Eavesdropping (10 page)

E
VERY
night, just as it starts to grow dark, all the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in the jungle get ready to retire. They begin by making their beds, but they do this not by fluffing up the leaves and branches that were used the night before. Rather, they build an entirely new place to sleep, first by settling in, then by pulling branches over and around them.
¹

Lots of wild animals appropriate physical areas for their personal use. In doing so they convert spaces to places, and these places became the property of the animal. Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger called them “fix points,” zones of maximum security to which animals withdraw when threatened, or when they need to rest, sleep, give birth, or care for the young.
²

Wild humans also make places out of spaces, and use them for their own specifically human needs. I refer here to human beings who
live in the wild
, naturally, as our distant ancestors did, without significant contact with individuals who live in any other way. There is nothing wild about the
behavior
of these individuals—many of them live in relative peace, and do an excellent job of rearing their children—but they live without walls. They share space with wild animals.

Wild humans are interesting because they tell us something about the adaptive value of various behaviors, including ones that shaped habitual residential and communicative arrangements long before the influence of contemporary cultures.
³
I believe there are messages in their behavior for what it means to live a completely domesticated life, as we now do; and for what we and others must know, and should not be permitted to learn, about each other.

Today small-scale societies are dwindling, but in the previous century a number of anthropologists studied the tiny, relatively unadulterated hunting and gathering bands that inhabited Africa, Australia, India, South America, and other places. Their detailed accounts tell us a great deal about the value placed on openness and privacy by wild-living humans.

One thing we will look at is their huts, for the form, spacing, and orientation of these structures tell us things about the perceptual requirements of the builders. We will see what wild humans valued, and find that this was revealed less by what they created than what they kept the same. It is something that we care about very deeply today.

In using the term “open plan” I am recalling a trend, beginning in the 1960s, toward open-plan offices. In these physical arrangements, office workers were distributed across large, open spaces—with few if any walls or partitions—in preference to small, enclosed, private offices. Predictably, when workers made the transition into
these new spaces, they said that they missed something to which they were accustomed: privacy.
⁴
Is this a basic human need?

If we look at the Kung, the answer would seem to be no. These hunter-gatherers inhabit the Kalahari Desert of Botswana and Southwest Africa. In the mid to late twentieth century, when they were studied fairly intensively, most of the Kung lived in bands of fifty or sixty, but they periodically dispersed into smaller groups or concentrated into larger ones, as suited their needs.
⁵

The typical Kung camp was laid out in concentric circles. In the center was a public gathering place. Rimming this plaza were the huts of the band members.

Huts built for the rainy season were the most elaborate. They were circular, about five feet in height and diameter, made of branches that were set in the ground around the circumference and bent inward, then lashed together to form the peak of the roof. The frame was covered with grass. Facing inwards, towards the plaza, was the front of the hut—a small opening. This opening could easily have been confused with
an
entrance, or
the
entrance, but in reality it was not really
any
kind of entrance, at least in the normal meaning of that word.

For the fact is that the Kung
went
in far less often than they
reached
in. The huts were places to store belongings or, less often, to seek momentary relief from the sun or rain. They were not really habitable, but this was no design flaw—the builders never expected to be occupiers. What the huts gave each family was a territorial claim—squatters’ rights in their most literal meaning—and in a more socially constructed sense, an address. This place was considered “private property” in the sense of its being one’s own.
⁶

Just how a tiny piece of ground can become an address was discovered by anthropologist Jean Briggs’ who, while conducting her doctoral research in the early 1960s, shared an igloo with an

Exhibit 10 Plan of a typical Kung village showing the central plaza (o), circle of huts and fireplaces (I), and other functional zones

Eskimo family. Briggs chose, or was given, a tiny place to sleep that was between one of the family members and the wall. “That spot, just the length and breadth of my sleeping bag, very quickly became my home, in a real sense,” she would later write. “I possessed my spot, and from it I always looked out on the same view. The sameness of it gave me a sense of stability in a world of shifting dwellings, a feeling of belonging in a family; it even gave
me a sense of privacy, since no one ever encroached on my space without permission, and sitting there I could withdraw quietly from conversation into an inner world.”
⁷

It is in no sense strange that the Kung would come to think of their grass and stick enclosures as a home base, perhaps even homes, even if they were not houses.
⁸
This is particularly clear in the case of huts built for the non-rainy months, which amounted to about three-fourths of the year. These huts were made with a few sticks and a little grass. It would be ridiculous to suppose that these were
dwellings
in any sense of the word, or even visual shields, and they were never used to escape scrutiny. Indeed, it was considered improper for anyone to withdraw from the sociality of camp life. The Kung “rarely spend time alone,” wrote Richard Lee, “and to seek solitude is regarded as a bizarre form of behavior.”
⁹

Partly to escape anything approaching solitude, the Kung huts were spaced so closely together that people sitting at their hearths—essentially “dine out” kitchens in front of the huts—could hand utensils to each other without getting up. This arrangement made it possible for next-door neighbors to converse at a normal level of loudness. It also enabled them to eavesdrop on the latest camp gossip. Indeed, I would suggest that the huts and layout of Kung villages were designed—consciously or unconsciously—with eavesdropping in mind. To block the flow of personal information would have been unthinkable, and extremely risky.

