means to gain and display status in their respective societies. It may seem silly to us that the Siassi Islanders spend months carrying cargos by canoe through treacherous seas just in order to feast publicly at the year’s end on as many pigs as possible—until we reflect on what Siassi Islanders would say about modern Americans who toil in order to flaunt jewels and sports cars.

Tiny nations

Thus, traditional societies of the past, and those that survived into modern times, behaved like tiny nations. They maintained their own territories or core areas, visited and received visitors from some but not other nations, and in some cases delineated, defended, and patrolled boundaries as rigorously as do modern nations. They were far more restricted in their knowledge of the outside world than are citizens of modern nations, who increasingly use television, cell phones, and the Internet to learn about the rest of the world even if they never leave their own homeland. They divided other peoples more sharply into friends, enemies, and strangers than does even North Korea today. They intermarried with people of some other nations, sometimes. They traded with each other as do modern nations, and political and social motives played an even larger role in their trade relationships than they do in ours. In the next three chapters we shall discover how these tiny traditional nations maintained peace, and how they made war.