Sick Societies
Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony
Robert B. Edgerton
The Free Press
New York, 1992
CHAPTER ONE: PARADISE LOST
THE MYTH OF PRIMITIVE HARMONY
Many anthropologists have chosen not to write about the
darker side of life in folk societies.
Among themselves they may talk freely about the kinds of cruelty,
irrationality and suffering from their field research.
Anthropologists believe that the ineffective practices they
see in a folk society are the result of social disorganization brought about by
colonialism.
They censor because not doing so would offend the people
being described.
Redfield’s former student Oscar Lewis restudied Tepoztlan a few years later, he
found widespread social conflict, malicious gossip, mistrust hatred and fear.
Those in the harmless people had a really high homicide
rate.
Indeed there is a pervasive assumption that long standing
social traditions must play a positive role.
Many anthropologists have also tried to reconstruct the way
of life they believe the people led before colonialism.
Female genital mutilation, infibulation,
was defended because it reinforced values of female purity and family honor.
Navaho belief in witches engendered fear, violence and
tragedy.
The Nuer went hungry due to a
prohibition against eating chicken or eggs.
Even the most accomplished ethnographers have ignored the
maladaptive.
Sirinio were so unconcerned with
their family members it amazed Homberg. Lost in the night he called for help and no
one answered. After half an hour the cries
ended. His sister said, “A jaguar
probably got him.”
CHAPTER TWO: FROM RELATIVISM TO
EVALUATION
He is proposing several questions.
--First, can we identify valid criteria for determining
whether one sociocultural system is more adaptive- or
less harmful to its members- than another?
--Second, do maladaptive or useless beliefs or practices
occur even in societies that have survived in the same ecosystem for many year?
--Finally, if maladaptive beliefs and practices can be
identified, why do they occur.
A harmful belief or practice would endanger a person’s
physical or mental health.
In addition to asking questions about individual well-being
and health, we would now ask whether the population can adequately carry out
the tasks necessary to meet the needs of its members.
Noyes declared that henceforth only
older men would be allowed to have sex with young, and as yet “imperfect,”
women.
238 individuals who some 30 years
ago lived in Duddie’s Branch, an isolated “hallow” in
Eastern Kentucky.
Most people simply defecated on the ground, leaving their feces to be
eaten by their emaciated dogs. Their hair literally throbbed with lice. Anthropologist Rena Gazaway
still grew fond of them. She thought
many were mute. One man had heard of the
American “King” – someone named Kennedy but he could not say what a king
was. These people were fiercely loyal to
their way of life. They could express
great love for their families. They had
pride, dignity, courage, and generosity.
The relativists
insistence on respect for the values of other people has undoubtedly done more
good for human dignity and human rights than it has done harm to science.
EVALUATING
CULTURES
Most particularistic interpretive
anthropologists who confine themselves to a single culture and reject all
comparison nevertheless implicitly use a comparative perspective.
The emotions of another people, to
choose only one example, are either the same as ours or
different, and either conclusion implies, at the very least, comparisons
between the emotions of the interpreter and those of the people being
interpreted.
Nevertheless, what I am proposing
calls for the evaluation of other cultures.
Some are maladaptive because they endanger people’s health, happiness,
or survival. In addition to relativism
many say there can be no universal standards for evaluating peoples’ cultural
beliefs or social institutions – many say it is quite impossible to even
understand others.
Philosopher Richard Rory has
endorsed the views of philosophers no less celebrated than Wittgenstein and Quine that scholars should abandon their quest for
objective truth.
Cultural
relativism, one of the most venerable – and, - many say, most valuable –
principles. This principle, or more correctly, this axiom, states that
because there is no universally valid standard by which the beliefs or
practices of other cultures can be evaluated, they can only be judged relative
to the cultural context in which they occur.
There are some highly vocal
scholars who deplore cultural relativism and confidently exalt the superiority
of one culture over others, such as Allan Bloom.
Famous Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis in
its strong version claimed that the language people spoke had such a profound
effect on how they saw the world and thought about it.
Subsequent research proved Whorf
wrong on all counts. The Hopi did have
tenses and various words for time.
