Scholars take various approaches towards understanding differences among societies. Each approach is useful for understanding some differences among some societies, but not appropriate for understanding other phenomena. One approach is the evolutionary one discussed and illustrated in the preceding section: to recognize broad features differing between societies of different population sizes and population densities, but shared among societies of similar population sizes and densities; and to infer, and sometimes to observe directly, changes in a society as it becomes larger or smaller. Related to that evolutionary approach is what may be termed an adaptationist approach: the idea that some features of a society are adaptive, and that they enable the society to function more effectively under its particular material conditions, physical and social environment, and size and density. Examples include the need for all societies consisting of more than a few thousand people to have leaders, and the potential of those large societies to generate the food surpluses required to support leaders. This approach encourages one to formulate generalizations, and to interpret changes of a society with time in terms of the conditions and environment under which the society lives.
A second approach, lying at the opposite pole from that first approach, views each society as unique because of its particular history, and considers cultural beliefs and practices as largely independent variables not dictated by environmental conditions. Among the virtually infinite number of examples, let me mention one extreme case from one of the peoples to be discussed in this book, because it is so dramatic and so convincingly unrelated to material conditions. The Kaulong people, one of dozens of small populations living along the southern watershed of the island of New Britain just east of New Guinea, formerly practised the ritualized strangling of widows. When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not murderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressured into this ritualized form of suicide by other members of her society. Instead, she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfill their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance, and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her.
No scholar has claimed that Kaulong widow strangling was in any way beneficial to Kaulong society or to the long-term (posthumous) genetic interests of the strangled widow or her relatives. No environmental scientist has recognized any feature of the Kaulong environment tending to make widow strangling more beneficial or understandable there than on New Britain’s northern watershed, or further east or west along New Britain’s southern watershed. I don’t know of other societies practising ritualized widow strangling on New Britain or New Guinea, except for the related Sengseng people neighboring the Kaulong. Instead, it seems necessary to view Kaulong widow strangling as an independent historical cultural trait that arose for some unknown reason in that particular area of New Britain, and that might eventually have been eliminated by natural selection among societies (i.e., through other New Britain societies not practising widow strangling thereby gaining advantages over the Kaulong), but that persisted for some considerable time until outside pressure and contact caused it to be abandoned after about 1957. Anyone familiar with any other society will be able to think of less extreme traits that characterize that society, that may lack obvious benefits or may even appear harmful to that society, and that aren’t clearly an outcome of local conditions.
Yet another approach towards understanding differences among societies is to recognize cultural beliefs and practices that have a wide regional distribution, and that spread historically over that region without being clearly related to the local conditions. Familiar examples are the near-ubiquity of monotheistic religions and non-tonal languages in Europe, contrasting with the frequency of non-monotheistic religions and tonal languages in China and adjacent parts of Southeast Asia. We know a lot about the origins and historical spreads of each type of religion and language in each region. However, I am not aware of convincing reasons why tonal languages would work less well in European environments, nor why monotheistic religions would be intrinsically unsuitable in Chinese and Southeast Asian environments. Religions, languages, and other beliefs and practices may spread in either of two ways. One way is by people expanding and taking their culture with them, as illustrated by European emigrants to the Americas and Australia establishing European languages and European-like societies there. The other way is as the result of people adopting beliefs and practices of other cultures: for example, modern Japanese people adopting Western clothing styles, and modern Americans adopting the habit of eating sushi, without Western emigrants having overrun Japan or Japanese emigrants having overrun the U.S.
A different issue about explanations that will recur frequently throughout this book is the distinction between the search for proximate explanations and the search for ultimate explanations. To understand this distinction, consider a couple consulting a psychotherapist after 20 years of marriage, and now intending to get divorced. To the therapist’s question, “What suddenly brings you to see me and seek divorce after 20 years of marriage?,” the husband replies: “It’s because she hit me hard in the face with a heavy glass bottle: I can’t live with a woman who did that.” The wife acknowledges that she did indeed hit him with a glass bottle, and that that’s the “cause” (i.e., the proximate cause) of their break-up. But the therapist knows that bottle attacks are rare in happy marriages and invite an inquiry about their own cause. The wife responds, “I couldn’t stand anymore all his affairs with other women, that’s why I hit him—his affairs are the real [i.e., the ultimate] cause of our break-up.” The husband acknowledges his affairs, but again the therapist wonders why this husband, unlike husbands in happy marriages, has been having affairs. The husband responds, “My wife is a cold, selfish person, and I found that I wanted a loving relationship like any normal person—that’s what I’ve been seeking in my affairs, and that’s the fundamental cause of our break-up.”
In long-term therapy the therapist would explore further the wife’s childhood upbringing that caused the wife to become cold and selfish (if that really is true). However, even this brief version of the story suffices to show that most causes and effects really consist of chains of causes, some more proximate and others more ultimate. In this book we shall encounter many such chains. For example, the proximate cause of a tribal war (Chapter 4) may be that person A in one tribe stole a pig from person B in another tribe; A justifies that theft in terms of a deeper cause (B’s cousin had contracted to buy a pig from A’s father but hadn’t paid the agreed-on price for the pig); and the ultimate cause of the war is drought and resource scarcity and population pressure, resulting in not enough pigs to feed the people of either tribe.
Those, then, are broad approaches that scholars take towards trying to make sense of differences among human societies. As for how scholars have acquired our knowledge about traditional societies, our sources of information can be divided somewhat arbitrarily into four categories, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, and blurring into each other. The most obvious method, and the source of most of the information in this book, is to send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people, and to carry out a study focusing on some specific topic. A major limitation in this approach is that scientists are usually not able to settle among a traditional people until the people have already been “pacified,” reduced by introduced diseases, conquered and subjected to control by a state government, and thus considerably modified from the people’s previous condition.
A second method is to attempt to peel back those recent changes in modern traditional societies, by interviewing living non-literate people about their orally transmitted histories, and by reconstructing in that way their society as it was several generations in the past. A third method shares the goals of oral reconstruction, insofar as it seeks to view traditional societies before they were visited by modern scientists. The approach, however, is to utilize the accounts of explorers, traders, government patrol officers, and missionary linguists who usually precede scientists in contacting traditional peoples. While the resulting accounts tend to be less systematic, less quantitative, and less scientifically rigorous than accounts by scientifically trained field workers, they offer the compensating advantage of describing a tribal society less modified than when studied later by visiting scientists. Finally, the sole source of information about societies in the remote past, without writing, and not in contact with literate observers is archaeological excavations. These offer the advantage of reconstructing a culture long before it was contacted and changed by the modern world—at the cost of losing fine detail (such as people’s names and motives), and facing more uncertainty and effort in extracting social conclusions from the physical manifestations preserved in archaeological deposits.
For readers (especially for scholars) interested in learning more about these various sources of information on traditional societies, I provide an extended discussion on pages 476–481 of the Further Readings section at the back of this book.
A small book about a big subject
