The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (50 page)

One could add that traditional lifestyles are overall more dangerous than the Western lifestyle, as expressed in a much shorter lifespan. That difference, though, is mostly recent. Before effective state government began around 400 years ago to reduce the impact of famines, and especially before public health measures and then antibiotics largely overcame infectious diseases less than 200 years ago, lifespans in European and American state societies were no higher than in traditional societies.

What, really, are the main dangers in traditional life? We shall see that lions and crocodiles are only part of the answer. As for reactions to dangers, we modern people sometimes respond rationally by adopting measures effective at minimizing the dangers, but in other cases we respond “irrationally” and ineffectively, e.g. by denial, or else by prayer and other religious practices. How do traditional peoples respond to dangers? I shall discuss what seem to me to be the four main groups of dangers faced by traditional peoples: environmental hazards, human violence, infectious and parasitic diseases, and starvation. The first two of those groups are
still major problems in modern Western societies, the third and especially the fourth less so (although they are still important in other parts of the modern world). Then I’ll briefly mention ways in which our assessments of risks are distorted, such that we overreact to pesticides and underreact to surgery.

When we imagine the dangers facing traditional societies, our first association is likely to be with lions and other environmental hazards. In reality, for most traditional societies environmental dangers rank only third as a cause of death, behind disease and human violence. But environmental dangers exert a bigger effect on people’s behavior than do diseases, because for environmental dangers the relation between cause and effect is much quicker and more easily perceived and understood.

Table 8.1
lists the main reported causes of accidental death or injury for seven traditional peoples for whom summaries are available. All seven live in or near the tropics and practise at least some hunting and gathering, but two (New Guinea Highlanders and the Kaulong) obtain most of their calories by farming. Obviously, different traditional peoples must face different dangers related to their different environments. For instance, drowning and being carried out to sea on an ice floe are risks for the Inuit of the Arctic coast but not for the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, while being struck by a toppling tree and being bitten by a poisonous snake are risks for Aka Pygmies and the Ache but not for the Inuit. Falling into a collapsing underground cavern is a risk for the Kaulong but for none other of the seven tabulated groups, because only the Kaulong live in an environment with many thinly roofed sinkholes. Obviously too,
Table 8.1
lumps together the differences between sexes and age classes within a society: accidents kill more men than women among the Ache, the !Kung, and many other peoples, not only because hunting animals by men poses more dangers than does plant gathering by women, but also because men tend to be more risk-seeking than are women. But
Table 8.1
still suffices to suggest some conclusions.

We note first that
Table 8.1
makes no mention of the main causes of accidental death in modern Westernized societies: in descending sequence of death toll, we are killed by cars (
Plate 44
), alcohol, guns, surgery, and motorcycles, of which none except occasionally alcohol is a hazard for traditional peoples. One might wonder whether we have merely traded our old hazards of lions and tree-falls for our new hazards of cars and alcohol. But there are two other big differences between environmental hazards in modern societies and in traditional societies besides the particular hazards involved. One difference is that the cumulative risk of accidental death is probably lower for modern societies, because we exert far more control over our environment even though it does contain new hazards of our own manufacture such as cars. The other difference is that, thanks to modern medicine, the damage caused by our accidents is much more often repaired before it kills us or inflicts life-long incapacity. When I broke a tendon in my hand, a surgeon splinted my hand, which healed and regained full function within six months, but some New Guinea friends who experienced tendon and bone breaks ended up with no or improper healing and were crippled for life.

Those two differences are part of the reason why traditional people so willingly abandon their jungle lifestyle, admired in the abstract by Westerners, who don’t have to live that lifestyle themselves. For instance, those differences help explain why so many Ache Indians give up the freedom of their lives as forest hunters and settle on reservations, degrading as that may seem to outsiders. Similarly, an American friend of mine traveled halfway around the world to meet a recently discovered band of New Guinea forest hunter-gatherers, only to discover that half of them had already chosen to move to an Indonesian village and put on T-shirts, because life there was safer and more comfortable. “Rice to eat, and no more mosquitoes!” was their short explanation.

As you read through the seven sets of entries of
Table 8.1
, you’ll see some common themes of dangers that are serious for many or most traditional peoples, but that are rare or surprising for us moderns. Wild animals are indeed a major threat for traditional peoples (
Plate 43
). For example, jaguars cause 8% of deaths of adult Ache men. Lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, buffalo, and crocodiles do kill Africans, but the animal that kills more Africans than any other is the hippopotamus. !Kung and African Pygmies are killed, bitten, scratched, and gored not just by big carnivores but also by antelope and other injured prey that they hunt. While we are horrified at the idea of !Kung hunters driving prides of lions from carcasses, the !Kung recognize that the most dangerous lion is in fact a lone beast too old, sick, or wounded to catch swift prey and reduced to attacking humans.

Poisonous snakes also rank high as a hazard for the tropical peoples of
Table 8.1
. They cause 14% of deaths of adult Ache men (i.e., more than jaguars), and even more loss of limbs. Almost every adult Yanomamo and Ache man has been bitten at least once. Ranked even more often as dangerous are trees, as a result both of trees or branches falling on people in the forest (remember my own experience that I described at the start of
Chapter 7
), and of people climbing a tree to hunt or to gather fruit or honey and falling out of the tree (
Plate 42
). Domestic fires for warmth are a bigger risk than bush fires, such that most New Guinea Highlanders and !Kung acquire burn scars from sleeping next to a fire as an adult or playing next to it as a baby.

