The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (16 page)

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.

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 dan
gerous 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?

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.