dying. On one of New Guinea’s highest mountains, while I was hiking well prepared and warmly dressed in freezing rain and gale-force winds at an altitude of 11,000 feet, I met a group of seven New Guinea schoolchildren who had foolishly set out that morning in clear weather, wearing shorts and T-shirts, to cross the mountain. By the time that I encountered them several hours later, they were shivering uncontrollably, stumbling, and barely able to speak. Local men with me, who shepherded them to a shelter, pointed out to me a nearby rock pile behind which a group of 23 men had sought shelter in bad weather in a previous year and had ended up dying there of exposure. Drowning and being struck by lightning are other environmental hazards for traditional as well as modern peoples.
The !Kung, New Guineans, Ache, and many other foraging peoples are legendary for their ability to follow tracks, read clues in the environment, and detect a barely indicated trail. Nevertheless, even they, and especially their children, occasionally make mistakes, get lost, and may be unable to find their way back to camp before nightfall, with fatal consequences. Friends of mine were involved in two such tragedies in New Guinea, one in which a boy walking with a group of adults wandered off and was never found despite exhaustive searches that same day and on the following days, the other in which an experienced strong man became lost on a mountain in the late afternoon, could not reach his village, and died of exposure in the forest at night.
Still other causes of accidents are our own weapons and tools. The arrows used by !Kung hunters are smeared with a potent poison, with the result that an accidental scratch by an arrow is the most serious cause of hunting accidents for the !Kung. Traditional people around the world accidentally cut themselves with their own knives and axes, as do modern cooks and woodsmen.
Less heroic and much commoner than lions or lightning as causes of accidental death or injury are humble insect bites and thorn scratches. In the humid tropics any bite or scratch—even one from a mere gnat, leech, louse, mosquito, or tick—is likely to become infected, and to develop if untreated into an incapacitating abscess. For example, once when I revisited a New Guinea friend named Delba with whom I had spent several weeks hiking through the forest two years previously, I was shocked to find him house-bound and unable to walk at all, as the result of a simple scratch that had become infected, and that then responded quickly to antibiotics that I carried but that New Guinea villagers don’t have. Ants, bees, centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and wasps not only bite or scratch but also inject poisons that are sometimes fatal. Along with falling trees, stinging wasps and biting ants are the dangers that my New Guinea friends fear most in the forest. Some insects lay an egg under one’s skin, from which hatches a larva that produces a huge and permanently disfiguring abscess.
While these causes of accidents in traditional societies are varied, they yield some generalizations. Serious consequences of accidents include not just death itself but also, even if one survives, the possibility of temporarily or permanently decreased physical effectiveness, resulting in impaired capacity to provide for one’s children and other relatives, decreased resistance to diseases, crippling, and limb amputation. It’s these “minor” consequences, not the risk of death, that make my New Guinea friends and me so afraid of ants, wasps, and infected thorn scratches. A poisonous snake bite that the victim survives may still cause gangrene and leave the victim paralyzed, maimed, or having lost the bitten arm or leg.
Just like the omnipresent risk of starvation to be discussed later in this chapter, environmental hazards influence people’s behavior far more than one might guess from the number of deaths or injuries caused. In fact, the number of deaths may be low precisely because so much behavior is invested in combating the hazards. For instance, lions and other big carnivores account for only 5 out of 1,000 !Kung deaths, and this might mislead one to the erroneous conclusion that lions are not a big factor in !Kung life. In reality, that low death toll reflects the profound influence of lions on !Kung life. New Guineans, living in an environment without dangerous carnivores, hunt at night; the !Kung don’t, both because it then becomes difficult to detect dangerous animals and their tracks, and because dangerous carnivores themselves are more active at night. !Kung women always go foraging in groups, constantly make noise and talk loudly to ensure that animals do not encounter them by surprise, look for tracks, and avoid running (because it incites a predator to attack). If a predator is seen in the vicinity, the !Kung may restrict their travel out of camp for a day or two.