Death from exposure to cold and/or wet weather is a danger outside
the tropics, and at high altitudes in New Guinea and elsewhere in the tropics. Even for the Ache living in Paraguay near the Tropic of Capricorn, winter temperatures can drop below freezing, and an Ache caught out in the forest at night without a fire is at risk of dying. On one of New Guinea’s highest mountains, while I was hiking well prepared and warmly dressed in freezing rain and gale-force winds at an altitude of 11,000 feet, I met a group of seven New Guinea schoolchildren who had foolishly set out that morning in clear weather, wearing shorts and T-shirts, to cross the mountain. By the time that I encountered them several hours later, they were shivering uncontrollably, stumbling, and barely able to speak. Local men with me, who shepherded them to a shelter, pointed out to me a nearby rock pile behind which a group of 23 men had sought shelter in bad weather in a previous year and had ended up dying there of exposure. Drowning and being struck by lightning are other environmental hazards for traditional as well as modern peoples.

The !Kung, New Guineans, Ache, and many other foraging peoples are legendary for their ability to follow tracks, read clues in the environment, and detect a barely indicated trail. Nevertheless, even they, and especially their children, occasionally make mistakes, get lost, and may be unable to find their way back to camp before nightfall, with fatal consequences. Friends of mine were involved in two such tragedies in New Guinea, one in which a boy walking with a group of adults wandered off and was never found despite exhaustive searches that same day and on the following days, the other in which an experienced strong man became lost on a mountain in the late afternoon, could not reach his village, and died of exposure in the forest at night.

Still other causes of accidents are our own weapons and tools. The arrows used by !Kung hunters are smeared with a potent poison, with the result that an accidental scratch by an arrow is the most serious cause of hunting accidents for the !Kung. Traditional people around the world accidentally cut themselves with their own knives and axes, as do modern cooks and woodsmen.

Less heroic and much commoner than lions or lightning as causes of accidental death or injury are humble insect bites and thorn scratches. In the humid tropics any bite or scratch—even one from a mere gnat, leech, louse, mosquito, or tick—is likely to become infected, and to develop if
untreated into an incapacitating abscess. For example, once when I revisited a New Guinea friend named Delba with whom I had spent several weeks hiking through the forest two years previously, I was shocked to find him house-bound and unable to walk at all, as the result of a simple scratch that had become infected, and that then responded quickly to antibiotics that I carried but that New Guinea villagers don’t have. Ants, bees, centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and wasps not only bite or scratch but also inject poisons that are sometimes fatal. Along with falling trees, stinging wasps and biting ants are the dangers that my New Guinea friends fear most in the forest. Some insects lay an egg under one’s skin, from which hatches a larva that produces a huge and permanently disfiguring abscess.

While these causes of accidents in traditional societies are varied, they yield some generalizations. Serious consequences of accidents include not just death itself but also, even if one survives, the possibility of temporarily or permanently decreased physical effectiveness, resulting in impaired capacity to provide for one’s children and other relatives, decreased resistance to diseases, crippling, and limb amputation. It’s these “minor” consequences, not the risk of death, that make my New Guinea friends and me so afraid of ants, wasps, and infected thorn scratches. A poisonous snake bite that the victim survives may still cause gangrene and leave the victim paralyzed, maimed, or having lost the bitten arm or leg.

Just like the omnipresent risk of starvation to be discussed later in this chapter, environmental hazards influence people’s behavior far more than one might guess from the number of deaths or injuries caused. In fact, the number of deaths may be low precisely because so much behavior is invested in combating the hazards. For instance, lions and other big carnivores account for only 5 out of 1,000 !Kung deaths, and this might mislead one to the erroneous conclusion that lions are not a big factor in !Kung life. In reality, that low death toll reflects the profound influence of lions on !Kung life. New Guineans, living in an environment without dangerous carnivores, hunt at night; the !Kung don’t, both because it then becomes difficult to detect dangerous animals and their tracks,
and because dangerous carnivores themselves are more active at night. !Kung women always go foraging in groups, constantly make noise and talk loudly to ensure that animals do not encounter them by surprise, look for tracks, and avoid running (because it incites a predator to attack). If a predator is seen in the vicinity, the !Kung may restrict their travel out of camp for a day or two.

Most accidents—those caused by animals, snakes, falling trees, falling out of a tree, bush fires, exposure, getting lost, drowning, insect bites, and thorn scratches—are associated with going out to forage for or to produce food. Most accidents could thus be avoided by staying home or in camp, but then one would acquire no food. Hence environmental dangers illustrate the modified Wayne Gretzky principle: If one takes no shots, then one will miss no shots but one is also guaranteed to score no goals. Traditional foragers and farmers, even more than Wayne Gretzky, must balance hazards against the overriding need for a steady stream of scores. Similarly, we modern city-dwellers could avoid the major hazard of urban life, car accidents, by staying home and not exposing ourselves to thousands of other drivers roaring unpredictably at 60 to 100 miles per hour along the freeways. But the jobs and shopping of most of us depend on driving. Wayne Gretzky would say: If no drives, then no pay check and no food.