No ethnographer known to the author
has returned from a stay in another culture to report that the people they
encountered were so alien that their beliefs and practices were completely
incomprehensible.
Berlin
and Kay, showed the basic color terms are universally
translatable because eleven psychophysiological
defined colors serve as the focal points of all the basic color terms in all
the languages of the world.
In the late 19th century
the scholarly study of small non-western societies began in earnest.The
belief that some traditional beliefs and practices were useless survivals
lasted until it was supplanted by the emerging concept of functionalism
developed by Bronislaw Malinowski
in the 1920s and 1930s. Malinowski’s British rival in the development of
functionalist theory was A. R. Radcliffe.
The idea that every known society
is well adapted to its environment is on the face of it tantamount to arguing
that all living humans are equally healthy simply because they are alive.
But all populations yet discovered believe
that a steel axe is better than a stone one.
Others have pointed out that for various purposes certain systems of
writing, money, or counting were more efficient than others.
Ruth Benedict’s 1934 best-seller
Patterns of Culture showed that all cultures are equal. She even praised cannibalism as
adaptive. Elsewhere she compared the
Zuni, Dobu and Kwakiutl. She actually said the less violent were her
favorites. She said the Dobu were paranoid.
She even said others were sick.
Eric Fromm
wrote the Sane Society in 1955 and he said some societies could be sick. Kroeber, then the
doyen of American anthropology, not only rejected relativism, but declared that
as societies “progressed” from simple to more complex,
they became more “humane”. Kroeber decried segregating women during menstruation,
ritual prostitution, torture, sacrifice and the belief in magic and
superstition.
John G. Kennedy asserted that
witchcraft beliefs were “irrational and dysfunctional”. Herskovits once
wrote about a critic of cultural relativism who defined an anthropologist as “a
person who respects every culture pattern but his own.”
DEFINING MALADAPTION
One reason why defining
maladaptation is so difficult is that there is a multiplicity of levels at
which it can be said to occur.
David F. Aberle to specify the conditions that would terminate the
existence of a society. They are:
1) the biological extinction or physical dispersion of its members.
2) apathy of the
members defined as a loss of motivation to survive.
3) the
war of all against all. And
4) the absorption of the society into another one.
Walter Goldschmidt offered a version he
called “social imperatives”
These are groups, values, status and role, authority and
ideology.
There are many potential criteria
for maladaption. He relies on the most
self-evident. These would include:
1)
the failure of a population or its culture to
survive because of he inadequacy or harmfulness of one or more of its beliefs
or institutions
2)
Maladaption exists when enough members of a
population are sufficiently dissatisfied with one or more of their social
institutions or cultural beliefs that the viability of their society is
threatened.
3)
It is maladaptive when a population maintains
beliefs or practices that so seriously impair the physical or mental health of
its members that thay cannot adequately meet their
own needs or maintain their social and cultural systems.
Maladaption is not only common; it
is inevitable (none, we will learn, are perfectly suited).
CHAPTER THREE: MALADAPTATION
When Europeans first made contact
with them in the eighteenth century, the approximately 4,000 Tasmanians then
living had the simplest technology ever reported for a human society. They manufactured no more than two dozen
items. Francois Peron was the first
person ever officially called an anthropologist. He visited Tasmania
in 1802.
They actually had had more technology before but forgot it.
When their children were sent to
European schools they performed as well as European children except in grammar
and arithmetic. But despite freezing
temperatures they never made an effort to fashion clothing.
They had to carry a firebrand, their principal medical treatment was slashing
the patient with deep cuts until the victim was covered with blood. The Europeans gave them dogs for young
women. They had no economic need for
conflict. But each band claimed
exclusive foraging rights to its territory, making any trespasser subject to
death and the killers subject to retaliatory raids. But raids to capture women were the main
cause of death. They failed to create
institutions to curb their destructive tendencies.
It is hard to see how raid, counter
raid and pervasive fear could be adaptive.
ADAPTION –
OPTIMAL or TOLERABLE?
