Guinea’s lingua franca of Tok Pisin; the Tok Pisin expression that I have translated here as “just for the sake of ‘friendship’” was “
Naturally, my realization shouldn’t be exaggerated. Of course, members of small-scale societies enjoy some individuals more than others within their own society. As small-scale societies become larger or gain exposure to non-traditional outside influences, traditional outlooks change, including views of friendship. Nevertheless, I think that the difference between concepts of friendship in large-scale and small-scale societies, expressed in Jim’s invitation and Yabu’s reaction respectively, is on the average real. It’s not just an artifact of Yabu’s responding to a European differently from how he would have responded to a New Guinean. As one New Guinea friend familiar with both Western ways and traditional New Guinea ways explained it to me, “In New Guinea we don’t just go and visit someone without a purpose. If you’ve just met and spent a week with someone, it doesn’t mean that you’ve thereby acquired a relationship or friendship with that person.” In contrast, the vast array of choices in large-scale Westernized societies, and our frequent geographic moves, give us more scope—and more need—for relationships based on personal bonds of friendship rather than on kinship, marriage, and the geographic accident of proximity during childhood.
In large hierarchical societies in which thousands or millions of people live together under the umbrella of a chiefdom or state, it’s normal to meet strangers, and doing so is safe and non-threatening. For example, every time that I walk across my University of California campus or along the streets of Los Angeles, I encounter without fear or danger hundreds of people whom I have never seen before, and may never see again, and with whom I have no traceable relationship by either blood or marriage. An early stage in this changed attitude towards strangers is illustrated by the Sudan’s Nuer people, whom I already mentioned as numbering about 200,000 and organized in a hierarchy of several levels from villages up to tribes. Obviously, no Nuer knows or has heard of all 199,999 other Nuer. Political organization is weak: each village has a figurehead chief with little real power, to be described in Chapter 2. Nevertheless (in the words of anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard), “Between Nuer, wherever they hail from, and though they be strangers to one another, friendly relations are at once established when they meet outside their country, for a Nuer is never a foreigner to another as he is to a Dinka or a Shilluk. Their feeling of superiority and the contempt they show for all foreigners and their readiness to fight them are a common bond of communion, and their common tongue and values permit ready intercommunication.”
Thus, compared to smaller-scale societies, the Nuer regard strangers no longer as threatening but instead as neutral or even as potentially friendly—provided that they are Nuer. Strangers who are not Nuer are either attacked (if they are Dinka) or merely despised (if they belong to any other type of people). In still larger societies with market economies, strangers have a potential positive value as prospective business partners, customers, suppliers, and employers.
First contacts
For traditional small-scale societies, the division of the world into friends of one’s own and neighboring groups, neighboring enemies, and more distant strangers resulted in knowledge of the world being very local. People knew their own core area or territory, and they knew much about the first surrounding tier of neighboring territories as a result of visits under reciprocal rights of use or during intermittent truces. But people were unlikely to know the next (the second) surrounding tier of nearby territories: intermittent hostilities with people of the first tier meant that you couldn’t cross that first tier during times of war to reach the second tier; and at times when you were at peace with a people of the first tier, they might in turn be at war with their neighbors in the second tier, again preventing you from visiting those neighbors.
Even travel into the territories of your immediate neighbors (the first tier) at presumed times of peace posed dangers. You might not realize that those neighbors had just started a war with some other allies of your people and therefore considered you now to be an enemy. Your hosts and relatives in that neighboring society might then be unwilling or unable to protect you. For instance, Karl Heider, Jan Broekhuijse, and Peter Matthiessen described an incident that happened on August 25, 1961, among the Baliem Valley’s Dugum Dani people. The Dani were divided into several dozen confederations, of which two, called the Gutelu Alliance and the Widaia Alliance, fought over the Dugum neighborhood. Nearby was the separate Asuk-Balek confederation, founded by a Gutelu split-off group that had abandoned its original land and taken refuge along the Baliem River after battles. Four Asuk-Balek men allied to the Widaia Alliance visited a Gutelu hamlet called Abulopak, where two of the Asuk-Balek men had relatives. But the visitors did not realize that the Widaia had recently killed two Gutelus, that the Gutelus had been unsuccessful in recent attempts to even the score by killing a Widaia, and that tension among the Gutelus was high.
The arrival of the unsuspecting Asuk-Baleks, allied to the Widaia, provided the Abulopak Gutelus with the next-best opportunity for revenge, second only to killing a Widaia. The two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were spared, but the two without relatives were attacked. One managed to escape. The other took refuge in a hut’s sleeping loft, but was dragged down and speared. That attack triggered an explosion of general rejoicing among the Abulopaks, who dragged the not-yet-dead Asuk-Balek’s body along a muddy path to their dance ground. The Abulopaks then danced with joy that night around the corpse and finally threw it into an irrigation ditch, pushed it under water, and covered it with grass. On the following morning the two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were permitted to retrieve the corpse. The incident illustrates the need for prudence verging on paranoia while traveling. Chapter 7 will say more about this need for what I term “constructive paranoia.”
Traditional distances of travel and of local knowledge were low in areas of high human population density and environmental constancy, and high in areas with sparse human population and variable environments. Geographic knowledge was very local in Highland New Guinea, with its dense populations and relatively stable environment. Travel and knowledge were wider in areas with stable environments but lower populations (such as the New Guinea lowlands and the African rainforests inhabited by African Pygmies), and were still wider in areas with variable environments and low populations (such as deserts and inland Arctic areas). For example, Andaman Islanders knew nothing about Andaman tribes living more than 20 miles distant. The known world of the Dugum Dani was largely confined to the Baliem Valley, most of which they could see from hilltops, but they could visit only a fraction of the valley because it was divided up by war frontiers that it was suicidal to cross. Aka Pygmies, given a list of up to 70 places and asked which of them they had visited, knew only half of the places lying within 21 miles and only one-quarter of the places within 42 miles. To place these numbers in perspective, when I lived in England in the 1950s and 1960s, it was still true that many rural English people had spent their lives in or near their villages, except possibly for traveling overseas as soldiers during World War I or II.
Thus, knowledge of the world beyond one’s first or second neighbors was non-existent or only second-hand among traditional small-scale societies. For instance, no one in the densely populated mountain valleys of the main body of New Guinea had seen or even heard of the ocean, lying at distances of only 50 to 120 miles. New Guinea Highlanders did receive in trade marine shells and (after European arrival on the coast) a few steel axes, which were prized. But those shells and axes were traded from one group to another and passed through many successive hands in covering that distance from the coast to the Highlands. Just as in the children’s game of telephone, in which children sit in a row or circle, one child whispers something to the next child, and what the last child hears bears no relation to what the first child said, all knowledge of the environment and people that supplied the shells and axes was lost by the time that they reached the Highlands.
For many small-scale societies, those traditional limitations on knowledge of the world were ended abruptly by so-called first contacts, when the arrival of European colonialists, explorers, traders, and missionaries proved the existence of a previously unknown outside world. The last peoples remaining “uncontacted” today are a few remote groups in New Guinea and tropical South America, but by now those remaining groups at least know of the outside world’s existence, because they have seen airplanes flying overhead and have heard of outsiders from neighboring “contacted” New Guinea groups. (By “contacted,” I mean contacted by distant outsiders such as Europeans and Indonesians; of course the “uncontacted” groups have been in contact with other New Guineans or South American Indians for thousands of years.) For example, when I was in western New Guinea’s mountains in the 1990s, my hosts, who had first been contacted by the Dutch a few decades previously, told me of a group to the north of them that had not yet been contacted, in the sense that they hadn’t yet been visited by missionaries or other outsiders.
