The World Until Yesterday

(Plate 21), who spend on the average seven hours a day foraging for tubers and fruit—even though they no longer have dependent children of their own to feed. But they do have hungry grandchildren, and the more time that a Hadza grandmother spends foraging for food, the faster her grandchildren gain weight as a result. Similar benefits have been described for 18th- and 19th-century Finnish and Canadian farmers: analyses of church and genealogical records show that more children survive to adulthood if they have a living grandmother than if both grandmothers are dead, and that every decade that a post-menopausal woman survives past age 50 is associated with her children producing on the average two extra children of their own (presumably because of the grandmother’s help).

Another service that older people can render even past the age of digging tubers seven hours a day is baby-sitting. That frees up the older person’s children and children-in-law to spend more time foraging unencumbered for their own children, the grandchildren of the older person. !Kung grandparents often take care of their grandchildren uninterruptedly for several consecutive days, thereby enabling their children to undertake overnight hunting and gathering trips on which the grandchildren would be an encumbrance. A main reason that elderly Samoans give today for migrating to the United States is to care for their grandchildren, and thus to enable their children to hold jobs outside the house and to face fewer burdens inside the house.

Old people can make things for their grown children to use, such as tools, weapons, baskets, pots, and woven textiles (Plate 22). For example, older Semang hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula were noted for making blowguns. This is an area where the elderly not only try to hang on to earlier abilities but are likely to excel: the best basket-makers and potters are often older people.

Other areas in which abilities grow with age include medicine, religion, entertainment, relationships, and politics. Traditional midwives and medicine men are often old, as are magicians and priests, prophets and sorcerers, and the leaders of songs, games, dances, and initiation rites. Older people enjoy a huge social advantage, insofar as they have spent a lifetime building up a network of relationships, into which they can then introduce their children. Political leaders are usually older people, so much so that the phrase “tribal elders” has become virtually a synonym for tribal leaders. That remains generally true even in modern state societies: for instance, the average age on taking office is 54 for American presidents and 53 for American Supreme Court justices.

But perhaps the most important function of older people in traditional societies is one that may not have occurred to readers of this book. In a literate society the main repositories of information are written or digital sources: encyclopedias, books, magazines, maps, diaries, notes, letters, and now the Internet. If we want to ascertain some fact, we look it up in a written source or else online. But that option doesn’t exist for a pre-literate society, which must rely instead on human memories. Hence the minds of older people are the society’s encyclopedias and libraries. Time and time again in New Guinea, when I am interviewing local people and ask them some question to which they are unsure of the answer, my informants pause and say, “Let’s ask the old man [or the old woman].” Older people know the tribe’s myths and songs, who is related to whom, who did what to whom when, the names and habits and uses of hundreds of species of local plants and animals, and where to go to find food when conditions are poor. Hence caring for older people becomes a matter of life or death, just as caring for one’s hydrographic charts is a matter of life or death for modern boat captains. I’ll illustrate this value of old people by the story of a case involving knowledge essential for a tribe’s survival.

The story happened to me in 1976, on a Southwest Pacific island called Rennell. Because I had been sent to Rennell to prepare an environmental impact report for a proposed bauxite mine on the island, I wanted to find out how rapidly forests might regenerate after being cleared for mining, and which tree species were useful for timber, edible fruits, or other purposes. Middle-aged islanders proceeded to name for me 126 Rennell plant species in the Rennell language (anu, gangotoba, ghai-gha-ghea, kagaa-loghu-loghu, etc.). For each species, they explained whether its seeds and fruits were inedible to animals as well as to humans, or else eaten by birds and bats but not humans (naming the particular bird and bat species involved), or else edible to humans. Among those species eaten by humans, some were further distinguished as being “eaten only after the hungi kengi.”

Never having heard of a hungi kengi, I ask what it was and how it turned normally inedible fruits into edible ones. In explanation, my informants brought me to a hut where they introduced me to the source of that information, a very old woman unable to walk unassisted. It turned out that hungi kengi was the Rennell name for the biggest cyclone to have hit the island in living memory, apparently around 1910 to judge from European colonial records. The old woman had at that time been a child not quite ready to be married, so she was probably in her late 70s or early 80s when I met her in 1976. The cyclone had flattened Rennell’s forests, destroyed gardens, and threatened surviving islanders with starvation. Until new gardens could be planted and began producing, people had to resort to eating anything at all digestible, including not just the usual preferred wild fruit species but also fruits that would normally be ignored—i.e., the fruits identified for me as being “eaten only after the hungi kengi.” That required knowledge about which of those second-choice fruits were non-poisonous and safe to eat, or had poisons that could be removed by some method of food preparation. Fortunately, at the time of the hungi kengi, there were islanders alive who remembered an earlier cyclone and how they had coped then. Now, this old woman was the last person alive in her village with that inherited experience and knowledge. If another big cyclone were to strike Rennell, her encyclopedic memory of which wild fruits to eat would be all that stood between her fellow villagers and starvation. Such stories about the overwhelming importance of old people’s memories for their relatives’ survival abound for pre-literate societies.

Society’s values

Thus, much of the reason why societies do or don’t care for their aged depends on how useful old people are. Another part of the reason depends on a society’s values: whether old people are respected or scorned. Obviously, these two reasons are related: the more useful old people are, the more likely they are to be respected. But, as in so many other areas of human culture, the coupling between utility and values is a loose one: some societies emphasize respect for the aged more than do other societies that appear economically similar.

At least some respect for old people seems widespread among human societies. In the modern United States a relatively mild form of respect co-exists with some attitudes of devaluing: American children are often told to respect their elders, not to talk back to them, and to give up one’s seat on a bus if one sees an old person standing. Respect for old people is stronger among the !Kung, in part because there are proportionately far fewer old !Kung than old Americans: barely 20% of !Kung born reach the age of 60, and they deserve admiration for having survived lions, accidents, diseases, raids, and other dangers inherent in the !Kung lifestyle.

An especially strong form of respect is the doctrine of filial piety associated with Confucius, traditionally prevalent in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and actually written into law until the laws were changed by Japan’s constitution of 1948 and China’s marriage law of 1950. According to Confucian doctrine, children owe absolute obedience to their parents, and disobedience or disrespect is considered despicable. Concretely, children (especially oldest sons) have a sacred duty to support parents in their old age. Even today, filial piety remains alive and well in East Asia, where (at least until recently) almost all elderly Chinese and three-quarters of elderly Japanese have lived with their children or family.

Another strong form of respect is the emphasis on family in southern Italy, Mexico, and many other societies. As described by Donald Cowgill, “The family is depicted as the core of the social structure and the source of an all-pervading influence over its members…. The honor of the family was crucial, and individual members were expected to support the male authority, sacrifice for the family, respect parents, and avoid bringing shame on the family name…. [The family’s oldest male took on a godfather image as] a dominant authority who enforced conformity to family goals and did not countenance divided allegiance…. within this framework, there was only limited leeway for individual self-expression, which in any case was to be subordinated to the family interest…. Middle-aged children included elderly parents in the activities of their nuclear families, and a majority rejected outright the notion of ever committing their parents to be placed in a nursing home.”

These Confucian Chinese, southern Italians, and Mexican households provide examples of a widespread phenomenon termed the “patriarchal” family, whose main authority is vested in the family’s oldest living male. Other familiar examples include many or most contemporary herding and other rural societies, and in the past the ancient Romans and Hebrews. To appreciate how patriarchal families are organized, think by contrast of the