Weston LeBarre refers to the ancient and widespread idea that the
fundamental source of semen, and thus fertility and life, is the brain. LeBarre shows that it
led countless populations throughout the world to become headhunters in order
to eat the brains of others because it was thought that doing so would enhance
their own life essence and fertility.
The great antiquity and virtual ubiquity of this demonstrably false
belief led LaBarre to coin the term “group archosis” to refer to “nonsense and misinformation so ancient and pervasive as to be seemingly inextricable
from our thinking.” He concluded, “A
frightening proportion of all culture is arguably archosis,
more especially sacred culture.”
A similar
question can be raised about the universal existence of ethnocentrism in human
society. Ethnocentrism may once have
been adaptive by reinforcing in-group commitment, solidarity, and cooperation
or by preserving scarce economic resources.
As British
anthropologist Roy Ellen has suggested, another reason why early human beliefs
and practices were not highly adaptive is that humans are not consistently
rational. Although Ellen did not use
this example, we might note that one reason for this is that people tend to
make faulty causal inferences. This
limitation has led them to blame one another rather than bacteria of viruses
for ill health.
Some folks
protect their children from sorcerers but not from fire or knives.
THE
PERSISTENCE OF MALADAPTATION
The history
of small societies is one of little change even in the realm of technology.
Psychologists
Donald Campbell has suggested that this may be so because people have evolved
to be conservative. It is a survival
mechanism. Joseph Lopreato
postulated a genetic basis.
Consider
the Ijaw of Nigeria, who above all else wanted to
have more children but nevertheless killed all twins of either sex, even after
British rule declared such actions to be homicide.
The fearsome Inuit wasted time on
protection. They avoided lakes that had
superior fishing. Good hunting areas
could not be visited at night for fear.
BIOLOGICAL PREDISPOSITIONS FOR
MALADAPTATION
Campbell
also said if humans are to succeed they devise social and cultural mechanisms
to control certain aspects of their biological nature.
The role of genetic factors is
poorly understood. So background is
needed. Goertz
has said that without symbols and meanings men would be monstrosities without
many more instincts. Some people don’t
like Goertz’s tabula rasa message. If it
is culture that shaped our nature, why are we one species with differing
cultures instead of different beings altogether.
It is likely that in the
Pleistocene environment, like early hominids, men had to learn to cooperate in
hunting and gathering. Thus, the Dakota
Indians exalted the manly virtues of the warrior but when warfare was
suppressed after the US
military conquest, they became apathetic and depressed.
The individualism that Tocqueville
saw in the 1830s held the seeds of our individualism which is now
destructive. Will we get away from it
when it is maladaptive?
ASSESSING
HUMAN NATURE
If genetics
determines our differences, as Daniel Freedman believes, it would follow that
some cultural practices that were adaptive for the more genetically quiescence
Navaho children – the use of a cradleboard, for example-would be maladaptive
for more active Euro-American children.
HUMAN NATURE VERSUS SOCIETY
Humans are clearly predisposed to
enjoy the company of other humans, to cooperate (at least in some activities),
and, as several scholars have suggested, we very likely have a need for
recognition or positive affect as well.E.O.Wilson has
said that there is a genetic superego.
Many of the predispositions that
are commonly believed to exist in humans have the capacity to threaten society
and resist the efforts of culture to constrain them. The list is a long and familiar one. Campbell
has argued that if a society is to survive, it must develop its means to stop
our anti-social ways. Trivers has the same feeling.
Various small, relatively peaceful
societies like the San fight over women; They kill other men over sexually
attractive women, their goal is not social well-being but personal
satisfaction.
A need for variety may lead to
creativity, as Ralph Linton believed, but it can also lead to socially
disruptive, deviant behavior.
CHAPTER FOUR: WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
FROM INEQUALITY TO EXPLOITATION
Because no
society yet described is completely lacking in social differentiation; Even the smallest societies, family and multiple family
groups or individual families. Until quite recently, all societies placed the
well-being of adults above children and those of men above women.
Many states
have not only neglected and exploited most of their own people,
they have polluted and degraded their physical environments. The most powerful have dominated, conquered,
or destroyed neighboring societies. They
usually have the greatest happiness for the smallest number.
