Wisdom and woes of tribes
By David Brooks |
January 13, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
THE custom among the Piraha Indians of Brazil is that women give birth alone. Linguist Steve Sheldon once saw a woman giving birth on a beach, while members of her tribe waited nearby. It was a breech birth, however, and she cried in agony. "Help me, please! The baby will not come." Sheldon went to help her, but the Piraha stopped him, saying that she didn't want his help. She kept screaming. The next morning mother and baby were found dead.
The Piraha believe that people have to endure hardships on their own.
Anthropologist Allan Holmberg was with a group of Siriono Indians of Bolivia when a middle-aged woman fell gravely ill, too, unwell to walk or speak. Her husband said the tribe had to move on and would leave her to die. They left her a fire and some water and walked away without saying goodbye. Even her husband had no parting words.
Holmberg was also sick and went away to get treatment. When he returned three weeks later, he found the woman's remains picked clean by scavenging animals.
"She tried to follow the fortunes of the band," Holmberg wrote, "but had failed and had the same fate accorded all Siriono whose days of utility are over." Tribes at this subsistence level don't have the resources to care for people who can't keep up.
Jared Diamond tells these and other stories in "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?" Diamond is a UCLA geographer whose books "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" became best-sellers, offering sweeping, brilliant descriptions of how geography and environment shape the destiny of nations.
In this book, he holds up tribal societies as a mirror for our lives. What have they discovered and what can we learn from them?
The most obvious difference is that pre-state tribal societies are a lot more violent. Especially in fertile areas of valuable land, people often can't wander beyond closely prescribed borders. The cycle of raids and revenge-driven counter raids goes on.
Though battles are individual, they are brutal, warfare is constant and casualties add up. He cites two tribal alliances in New Guinea at war in 1961, noting that the number killed over six months, 0.14 percent, was higher than the casualty rate Europe, Japan, China or America during the world wars.
Nation states occasionally engage in vast, hellacious wars, but these are rare. Modern societies average war-related death rates about one-tenth as high as tribal societies.
This is one way in which modern life is unequivocally better than traditional life. But in the arenas of child-rearing, the treatment of the elderly and dispute resolution, Diamond argues that traditional societies have much to teach us.
We live in codified, impersonal societies. They live in uncodified but more personal societies.
"Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies," he observes. Identity isn't a problem either. Neither is moral confusion. Or boredom. Diamond says life is more vivid in tribal societies. "Being in New Guinea is like seeing the world briefly in vivid colors, when by comparison the world elsewhere is gray."
Diamond's knowledge and insights are still awesome, but alas, that vividness rarely comes across on the page. His writing is curiously impersonal. We rarely get to hear the people in traditional societies speak for themselves, we don't learn their stories, we don't know about their beliefs, their religions or their thoughts.
The Piraha believe that people have to endure hardships on their own.
Anthropologist Allan Holmberg was with a group of Siriono Indians of Bolivia when a middle-aged woman fell gravely ill, too, unwell to walk or speak. Her husband said the tribe had to move on and would leave her to die. They left her a fire and some water and walked away without saying goodbye. Even her husband had no parting words.
Holmberg was also sick and went away to get treatment. When he returned three weeks later, he found the woman's remains picked clean by scavenging animals.
"She tried to follow the fortunes of the band," Holmberg wrote, "but had failed and had the same fate accorded all Siriono whose days of utility are over." Tribes at this subsistence level don't have the resources to care for people who can't keep up.
Jared Diamond tells these and other stories in "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?" Diamond is a UCLA geographer whose books "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" became best-sellers, offering sweeping, brilliant descriptions of how geography and environment shape the destiny of nations.
In this book, he holds up tribal societies as a mirror for our lives. What have they discovered and what can we learn from them?
The most obvious difference is that pre-state tribal societies are a lot more violent. Especially in fertile areas of valuable land, people often can't wander beyond closely prescribed borders. The cycle of raids and revenge-driven counter raids goes on.
Though battles are individual, they are brutal, warfare is constant and casualties add up. He cites two tribal alliances in New Guinea at war in 1961, noting that the number killed over six months, 0.14 percent, was higher than the casualty rate Europe, Japan, China or America during the world wars.
Nation states occasionally engage in vast, hellacious wars, but these are rare. Modern societies average war-related death rates about one-tenth as high as tribal societies.
This is one way in which modern life is unequivocally better than traditional life. But in the arenas of child-rearing, the treatment of the elderly and dispute resolution, Diamond argues that traditional societies have much to teach us.
We live in codified, impersonal societies. They live in uncodified but more personal societies.
"Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies," he observes. Identity isn't a problem either. Neither is moral confusion. Or boredom. Diamond says life is more vivid in tribal societies. "Being in New Guinea is like seeing the world briefly in vivid colors, when by comparison the world elsewhere is gray."
Diamond's knowledge and insights are still awesome, but alas, that vividness rarely comes across on the page. His writing is curiously impersonal. We rarely get to hear the people in traditional societies speak for themselves, we don't learn their stories, we don't know about their beliefs, their religions or their thoughts.
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