On a different continent, an Indian Ocean away, a tiny band of aborigines lives in similar huts, or at least they did in the late 1960s. That’s when archeologist Richard Gould excavated an area in the Central Australian Desert and, while there, photographed the huts of the indigenous Pitjantjatjara people.
¹⁰
At that time there were just over thirty aborigines living a fully nomadic existence in the area where Gould was doing his archeological work. He found that in
the winter, when temperatures dropped to freezing, the Pitjantjatjara built “cold camps” by erecting windbreaks to shield them from ground winds. Like the Kung’s, the Pitjantjatjara camps were generally circular, with the huts on the periphery and the entrances of the huts facing towards the center.
¹¹
In the summer, when there was sweltering heat, the aborigines built small, dome-shaped shelters from boughs. These “shade camps” provided relief during the hottest part of the day.

Photographs indicate that the shelters of the Pitjantjatjara and the Kung were almost identical. Although Gould said nothing about any resistance to privacy the Pitjantjatjara might have felt, there is little indication from the design of their huts that they wanted to spend any time in them, or to be alone.

In the early 1960s Robert Dentan studied the Senoi Semai, another aboriginal group that lived in the mountains of central Malaya. The Semai people characteristically banded together in time of danger, and therefore needed to know who was under threat. Their houses were built to foster this awareness. “Because the outside walls are usually thin and the whole house open to the breeze,” Dentan wrote, “people near a house can hear what is going on inside …In the evening after the lights were out we would often chat through the walls for a quarter of an hour or so with any of our next door neighbors who were awake.”
¹²

It would not be wrong to refer to the Semai huts as shelter, for they were designed to protect people against wild animals and the elements. But they were not supposed to shield people from each other. “To refuse someone admission to one’s house,” Dentan wrote, “would be an act of extreme hostility.”
¹³
Recognizing this, and secure in the knowledge that the friendly anthropologist would not want to hurt their feelings, the Semai sometimes entered Dentan’s house, even if he and his wife were sound asleep at five
o’clock in the morning. In his book he described a typical entry. “They would cough a few times to see if we were awake or ask in clear, pleasant voices, ‘You sleeping?’ If we pretended to be asleep and they had nothing urgent to do,” Dentan wrote, “they would settle down to chat with each other. A person who dropped in by himself might just sit for a while, humming a little tune, or he might rummage through our belongings in hopes of turning up something interesting.” In response to these invasions, the Dentans tried tying the door shut, but this made little difference. “Serene in their knowledge that we liked them and were therefore always glad to have them visit,” he wrote, “they would reach over the top of the door and untie the fastening.”
¹⁴

The Nayaka, a forest-dwelling group in south India, were studied about thirty years ago by Nurit Bird-David. She reported that the “walls” of Nayakan domiciles were made of interwoven strips of bamboo, offering little or no privacy. The people moved into these huts before construction was complete, and lived there for many weeks, in full view, before they began to build walls.
¹⁵

Even when the huts were finished, the Nayaka continued to spend much of their time outside. “They remain seated by their respective fire-places, and talk across space from fire to fire,” wrote Bird-David; “[and] they rarely try to conceal their domestic activities.” Almost all interactions are overheard by others, she went on. “Normally, they do not even try to keep their conversations private.
¹⁶

The Samoans also lived in a fishbowl. In the 1980s the typical house (called a
fale
) had no walls. Except in bad weather, when they lowered blinds, the occupants were completely exposed to public
view. This, according to anthropologist Bradd Shore, helped keep everyone in line. One woman told Shore, “People want to know what happens inside a house. Many Samoans feel that if your house is all closed up, then you’ll do secret things inside that others cannot see.”
¹⁷
Another said that in a walled house (called a
pãlagi
), a structure that aroused suspicion, “you cannot see the kind of behaviors that go on inside. If people do bad things you cannot see them.”
¹⁸

Here one begins to see tensions between two quests, one for the nutritional and other resources that are needed to sustain individuals, the other for interpersonal feelings that are necessary for group solidarity. Aroused by these tensions, eavesdropping flourishes at the boundary between individuals and their societies.

The Mehinacu Indians of central Brazil, who were mentioned in the first chapter, are the most interesting for our purposes, for they offer insights into a tribal group’s extraordinary need for transparency and a rare glimpse of its equally unusual need for periods of relief.