Usually the
men decide who the women will marry and then they must be subordinate. The Chumash had
lower classes and kept slaves.
Even more difficult to explain in
adaptive terms than the practice of torturing wild animals was the cruelty they
showed to their invaluable sled dogs. If
a dog got weak it was beaten and left to starve.
MALE DOMINANCE
Men have approved of wife beating
in virtually every folk society. In Papua
New Guinea men so monopolized the access to
animal flesh that women and children had to eat the flesh of deceased
relatives.
It was not at all uncommon for
women to carry loads of wood, water and other valuables that were in excess of
their own body weight. What is more,
after colonial governments curtailed warfare to such an extent that there were
no more raids by enemies and hence there could be no imperative reason for men
to carry weapons, men still did not carry the other types of supplies.
Is there an adaptive advantage for
a society to have its men so ruthlessly assert their superiority over
women? Perhaps it helps them to keep
their masculinity and self-confidence.
Be these values are not necessarily adaptive.
In the Guisii,
When the groom first visited the bride’s home before
the wedding ceremony, he was accosted by a crowd of highly vocal women who
colorfully criticized his appearance and taunted him. When the bride visited the groom’s relatives
she found the door to her future mother-in-law’s house barred by a crowd of
hostile women who , not to be outdone, screamed insults at her, mocked and
pinched her, and sometimes even smeared dung on her lips before allowing her
inside.
The Guissii
committed rape almost four times as often as the average rate in the US. In 1937, there were so many rapes that the
British colonial government had to threaten military action, and in 1950 there
were so many convictions for rape that there were not enough prison facilities
to hold the offenders.
POLITICAL EXPLOITATION
The malnourished adolescent poor in
18th century London we
so short that only two of 81 ethnic groups known have been shorter. In1840 in Manchester
the average age at death for gentlemen was 38, for traders 20 and for unskilled
laborers 17.
The East German Ministry for State
Security – the infinite Stasi – employed over 34,000
full-time secret police, 6,000 of whom did nothing but monitor phone calls.
The use of coercive force still
occurs even in small hunting and gathering societies. However these attempts to dominate are
typically short lived.
Eastern highlands
warfare among societies was so ferocious that entire populations were sometimes
annihilated. In order to survive, a
society needed a great war leader who could rally and
recruit allies for the decimated populations.
Audrey Richards observed that a
chief among the Bemba of Rhodesia practiced
savage mutilation on those that offended him. From Africa
to Polynesia, chiefs, their families, and retainers
often ruled over the great majority of the population, through the use of force.
The Kwakiuti
had to give half of their food production to the chiefs. They also had a large number of slaves
(perhaps 15% of the population) while commoners went hungry.
The Aztec empire is a more extreme
than that of a people who had a small group of leaders who dominated, enslaved
and ate their fellow citizens. Almost
all the welth taken in battle, including the flesh
from the sacrificed victims, went to the Aztec elite – the king, nobles, and
priests.
Aztecs sacrificed from 15,000 to
250,000 a year and they ate most of them.
Many sold themselves into slavery because they could not otherwise
provide for themselves.
Shaka got
the Zulus into fighting shape. His discipline was brutal. For all to see with a sharpened stake driven
up the anus, while vultures pecked at the corpse. Fyn, who spent a
great many days with Shaka, once saw him order the
deaths of sixty boys under the age of twelve before he sat down to
breakfast.
Kumase is
the capital of the Asante. They had immense gold. Asante commoners, the
conquered peoples or the slaves who made up the bulk of the Asante
Empire; but there can be no doubt that the empire was ruled by a small elite
that prospered brilliantly from the labor and military service of many.
Not until the men of Belgium’s
King Leopold killed an estimated 6 million people in the Belgium Congo did the
world seriously object. The only
remarkable thing about the fact that states with great military power practice
genocide is that it is so unremarkable.
CONCLUSION
The reproductive success of the
poor not only sharpens the Malthusian sword that rises above the entire
population, it threatens the power and hence the adaptive success of the
elite. A population that grows too large
to feed itself may meekly die off in starvation or
disease, but it may also rebel, destroying the well-being and the lives of the
elite.
