chose not to hunt in that other band’s area. That is, there was informal mutual avoidance.
Thus, traditional land use ranged over a spectrum, from well-marked territories that were patrolled and defended and from which outsiders were excluded on pain of death, through fuzzy home ranges without clear boundaries and which outsiders could use by mutual agreement, to home areas kept separate just by informal mutual avoidance. No traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern Americans or European Union citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere within the U.S. or European Union and can travel in many other countries as well merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a border passport control officer. (Of course the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack has pushed Americans back towards a traditional suspicion of strangers and has resulted in restrictions on free travel, such as no-fly lists and airport security checks.) But one could also argue that our modern system of relatively open access is an upscale extension of traditional access rights and restrictions. Traditional peoples, living in societies of a few hundred individuals, obtain access to others’ lands by being known individually, by having individual relationships there, and by asking permission individually. In our societies of hundreds of millions, our definition of “relationship” is extended to any citizen of our state or of a friendly state, and the asking of permission is formalized and granted en masse by means of passports and visas.
Friends, enemies, and strangers
All those restrictions on free movement cause members of small-scale societies to divide people into three categories: friends, enemies, and strangers. “Friends” are the members of your own band or village, and of those neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on peaceful terms at the moment. “Enemies” are members of neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on hostile terms at the moment. Nevertheless, you probably know at least the names and relationships, and possibly the appearances, of many or most individuals in those hostile bands, because you’ll have heard of them or actually met them in the course of negotiations for compensation, periods of peace resulting from shifting alliances, and exchanges of brides (or occasionally grooms) during those truces. An example is those two river men who had married into the village of my mountain friends.
The remaining category is “strangers”: unknown individuals belonging to distant bands with which your band has little or no contact. Rarely or never do members of small-scale societies encounter strangers, because it’s suicidal to travel into an unfamiliar area to whose inhabitants you are unknown and completely unrelated. If you do happen to encounter a stranger in your territory, you have to presume that the person is dangerous, because (given the dangers of traveling to unfamiliar areas) the stranger is really likely to be scouting in order to raid or kill your group, or else trespassing in order to hunt or steal resources or kidnap a marriageable woman.
In a small-scale local population numbering several hundred people, you’ll certainly know all members by name and face, the details of all their relationships by blood and marriage and adoption, and how they are related to you. When you add to your own band the several neighboring friendly bands, your potential universe of “friends” may number over a thousand people, including many whom you’ve heard of but never actually seen. Hence suppose that, while out alone away from your core area or near the boundary of your territory, you meet a person or people whom you don’t recognize. If there are several of them and just one of you, you’ll run away, and vice versa. If there is one of you and one of them, and if the two of you see each other at a distance, both of you may run away if a glance suggests a balance of strength (e.g., two adult men, rather than a man confronting a woman or a child). But if you come around a corner and suddenly confront another person unexpectedly, and it’s too late to run away, that’s a recipe for a tense situation. It can be resolved by the two of you sitting down, each of you naming yourself and your relatives and exactly how you are related to them, and continuing in an effort to identify a relative in common, such that the two of you would have some relationship to each other and wouldn’t have grounds to attack each other. But if after several hours of such a conversation the two of you still can’t identify any relative in common, then you can’t just turn around and say, “It was nice to meet you, goodbye.” Instead, you or he or both of you must consider the other a trespasser without a relationship justifying a visit, and a chasing-off or a fight becomes likely.
Speakers of the Central !Kung dialect within the Nyae Nyae area refer to other such speakers as
For example, a !Kung man named Gao, at the request of the anthropologist Lorna Marshall, went on an errand for her to a place called Khadum, lying outside but not far north of the Nyae Nyae area. Gao had never visited Khadum, and very few other Nyae Nyae !Kung had ever been there either. The !Kung at Khadum at first called Gao a ju/dole, which meant at minimum a frosty reception and possibly trouble. But Gao quickly said that he had heard that the father of someone living at Khadum had the same name as Gao’s own father, and that someone else at Khadum had a brother named Gao, like Gao himself. The !Kung at Khadum then said to Gao, “So, you are Gao’s [i.e., our Gao’s]
A similar categorization of people operated among Paraguay’s Ache Indians (Plate 10). At the time of peaceful European contact the Ache numbered around 700 people, living in bands of 15 to 70 people each, and with several bands closely affiliated into a group of bands. There were four such groups, ranging in total number at the time of contact from 30 to 550 people. Ache referred to other members of their own group as
In modern large-scale societies whose citizens travel widely around their own country and around the world, we accumulate many friendships based on individual “chemistry” rather than on group affiliation. Some of our life- long friends are people with whom we grew up or went to school, but others are ones whom we met on our travels. What counts in friendship is whether people like each other and share interests, not whether one’s group is politically allied with the other person’s group. We take this concept of personal friendship so much for granted that it was only after years of working in New Guinea that an incident made clear to me the different concept of friendship prevailing in traditional small-scale New Guinea societies.
The incident involved a New Guinean named Yabu, whose village in the Central Highlands had practised a traditional lifestyle until the local establishment of government control and the end of intertribal warfare about a decade previously. In the course of my bird studies I brought Yabu as one of my field assistants to a campsite in the Southeast Highlands, where we were visited for several days by a British schoolteacher named Jim. Yabu and Jim spent much time talking and joking with each other, recounted long stories to each other, and evidently enjoyed each other’s company. The Central Highlands town in which Jim taught school was located only a few dozen miles from Yabu’s village. When Yabu completed his fieldwork with me, he would return to his village by taking a plane flight to the airport of Jim’s town and then go on to his village by walking. Hence as Jim was leaving our camp and saying goodbye to Yabu and me, Jim did what seemed perfectly natural to me: he invited Yabu to stop and visit him while Yabu was traveling through Jim’s town.
Some days after Jim had gone, I asked Yabu whether he did plan to visit Jim on his way home. Yabu’s reaction was one of surprise and mild indignation at my suggestion of such a waste of time: “Visit him? What for? If he had work or a paid job to offer me, then I would. But he doesn’t have a job for me. Of course I’m not going to stop in his town and look him up just for the sake of ‘friendship’!” (This conversation took place in Papua New
