The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (20 page)

The traditional compensation process, illustrated by the story of Billy and Malo, has as its aims the dispute’s speedy peaceful resolution, emotional reconciliation between the two sides, and restoration of their previous relationship. This sounds simple, natural, and appealing to us, until we reflect how fundamentally it differs from the aims of our state systems of justice. Traditional New Guinea didn’t possess a state system of justice, a state government, a centralized political system, or professional leaders and bureaucrats and judges exercising decision-making powers and claiming a monopoly on the right to use force. States have their own separate interests in settling disputes and administering justice among their citizens. Those state interests don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of either participant in a dispute. Traditional New Guinea justice is, instead, of the do-it-yourself sort, arranged by the disputants themselves and by their respective supporters. The compensation process is one prong, the peaceful one, of the two-pronged system of traditional dispute resolution. The other prong (
Chapters 3
and
4
) is to seek personal retribution by violence, tending to escalate into cycles of counter-retribution and ultimately war.

An essential fact shaping the traditional New Guinea compensation process, and distinguishing it from Western disputes, is that the participants in almost any traditional New Guinea dispute were previously known to each other, either from already having been involved in some sort of personal relationship, or at least from knowing of each other by name or father’s name or group affiliation. For instance, even if you as a New Guinean don’t personally know the man in the village a few miles away who killed your pig while it was wandering in the forest, you surely have heard of him by name, you know of the clan to which he belongs, and you personally know some members of that clan. That’s because traditional New Guinea consisted of small-scale localized societies of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals. People traditionally maintained their area of residence for life or else moved short distances just for specific reasons, such as for marriage or to join relatives. Traditional New Guineans rarely or never encountered complete “strangers,” as do we citizens of
modern state societies. But we citizens of Westernized states, unlike New Guineans, live in societies of millions, so of course we daily encounter and have to deal with previously unknown members of our own society. Even in sparsely inhabited rural areas where all the residents know each other, such as Montana’s Big Hole Basin, where I spent summers as a teen-ager, strangers routinely appear—e.g., someone driving through town and stopping to fill his car with gas. Furthermore, we move long distances for work, vacation, or just personal preference and thereby undergo almost complete turnovers of our circle of contacts repeatedly throughout our lives.

As a result, whereas in state societies most of our disputes arising from car accidents or business transactions are with strangers whom we didn’t know previously and with whom we shall never have dealings again, in traditional New Guinea any dispute is with someone with whom you will continue to have an actual or potential relationship in the future. At the maximum, your dispute will be with someone, such as a fellow villager, whom you encounter repeatedly and with whom you can’t avoid having continued daily dealings. At minimum, the other party in the dispute will be someone whom you won’t have to encounter repeatedly in the future (e.g., that villager a few miles distant who killed your pig), but that person still lives within traveling distance of you, and you at least want to be able to count on having no more trouble with him. That’s why the main aim of traditional New Guinea compensation is to restore the previous relationship, even if it was merely a “non-relationship” that consisted only of giving each other no trouble despite the potential for doing so. But that aim, and the essential facts underlying it, represent a huge difference from Western state systems of dispute resolution, in which restoring a relationship is usually irrelevant because there wasn’t any relationship before and there won’t be any again in the future. For instance, in my lifetime I have become involved in three civil disputes—with a cabinet-maker, with a swimming-pool contractor, and with a real estate agent—in which I didn’t know the other party involved before the disputed transaction involving cabinets or a pool or real estate, and I haven’t had any further contact with them or even heard of them after our dispute was resolved or dropped.

For New Guineans, the key element in restoring a damaged relationship is an acknowledgment of and respect for each other’s feelings, so that the two parties can clear the air of anger as well as possible under the cir
cumstances and get on with their former involvement or non-involvement. Although the payment cementing the restored relationship is now universally referred to in Papua New Guinea by the English word “compensation,” that term is misleading. The payment is actually a symbolic means to reestablish the previous relationship: side A “says sorry” to side B and acknowledges B’s feelings by incurring its own loss, consisting of the compensation paid. For instance, in the case of Billy and Malo, what Billy’s father really wanted was for Malo and his employers to acknowledge the great loss and grief that he had suffered. As Gideon said explicitly to Billy’s father in turning over to him the compensation, the money was worthless rubbish compared to the value of Billy’s life; it was just a way of saying sorry and sharing in Billy’s family’s loss.

Reestablishing relationships counts for everything in traditional New Guinea, and establishing guilt or negligence or punishment according to Western concepts is not the main issue. That perspective helps explain the resolution, astonishing to me when I learned of it, of a long-running dispute between some New Guinea mountain clans, one of the clans being my friends at Goti Village. My Goti friends had become embroiled with four other clans in a long series of raids and reciprocal killings, in the course of which the father and an older brother of my Goti friend Pius were killed. The situation became so dangerous that most of my Goti friends fled from their ancestral lands and took refuge among allies at a neighboring village in order to escape from further attacks. Not until 33 years later did the Gotis feel safe enough to move back to their ancestral lands. Three years after that, to put a definitive end to living under fear of raids, they hosted at Goti a ceremony of reconciliation, in which the Gotis paid compensation of pigs and other goods to their former attackers.