Unlike the British counterparts,
the rulers of Tokugawa Japan
chose to reject advances in military technology. Armed with a gun, the rudest peasant could
kill the noblest lord. By the end of the
16th century, the feudal lords had already begun the process of
removing firearms from the peasants.
CHAPTER FIVE: SICKNESS, SUFFERING, AND
PREMATURE DEATH
Nevertheless,
many traditional medical practices were not only useless but could be downright
dangerous. Children were allowed to play
with their feces, and sick persons lay unattended in hammocks that were exposed
to cold and rain. Indeed, some of Siriono believed those who became ill had to eat. Those who became ill gorged themselves to
death. An Australian Royal Commission
estimated that 15,000 babies a year were killed by overdoses of opium.
When President Garfield was wounded
by an assassin in 1881, his doctors probed the wound with unwashed
fingers.
Ill HEALTH AND SUFFERING
Yanomamo
Indians had 43 percent of all females born die during their first year
(probably more than half due to infanticide) and only 22 percent of the
population lived beyond the age of 30.
And in Mexico,
it has been estimated that nutritional deficiencies directly accounted for 25
percent of deaths of preschool children.
In 1982 40,000 children died from
malnutrition or preventable disease each day.
That is 14 million dead children a year.
In 1990 it was the same. Black
men in Harlem are less likely to reach the age of 65
than men in Bangladesh.
Mormons in California
have one of the lowest mortality rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease
ever recorded. A telling case in point
is the decision of people to leave foraging for agriculture, even though their
health suffers. Life expectancy for all
ages and sexes were determined to be lower in foraging situations.
At its peak around 500 AD, the
Aztec had a life expectancy between 14 and 17 years, infant mortality was about
40 percent, and only 38 percent of everyone born lived to be as old as 15.
To hunter-gatherers lives are
between 20 and 40 years, depending on the particular society. And infant mortality is high most hunting and
gathering people do live through regular periods of extreme hunger and death of
heir children.
The aborigines of Australia
could only feed their population by aborting as many as half of all fetuses
that were conceived.
MALADAPTIVE HEALTH BELIEFS AND
PRACTICES
K. R. Howe had contested European
descriptions of the great health and beauty of early Polynesians. They had arthritis, dental decay, parasitic
disease and other infection that led to incredible infant mortality. Very few lived beyond the age of thirty.
In Papua
New Guinea 20 to 30 percent died before the
age of 5. They did not make good use of
the easily available protein. They
limited the amount that mothers could eat during pregnancy or while
nursing. Small children were typically
denied animal protein.
Also, the general lack of concern
for hygiene in the preparation and consumption of food must have substantially
increased the risk of infection, as did the practice of allowing children to
crawl on feces-littered ground and put contaminated objects in their mouths.
In Maring
culture close relatives of deceased persons could not enter the gardens to
produce or harvest food for several weeks after the death. As more and more nutritionally marginal
people died, in increasing numbers of previously healthy adults were compelled
to deny themselves food while mourning.
They began to accuse one another of causing these deaths by
sorcery.
With a handful of exceptions, women
and children in all societies eat less food – less-prized food- than men, and
in many societies, women’s diets are restricted even further in both calories
and protein when they are pregnant. P. 115.
In Ethiopia
and many parts of East Africa, the youngest child is fed
whatever may be left over after his father, any guest, his mother and siblings
have eaten. As a result many are
malnourished.
In
Kwashiorkor in West Africa there is a custom whereby first
babies are displaced from their mother’s breast by new ones. The first one’s hair turns a reddish blond,
and it may lose its appetite, become withdrawn, and die, most often from
gastroenteritis.
50% of Mexican American households
in the American southwest used a drink with lead compounds, mercury or toxic
laundry bluing to cure empacho. Ayurvedic medicine
said that dehydration was thought to be polluted because of transgressions
committed by its mother.
