Eavesdropping (11 page)

In 1967 Thomas Gregor studied a small Mehinacu tribe living along the headwaters of the Xingú River. It is clear from his report that Mehinacu life was built to accommodate the senses. Each of the five huts in the village housed a family of about ten or twelve. The dwellings were oval in shape, with hammocks in the ends and an open area in the center. There were no internal walls. These thatched domiciles were situated around an open circular plaza. Anyone crossing the plaza was seen by one or more villagers. Some of the watchers merely sat in the doorway of a hut; others peered out of openings in order to keep an eye on local activities.

When the Mehinacu were not immediately visible, which was rare, their activities could be inferred from various clues, which were eagerly sought by their curious fellow villagers. We saw
earlier that they were quick to notice the telltale prints of butts and heels on the sandy paths around the village, but the Mehinacu also recognized each other from their footprints. When asked by Gregor, several tribesmen drew each other’s footprints from memory, doing so with sufficient accuracy that other villagers could use them to make a positive identification.
¹⁹
Such clues enabled the Mehinacu to reconstruct not only the activities of others, but also their intentions—what they were “up to.”

Many of the Mehinacu activities that could not be seen were audible. The thatch walls of the huts did little to keep conversations inside. When a person speaks, wrote Gregor, “there is a chance that a third person is listening, and that in a short time everyone else will know what he said. Even the most intimate details of his sex life often become a matter of public knowledge.” Incidentally, this feature of Mehinacu dwellings—the ability to overhear sensitive conversations—is the single most important complaint about open-plan offices,
²⁰
but the Mehinacu considered it a benefit.

Exhibit 11 The chief’s foot, as drawn by one of the villagers

A naive visitor might think that the collage of personal sights and sounds in these tiny villages was the result of shoddy construction materials or primitive building techniques—the best that wild humans could come up with, having little or nothing to rely on but bamboo and grass. But it was not what these tribes
didn’t know
that accounted for their transparency. It is what they
did know
. The under-building of huts and the openness of encampments were
intended
, and the benefits they offered were of critical significance.

What does it mean to be fully exposed? What does the choice to live a transparent life give those who choose it? From a psychological standpoint, we may suppose that complete access to the lives of others is expansive. It gives people a sense of the possible. “As one’s ability to monitor surrounding activities increases,” wrote architecture professor John Archea, “so does one’s awareness of emerging behavioral opportunities.” Paradoxically, full exposure can also be restrictive in ways that are also beneficial, especially from a social perspective. When “the likelihood of being monitored by others increases,” Archea continued, “so does the person’s accountability for his or her own behavior.”
²¹

But exposure was also protective. In small, open societies, people were able to achieve some level of personal security without surveillance cameras, police, or an aggressive press—mechanisms that are required in larger societies. But there was a price to pay: openly living beings could not quit monitoring, and when they observed wrong-doing they had to take action personally or spread the word.

In small-scale communities, even subtle events are likely to reach public notice. Since each person is known to everyone, his conduct will automatically be of interest, and since the material featured in gossip usually involves some sort of indiscretion, the person’s “news” will travel rapidly. In Semai communities there are few ways that Semai can be forced to conform to community standards,
according to Robert Dentan, but “each person knows that his neighbors are watching him.” If a man does something that offends a neighbor, “the news will be all over the settlement by bedtime.”
²²

Small-scale societies are usually egalitarian. Everyone is happy, more or less, as long as no one is trying to get ahead, because in such arrangements personal advancement can only occur at the expense of others. To avoid being victimized, villagers keep a close eye on the activities of everyone else.
²³
“Egalitarian societies,” wrote Anthony Forge, “can only be maintained at the cost of continuous vigilance by their members.”
²⁴

A specific thing that members maintain with vigilance is their systems for sharing food, which might, at first glance, appear to be supported by trust. But trust is not a well-formed concept in societies in which there is little possibility of violations, and round-the-clock surveillance makes those unlikely. Individuals who have food—that is, are
seen with food
—are expected to share it, and if they hoard it—that is, are
seen not sharing it
—they are chastised. One Samoan told Bradd Shore that if a family wished to eat a pig in an open
fale
house, the pig would have to be shared with other families because the family would be seen eating it. If, on the other hand, they were among the few that had a closed
pãlagi
house, they would not be forced to give food away, because then no one would know what the family was eating.

Eavesdropping offers psychological benefits as well. In order to preserve some level of peace and harmony, people in interdependent groups need to be aware of mood changes, and if they live in close proximity to each other, they are. They see facial expressions, a tightening or loosening of the body, and subtle movements of the hands. When people are close to each other, they can see eye gaze, and by following lines of regard they can tell what others are looking at, or refuse to acknowledge. They can detect emotions in the voice, and may be able to make out whispered messages, including ones that are not intended for them.

Collectively, these subtle behaviors tell the observant individual what others are doing and intend to do. To fully benefit from group living, people must have this information, but they will not have it if everyone is widely dispersed. To benefit from group living, people need to huddle.