Most accidents—those caused by animals, snakes, falling trees, falling out of a tree, bush fires, exposure, getting lost, drowning, insect bites, and thorn scratches—are associated with going out to forage for or to produce food. Most accidents could thus be avoided by staying home or in camp, but then one would acquire no food. Hence environmental dangers illustrate the modified Wayne Gretzky principle: If one takes no shots, then one will miss no shots but one is also guaranteed to score no goals. Traditional foragers and farmers, even more than Wayne Gretzky, must balance hazards against the overriding need for a steady stream of scores. Similarly, we modern city-dwellers could avoid the major hazard of urban life, car accidents, by staying home and not exposing ourselves to thousands of other drivers roaring unpredictably at 60 to 100 miles per hour along the freeways. But the jobs and shopping of most of us depend on driving. Wayne Gretzky would say: If no drives, then no pay check and no food.
Vigilance
How do traditional peoples respond to their reality of living lives always at danger from environmental hazards? Their responses include the constructive paranoia that I explained in Chapter 7, religious responses that I’ll discuss in Chapter 9, and several other practices and attitudes.
The !Kung are constantly vigilant. While out foraging or walking through the bush, they watch and listen for animals and people, and they examine tracks in the sand to deduce what animal or person made the tracks, in which direction it was traveling, at what speed, how long ago, and whether or how they should modify their plans as a result. Even while in camp they must remain vigilant, despite the deterrence value of people and noise and fires, because animals sometimes enter camps, especially snakes. If the large poisonous snake known as the black mamba is seen in a camp, the !Kung are likely to abandon the camp rather than try to kill the snake. That might seem to us an overreaction, but the black mamba is one of Africa’s most dangerous snakes because of its large size (up to eight feet), quick movements, long fangs, and potent neurotoxic venom; most bites are fatal.
In any dangerous environment, accumulated experience teaches rules of behavior to minimize the risks, rules worth following even if an outsider considers it overreacting. What Jane Goodale wrote about the outlook of the Kaulong people in the rainforests of New Britain could apply equally well to traditional peoples elsewhere, with just substitutions of the specific examples: “Prevention of accidents is important, and the knowledge of how, when, and under what circumstances any particular endeavor should or should not be undertaken is necessary to personal success and survival. Significantly, innovation in any technique or in behavior relating to the natural environment is considered to be extremely dangerous. There is a rather narrow range of correct behavior, beyond which there is the distinct and oft-stated danger of the sudden opening of the ground under one’s feet, the falling of a tree as one walks underneath, or the sudden rise of flood waters while one is attempting to cross over the other bank. For example, I was told to stop skipping stones on the surface of our river (‘a flood will come up’); not to play with fire (‘the ground will open up,’ or ‘the fire will burn you, and not cook your food’); not to call the name of cave bats while hunting them (‘the cave will collapse’); and many other ‘don’ts’ with similar sanctions carried out by the natural environment.” The same attitude underlies the philosophy of life that a New Guinea friend summed up for me: “Everything happens for a reason, so one must be cautious.”
A common Western reaction to danger that I have never, ever, encountered among experienced New Guineans is to be macho, to seek or enjoy dangerous situations, or to pretend to be unafraid and try to hide one’s own fear. Marjorie Shostak noted the lack of those same Western macho attitudes among the !Kung: “Hunts are often dangerous. The !Kung face danger courageously, but they do not seek it out or take risks for the sake of proving their courage. Actively avoiding hazardous situations is considered prudent, not cowardly or unmasculine. Young boys, moreover, are not expected to conquer their fear and act like grown men. To unnecessary risks, the ! Kung say, ‘But a person could die!’”
Shostak went on to describe how a 12-year-old !Kung boy named Kashe and his cousin and his father recounted a successful hunt in which the father had speared a large gemsbok, an antelope that defended itself with long razor-sharp horns. When Shostak asked Kashe whether he was helping his father with the kill, Kashe laughed and proudly answered, “No, I was up in a tree!” “His smile became an easy laugh. Puzzled, I asked again, and he