STRESS AND WELL-BEING
John Kennedy warned that paranoia
associated with witchcraft could make life in some societies terribly
uncomfortable. It is widespread in Latin
America and in fact most other parts of the world. This level of fear hardly seems
adaptive. There can be no doubt that the
perpetual fighting of early societies created too much fear.
The Netsilik
Inuit believed no one was permitted to assist the women in giving birth to
pregnant women. The Navaho Indians have
been called “perhaps the most hypochondriacal people known to the
anthropological literature” because of their obsessive concern with curing
ceremonies. Most Inuit groups lived in
dreadful fear.
MENTAL ILLNESS
The idea that people experienced less
stress in small folk communities than in urban societies has been one of the
most implicitly taken for granted assumptions of modern social science.
Schizophrenia can hardly be
considered adaptive and it has been said to be a result of the stresses of
modern life. But all now see it as
somewhat genetic. Rates of depression
also vary from society to society, as do phobias, anxiety, obsessive compulsive
disorders, hysteria and similar ailments.
But it is not clear how much of these conditions are a result of
maladaptive customs. Lower SES people
have more mental problems.
The post-partum depression in the US,
the phenomenon appears to be quite rare in non-Western societies.
CHAPTER SIX: FROM DISCONTENT TO
REBELLION
Beliefs or
practices that leave a population seriously discontented or rebellious are,
under most circumstances, maladaptive because they threaten the survival of
that socio-cultural system and endangered the physical and emotional well-being
of the people in it.
But the
practice of foot binding apparently did not begin until around 1100 A.D. A
woman with bound feet could not work; so her husband achieved prestige by
demonstrating that he could afford to have a wife who did not need to
work. Footbinding endured for over a
thousand years without any widespread social protest by women.
These practices were
able to be put out in a decade or so but it lasted until the 1930s. For example, the practice of sending widows
or household slaves to the grave with their deceased husbands or masters was
known in many parts of the world, including China,
Africa, ancient Greece,
Scandinavia, and Russia.
Known as
sati in Sanskrit and Anglicized as “suttee,” this practice was observered as early as the fourth century B.C. By choosing sati she could reduce the
pollution that endangered her husband’s surviving relatives, absolve herself of
sin. But despite the great pressure,
very few widows actually chose sati. Less than 10 percent even though they were scorned and feared.
The
practice of female genital mutilation is widespread and in Kenya
in 1961 and 1962 the author could not find a single Pokot
woman who would criticize the operation.
Various ethnographers have observed that people in small
traditional societies may willingly give up one of their important practices
after only minimal contact with Christian missionaries or European
administrators.
The Dani many of these populations
gave up their warfare as soon as Australian police patrols appeared and
sometimes they remained completely pacified as long as a single European was
present.
Some
African kings made and remade customs willy-nilly. However, sometimes customs
are so tenaciously defended that even people of power and influence can do
nothing to change them. The Skidi Pawnee Indians of Nebraska sacrificed humans for
religious purposes.
They tortured men women and
children before they did it. A chief
tried to stop them but, led on by priests, it did not help. They continued
until at least 1834. Page 142.
The alcohol related death among
American Indians n the US
in 1982 was almost three times that of the whole nation.
Profoundly disaffected people may
have recourse to all manner of socially disruptive action, but suicide is
common. People in some small traditional
societies also kill themselves frequently.
Ten percent of all deaths known to
Pool during the six generations in Papua New
Guinea were due to suicides. In the early 1970s 57% of the total were. Most suicides were by men 23-34 who
could not stand the manliness requirements of their society. In societies where wives are beaten and find
no refuge kill themselves.
It is true that many societies-even
the people of Duddie’s Branch- not only command the
emotional commitment of their members but are closed to outsiders. Indeed human history has been marked as much
by population movement as by closed societies that jealously defend their
homelands against outsiders.
It cannot be estimated how many
people who leave the society in which they are born did so because the society
in which they were from did not meet their needs.
Samburu
were warriors. The young were not
allowed women. There was near rebellion
but it was held down by the idea that elders could put a curse on any young
person who offended them.