When Pius told me this story, I at first couldn’t believe my ears and was sure that I had misunderstood him. “
You
paid
them
compensation?” I asked him. “But
they
killed
your
father and other relatives; why aren’t
they
paying
you
?” No, explained Pius, that’s not how it works; the goal wasn’t to extract payment for its own sake, nor to pretend to equalize accounts by A receiving X pigs from B after B has inflicted Y deaths on A. The goal was instead to reestablish peaceful relations between recent enemies, and to make it possible to live safely again at Goti Village. The enemy clans had their own complaints over claimed encroachment on their land, and over
the killing of some of their own members by Goti people. After negotiations, both parties declared themselves satisfied and willing to set aside their hard feelings; on the basis of that agreement under which the enemy clans received pigs and other goods, the Goti people reclaimed their former lands, and both sides could live in freedom from further attacks.

In traditional New Guinea society, because networks of social relationships tend to be more important and lasting than in Western state societies, the consequences of disputes are prone to radiate beyond the immediate participants to a degree difficult for Westerners to understand. To us Westerners, it seems absurd that the damaging of the garden of a member of one clan by a pig belonging to a member of another clan could trigger a war between the two clans; to New Guinea Highlanders, that outcome is unsurprising. New Guineans tend to retain for life the important relationships into which they are born. Those relationships give each New Guinean support from many other people, but also bring obligations towards many other people. Of course we modern Westerners also have long-lasting social relationships, but we acquire and shed relationships throughout our lives much more than do New Guineans, and we live in a society rewarding individuals who seek to get ahead. Hence in New Guinea disputes the parties who receive or pay compensation are not just the immediate participants concerned, such as Malo and Billy’s parents, but also more distantly related people on both sides: Billy’s clansmen, from whom payback killings were feared; Malo’s fellow workers, who were the potential targets of retaliation, and whose employer actually paid the compensation; and any member of Malo’s extended family or clan, who would have been both a target of retaliation and a source of compensation payments if Malo had not been employed by a business. Similarly, if in New Guinea a married couple is considering a divorce, then other people are affected and get involved in the arguments about divorce far more than in the West. Those others include the husband’s relatives, who paid the bride-price and will now demand its repayment;
the wife’s relatives, who received the bride-price and will now face demands for its repayment; and both clans, for whom the marriage may have represented a significant political alliance, and for whom the divorce would thus constitute a threat to that alliance.

The flip side of that overriding emphasis on social networks in traditional societies is our greater emphasis on the individual in modern state societies, especially in the United States. We not only permit, we actually encourage, individuals to advance themselves, to win, and to gain advantages at the expense of others. In many of our business transactions we aim to maximize our own profit, and never mind the feelings of the person on the other side of the table on whom we have succeeded in inflicting a loss. Even children’s games in the U.S. commonly are contests of winning and losing. That isn’t so in traditional New Guinea society, where children’s play involves cooperation rather than winning and losing.

For instance, the anthropologist Jane Goodale watched a group of children (the Kaulong people of New Britain) who had been given a bunch of bananas sufficient to provide one banana for each child. The children proceeded to play a game. Instead of a contest in which each child sought to win the biggest banana, each child cut his/her banana into two equal halves, ate one half, offered the other half to another child, and in turn received half of that child’s banana. Then each child proceeded to cut that uneaten half of the banana into two equal quarters, ate one of the quarters, offered the other quarter to another child, and received another child’s uneaten quarter banana in return. The game went on for five cycles, as the residual piece of banana was broken into equal eighths, then into equal sixteenths, until finally each child ate the stub representing one-thirty-second of the original banana, gave the other thirty-second to another child to eat, and received and ate the last thirty-second of another banana from still another child. That whole play ritual was part of the practising by which New Guinea children learn to share, and not to seek an advantage for themselves.

As another example of traditional New Guinea society’s deemphasis of individual advantage, a hard-working and ambitious teen-ager called Mafuk worked for me for a couple of months. When I paid him his salary and asked him what he intended to do with the money, he answered that he was going to buy a sewing machine with which he would mend other people’s torn clothes. He would charge them for the repairs, thereby
recoup and multiply his initial investment, and start accumulating money to improve his lot in life. But Mafuk’s relatives were outraged at what they considered his selfishness. Naturally, in that sedentary society the people whose clothes Mafuk would be mending would be people whom he already knew, most of them his close or distant relatives. It violated New Guinea societal norms for Mafuk to advance himself by taking money from them. Instead, he was expected to mend their clothes for free, and in turn they would support him in other ways throughout his life, such as by contributing to his bride-price obligation when he married. Similarly, gold miners in Gabon who don’t share their gold and money with jealous friends and relatives become targets of sorcerers believed responsible for causing their victims to contract the usually fatal disease Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

When Western missionaries who have lived in New Guinea with their young children return to Australia or the United States, or when they send their children back to Australia or the U.S. to attend boarding school, the children tell me that their biggest adjustment problem is to deal with and adopt the West’s selfish individualistic ways, and to shed the emphasis on cooperation and sharing that they have learned among New Guinea children. They describe feeling ashamed of themselves if they play competitive games in order to win, or if they try to excel in school, or if they seek an advantage or opportunity that their comrades don’t achieve.

What about differences in dispute resolution among non-state societies? While resort to mediation, as in the case of Billy and Malo, may work well in traditional New Guinea villages, it may be either unnecessary or ineffective in other types of societies. It turns out that there is a virtual continuum, from small societies with no centralized authority or justice system, through chiefdoms in which the chief resolves many disputes, on to weak states in which individuals often still take justice into their own hands, and concluding with strong states exercising effective authority. Let us consider peaceful dispute resolution in five different non-state so
cieties, ranging from ones smaller than New Guinea villages to a large society with the beginnings of political centralization (
Plate 15
).