But I can certainly understand how Gumini acquired his attitude. His area had come under government control recently. Until then, traditional fighting had been going on. Paia, 10 years older than Gumini, had grown up making stone tools. In Gumini’s and Paia’s society, people who weren’t super-attentive to signs of strangers in the forest didn’t live long. It does no harm to be suspicious of sticks not readily explained naturally, to spend an hour examining and discussing each one, and then to remain alert for other sticks. Before my canoe accident, I would have dismissed Gumini’s reaction as exaggerated, just as I had dismissed as exaggerated the reactions of New Guineans to the dead tree under which I had camped earlier in my New Guinea career. But I had now spent enough time in New Guinea to understand Gumini’s reaction. It’s better to pay attention 1,000 times to sticks that turn out to have fallen naturally into an unnatural-looking position, than to make the fatal mistake of ignoring one stick that really did get placed by strange humans. Gumini’s constructive paranoia was an appropriate reaction of an experienced, cautious New Guinean.
Taking risks
While the underlying caution that I term constructive paranoia has struck me frequently among New Guineans, I don’t want to leave the misimpression that they are thereby paralyzed and hesitant to act. To begin with, there are cautious and incautious New Guineans, just as there are cautious and incautious Americans. Then, too, the cautious ones are perfectly able to weigh risks and to act. They do some things that they know are risky, but that they nevertheless choose to do repeatedly and with appropriate care. That’s because doing those things is essential for their obtaining food and succeeding in life, or because they place value on doing them. I’m reminded of a line attributed to the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky, about the risks of attempting difficult hockey shots that might miss the net: “100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in!”
My New Guinea friends would understand Gretzky’s quip, and would add two footnotes to it. First, a closer analogy with traditional life would be if you were actually penalized for missing a shot—but you would still take shots, albeit more cautiously. Second, a hockey player can’t wait forever for the perfect opportunity to take a shot, because a hockey game has a time limit of one hour. Similarly, traditional lives include time limits: you’ll die of thirst within a few days if you don’t take risks in finding water, you’ll starve within a few weeks if you don’t take risks in obtaining food, and you’ll die within less than a century no matter what you do. In fact, traditional lifespans are on the average considerably shorter than those of modern First World people, because of uncontrollable factors such as diseases, droughts, and enemy attacks. No matter how cautious a person in a traditional society is, he or she is likely to die before age 55 anyway, and that may mean having to tolerate higher risk levels than in First World societies with an average lifespan of 80—just as Wayne Gretzky would have to take more shots if a hockey game lasted only 30 minutes instead of one hour. Here are three examples of calculated risks that traditional people accept but that horrify us:
!Kung hunters, armed with nothing more than small bows and poisoned arrows, wave sticks and shout to drive groups of lions or hyenas off of animal carcasses. When a hunter succeeds in wounding an antelope, the small arrow does not kill by impact: instead, the prey runs off, the hunters track it, and by the time that the prey has collapsed from the slow-acting poison’s effect many hours or a day later, lions or hyenas are likely to have found the carcass first. Hunters who are not prepared to drive those predators off carcasses are guaranteed to starve. Few things impress me as more suicidal than the thought of walking up to a group of feasting lions while shaking a stick to intimidate them. Nevertheless, !Kung hunters do it dozens of times a year, for decades. They attempt to minimize their risks by challenging sated lions with visibly bulging bellies and likely to be ready to retreat, and by not challenging hungry or emaciated lions that evidently just discovered the carcass and are likely to stand their ground.
Women in the Fore area of New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands move from their natal village to their husband’s village at the time of marriage. When married women later go back to their natal village to visit their parents and other blood relatives, they may travel either with their husbands or else alone. In traditional times of chronic warfare, a woman’s traveling alone involved the risk of her being raped or killed while traversing enemy territory. Women attempted to minimize those risks by seeking protection from other relatives living in the territory traversed. However, the dangers and the protection were both difficult to predict. A woman might be attacked in revenge for a killing carried out a generation ago; or her protectors might be outnumbered by those seeking revenge, or might acknowledge justice in the demand for revenge.
For instance, the anthropologist Ronald Berndt related the story of a young woman named Jumu, from Ofafina village, who went to marry a man at Jasuvi. For Jumu later to return with her child to visit her parents and brothers at Ofafina required traversing the Ora district, where a woman named Inusa had recently been killed by Ofafina men. Hence Jumu’s Jasuvi in-laws advised her to seek protection from an Ora male relative named Asiwa, who also happened to be a brother’s son of the dead Inusa. Unfortunately, after finding Asiwa in his garden, Jumu was detected by some Ora men, who tricked and pressured Asiwa into allowing one of them to rape Jumu in Asiwa’s presence, and then killed Jumu and her child. Asiwa was apparently only half-hearted in his efforts to protect Jumu, because he felt that the killing of Jumu and her child constituted legitimate revenge for Inusa’s killing. As for why Jumu made what proved to be the fatal mistake of entrusting herself to Asiwa’s protection, Berndt commented, “Fighting, revenge, and counter-revenge are so commonplace that people become accustomed to this state of affairs.” That is, Jumu was unwilling to abandon forever the hope of seeing her parents again, and she accepted and tried to minimize the risks involved.
My remaining example of the delicate balance between constructive paranoia and knowingly accepting risks involves Inuit hunters. An important Inuit method of hunting seals in the winter involves standing, sometimes for hours, over one of the seal’s breathing holes in a shelf of sea ice, in the hopes that a seal will surface at that hole for a quick breath and can then be harpooned. This technique poses the risk that the ice shelf may break off and drift out to sea, leaving the hunter stranded on the ice and facing likely death from ice break-up and drowning, exposure, or starvation. It would be much safer for hunters to remain on land and not place themselves at that risk. But that in turn would make death from starvation probable, because land hunting offers no rewards to match killing seals at breathing holes. While Inuit hunters attempt to select ice shelves unlikely to break off, even the most careful hunter cannot predict shelf break-off with certainty, and other hazards of Arctic life result in a short average lifespan for traditional Inuit hunters. That is, if a hockey game lasted only 20 minutes, one would have to risk taking shots even if missed shots were penalized.
Risks and talkativeness
Finally, I would like to speculate about a possible connection between two features of traditional life: its risks, and what I have experienced as the talkativeness of traditional peoples. Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking. That makes it difficult for a Westerner like me, accustomed to nights spent in uninterrupted sleep and not punctuated with conversations, to get a good night’s rest in a hut shared with many New Guineans. Other Westerners have similarly commented on the talkativeness of the !Kung, of African Pygmies, and of many other traditional peoples.
Out of innumerable examples, here is one that stuck in my mind. One morning during my second trip to New Guinea, I was in a camp tent with two New Guinea Highland men, while other men from the camp were out in the forest. The two men belonged to the Fore tribe and were talking to each other in the Fore language. I had been enjoying learning the Fore language, and the men’s conversation was sufficiently repetitive and about a subject for which I had already acquired vocabulary that I was able to follow much of what they were saying. They were talking about the Highland staple food of sweet potato, for which the Fore word is