Women have been quite unhappy and
have blamed men for their plight. But
with rare exceptions men physically dominate women, and they are often far from
gentle about it. Spirit
possessions, which occurs in many parts of the world in addition to Africa,
allows women to protest against circumstances like claiming a sickness. Many women gang up on particularly bad
men. Smart men get out of their way.
The San constantly exhort each
other to share but do not do so. They
only did so if food was abundant. In the
siriono women had to hide food in their vaginas.
Rebellious antagonism towards
authority is often ritualized, with jesters.
But it is not only the persons
thought guilty of sorcery or witchcraft who become victims when a population is
discontented. Many categories of
objectionable people become targets: merchants, strangers, and people who
profess a different religion.
Between 1961 and 1968 all but seven
of the world’s 121 largest nations had violence. Ten of the world’s bloodiest conflicts were
civil wars or rebellions. During the
first two decades after WW II there were more rebellions than elections.
People everywhere express varying degreees of dissatisfaction . Sometimes it leads to self-destruction.
A society whose members are always
drunk, capriciously murderous or suicidal must change or cease to exist. Not all discontent can be adaptive (the idea
he is at war with).
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE DEATH OF POPULATIONS,
SOCIETIES AND CULTURES
The sad story of Ishi, the last surviving
Yahi Indian.
The Yahi were unique among North American
Indians in that they alone released arrows from bows as Mongols do. They
led a rewarding life, despite having two dialects (one for men and another for
women). They were sufficiently committed
to their lives to hold out against armed white men longer than any other North
American society.
It is not
uncommon for a population to think of itself as the best people on earth. It is hard to think that a society would hold
out against the industrialized Europeans.
However, some societies lost much of their culture and population before
European expansion took place.
The
Tasmanians and various others have seen much of their technology
disappear. Canoes disappeared in various
parts of Melanesia to be replaced by less seaworthy
rafts. In Polynesia,
bows and arrows, once important in warfare, became toys for children, and an
isolated group of 200 Inuit in northern Greenland lost
the ability to make kayaks, the skin covered boats so important in
fishing.
It did not
motivate its people to want to survive as Batak. They chose to eat a nutritionally poor diet
even though more nutritious foods were available. They had low fertility and married out of
their race. They did not lose their land
and other folks have survived harsher situations. The Mbuti Pygmies,
for example, consciously chose to retain the integrity of their culture, and
for a long period they have very largely done so.
To survive
a society must have a military. P 165.
Maricopa
Indians virtually annihilated the Quechan
raiders. Shaka
the Zulu replaced the traditional throwing spear with a stabbing spear. He completely reorganized the military. The Asante empire was built by military conquest. Those who refused to accept Asante rule were killed in
large numbers. Yet they had no advantage
in weapons.
The Aztec
Empire, the Mayan civilization, and the great achievements of Peru
came to an end. Whether
over hundreds of years or quite suddenly, the great urbanized societies
collapse. Like the Hitite.
Joseph Tainter has attributed the collapse of many of the worlds great civilizations to just such popular
discontent. When the Vandals came more
saw gain by joining them than staying in their existing polity.
Social collapse can be brought about
by belief systems and related behaviors that involve scarcely rational
assessments of the balance between investments and returns.
Knauft
saw that the Gebusi attacked presumed witches so much
that their homicide rate was one of the highest ever recorded. They started to die out with a high
rate. Idi Amin had bizarre supernatural convictions that led to bad
policies. Disregarding his council’s
advice, Montezuma made no effort to stop the Spaniards.
The pages of history are also
replete with examples of prophets who led their followers to their deaths. He describes a situation in which 100,000
people were devastated. The Xhosa
followed a prophet who had them kill all their cattle. This ended them.
A desire for revenge can also
destroy a society. A belief in the
necessity of blood vengeance may have been adaptive once. It no longer is. Many societies have been unable to bring
their feuds under control. Ruth Benedict
called this cultural suicide. She was
referring to the Kaingang Indians whose incessant
feuds had reduced their population by 75%.
Kaiadilt
men killed other Kaiadilt men in order to take their
women. When they did it it was not for adaptation
that they wanted women as sexual partners.