From the perspective of the unwitting “sender,” however, there may be psychological problems with proximity. The English psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has written that people require at least the
possibility
that they will be able to keep the existence of their thoughts and feelings to themselves. “The capacity for mind-reading and for being mind-read is all very well,” he wrote. “But human individuals even in the closest knit cooperative groups are still usually to some degree in competition. So there must certainly be times when individuals do not want to be a completely open book to others.”
²⁵

A great deal of the shielding needed for personal activities is achieved by psychological escape, that is, with behavioral signals rather than structural barriers. Earlier we looked at Nurit-Bird’s account of psychological shelter offered by the Naiken people of India. In a later paper she described the way that they “sit scattered, staring in different directions,” displaying a reticence that protects them from direct encounters with others. Since they live openly, reticence provides relief against what Nurit-Bird called “involuntary intimacy.”

The averted gaze has always been an effective way of isolating oneself from others, and it continues to be today, especially when people are crowded into small places such as elevators and ATM kiosks. We may suppose this signal worked overtime in the case of anthropologist Jean Briggs, who, as we saw, lived with an Eskimo family in an open-space igloo or tent. Briggs quickly discovered that all her normally private (physiological) activities
would have to be carried out in front of these potential observers. Yet this scrupulously polite family of six never really looked at Briggs, nor did she watch them when they engaged in intimate personal and family activities.

Similar observations were made by Paul Fejos, an anthropologist who studied the Yagua people of northeastern Peru in the early 1940s. All the families of a clan, which ranged from twenty-five to fifty members, lived communally in one large house.” Fejos noted that although there were no partitions, members could achieve privacy at any time simply by turning away. “No one in the house, Fejos wrote, “will look upon, or observe, one who is in private facing the wall, no matter how urgently he may wish to talk to him.”
²⁶

This sort of civil inattention is rather different from structural privacy. For one thing, one’s associates cooperate. Their ability to attend is not, as with physical enclosure, removed from them unilaterally. The privacy achieved by these individuals is
requested
—directly or, more often, indirectly—and freely
conferred
. In open living arrangements, others retain the ability to detect an abuse of privacy, and to restore scrutiny at any time.
They know what it is they are not watching
.

These benign concessions by a group carry rather different implications than unilateral withdrawal by an individual. This is especially true where the individual cannot be trusted, and in face to face societies there are few ways that one can earn trust. If we are eating a pig, one Samoan woman said, we give it to other families because they can see into our house and they know that we are eating it. It may be impossible for a man to know who can be trusted and who cannot, wrote the jurist Charles Fried, “unless he has a right to act without constant surveillance so that he knows he can betray the trust.”
²⁷

We thus find eavesdropping and trust in odd juxtaposition. In today’s closed societies, eavesdropping is precipitated by distrust, but in the open societies of the past, eavesdropping—then an easy thing to do—rendered trust unnecessary.

Eavesdropping works well with tiny groups, which may be responsible for the fact that small-scale societies may be able to get by without police or courts.
²⁸
But as groups enlarge, it becomes more and more difficult to “keep tabs on… the alliances and maneuverings of others,” as Berkeley anthropologist George Foster put it, and under the circumstances it is easy to imagine that these activities “may be prejudicial to oneself.”
²⁹
But why is it difficult to keep track? Are we concerned, here, with limits on the information processing capabilities of the human brain?
“Homo sapiens,”
wrote a British anthropologist, Anthony Forge, “can only handle a certain maximum number of intense face to face relationships, successfully distinguishing between each.”
³⁰

Of course we are not speaking here of limits on the capacity to store and recognize faces. This capacity goes into the thousands, far outstripping the size of small villages. But there is almost certainly a problem with personal familiarity, of knowing what others have done, are doing, and may be planning to do next. How many of these ambiguous beings can one stand to live with?

In his own field work in New Guinea, Forge noted that there were usually about 150 people in the average settlement. Groups of this size normally included about thirty-five men. This number, he reasoned, should certainly be able to cooperate without too much rivalry. If the group swelled to double this size, however, or climbed even higher, the fighting over resources would surely escalate. Little would be known about other people’s reliability and intentions, so it would be difficult to predict their future actions under various circumstances or the likelihood that they would offer help in time of need.

Now this is interesting. If people become suspicious of each other when there are too many faces to keep track of, and fractious when they don’t know who they can depend on, how would we expect them to act if key members of their group periodically disappeared from view and, for fairly long periods, remained out of sight?

For working and talking, people sit on mats under spreading trees … To stay alone in the house is considered a sure sign of evil intent.                  Gillian Feeley-Harnik

G
ERMAN
biologist Paul Leyhausen once recited a parable about some porcupines that on a winter night decided to huddle together for warmth. They quickly discovered that their spines made proximity uncomfortable, so they moved apart again and got cold. After a bit of shuffling in and out, the porcupines eventually found a distance at which they could be warm without getting pricked.
¹

Our human ancestors also experienced environmental threats of one sort or another, and discovered that they had collective action on their side if they maintained close contact with other members of their group. But if their associates drew too close, and remained so for too long, they began to rub each other the wrong way. The challenge for them, no less than for the porcupines, lay in finding the right distance.