Dutch intervention saved the Marindanim
because as headhunters who raided enemies as far away as 100 miles and their
population was dwindling.
Marindamin
men of Melanesia practiced ritual male homosexuality
based on their belief that semen was essential to human growth and
development. They also married quite
young to assure the bride’s fertility she too had to be filled with semen. On her wedding night,
therefore, as many as ten members of the husband’s lineage had sexual
intercourse with the bride.
Instead of enhancing a woman’s
fertility the practice led to pelvic inflammatory disease that produced
infertility. Populations
large and small have lost their cultures, social institutions and
languages.
At Masada
over a thousand men lost their lives in defense of Israel. It is seen as heroic. Had they been the last
Jews, however, they would never have been heard of again.
CHAPTER EIGHT: ADAPTATION RECONSIDERED
Compared with the farmers, the
pastoralists in all societies were more open and direct in their expressions of
emotions and in their interpersonal relations.
Farmers tended to avoid conflict, presumably because their ties to the
land made it impossible for them to move away.
For all practical purposes, Plains
Indian’s economic activities were identical.
However, their social organizations were quite dissimilar, and their
cultures were dramatically different. Some
chose risky hunting for fun and others not.
Peoples right next to each other use different technologies and some are
less efficient than others. They do not
take up all the other technology because it is cumbersome to do so.
If one reflects for a moment on how
most human populations solve their problems, it should be apparent that they
will not always do so perfectly or even very well.
Christopher Boehm, he declared that
natives were applied scientists. Some
scholars have imputed unconscious problem-solving ability to populations. They say they are adapted even though they do
not know it.
Betty Meggers
seriously concluded that people use inefficient hunting techniques and
supernatural restrictions to not over hunt.
The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies
tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that
directly involve their subsistence, yet their non-rational beliefs
sometimes destroy them.
There is ample evidence that people
in many societies can provide no rational reason for clinging to certainly
belief or practices. Americans do the
same, worrying most about relatively unimportant environmental problems like
pesticide residue on foods and radiation from X-Rays while largely ignoring
global warming.
58% of American college students
believe that astrological predictions are valid and that 50% think that the
Egyptian pyramids were build by ETs. We saw many members of the Hawaiian
priesthood and aristocracy abolished their system of food taboos. Such farsighted leadership must have been
uncommon in human history.
Most populations manage to survive
without being rational calculators in search of optimal solutions. It appears for example, that folk populations
typically adopt strategies that assure a life-sustaining but well below maximal
yield of food.
This has led some anthropologists
to refer to their economic strategies in terms of “minimal risk” and “least
effort.”
CONCLUSION
The sense of community said to
typify small-scale societies is neither as common or
as intense in these societies as proponents of the folk-urban distinction have
thought.
Chumash
and Kwakiutl have had powerful chiefs, social classes, and even slaves; their
sense of community was sharply divided.
In reality, however, these people are notorious for being pitted against
one another in perpetual envy, fear, and hostility.
Urban dwellers suffer from various
forms of personal and social distress partly because their own communities are
less than idyllic but also because of the great diversity of cultures,
religions, occupations, and classes.
Small-scale societies are spared the disharmony that may result from
such diversity but they are not free from conflict.
The average life expectancy in the
US and Japan and Western Europe today is more than twice that ever attained by
any folk-society and indeed is three times that of many.
Variation
in DNA is adaptively neutral. So that of
drift in culture.
Pawnee practice of torturing children before sacrificing
them to propitiate the Mornig Star would be
considered a moral outrage by anyone reading this book. Perhaps the lessening Pawnee anxiety, human
sacrifice was a practice that created fear because failure to perform the
ceremony would bring about supernatural displeasure.
Small
tribes will be brought more and more into the larger federations, but the
tendency towards xenophobia will not lessen.
These ethnic and religious revivalisms, will
bring about valorization of traditional beliefs. In a retribalized world, we can hope that
people will choose wisely.
But the
factors that led to maladaptation in the past will continue to threaten
well-being. That is all the more reason that
those who fashion the new cultures and societies should be aware that some
beliefs and behaviors serve human needs better than others.
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