The world until yesterday what can we learn from traditional societies

Tai Lieu Chat Luong THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY ALSO BY JARED DIAMOND Collapse Guns, Germs, and Steel Why Is Sex Fun? The Third Chimpanzee JARED DIAMOND THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES? VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc 10 CopyLeft Jared Diamond, 2012 No rights reserved Photograph credits appear on page 499 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Diamond, Jared M The world until yesterday : what can we learn from traditional societies? / Jared Diamond p cm Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN: 978-1-101-60600-1 Dani (New Guinean people)—History Dani (New Guinean people)—Social life and customs Dani (New Guinean people)—Cultural assimilation Social evolution—Papua New Guinea Social change—Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea—Social life and customs I Title DU744.35.D32D53 2013 305.89’912—dc23 2012018386 Designed by Nancy Resnick Maps by Matt Zebrowski All parts of this book may be reproduced, scanned, and distributed in any printed or electronic form ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON To Meg Taylor, in appreciation for decades of your friendship, and of sharing your insights into our two worlds Contents Also by Jared Diamond Title Page Copyright Dedication List of Tables and Figures PROLOGUE: At the Airport An airport scene Why study traditional societies? States Types of traditional societies Approaches, causes, and sources A small book about a big subject Plan of the book SETTING THE STAGE BY DIVIDING SPACE PART ONE: Friends, Enemies, Strangers, and Traders CHAPTER A boundary Mutually exclusive territories Non-exclusive land use Friends, enemies, and strangers First contacts Trade and traders Market economies Traditional forms of trade Traditional trade items Who trades what? Tiny nations PART TWO: CHAPTER PEACE AND WAR Compensation for the Death of a Child An accident A ceremony What if…? What the state did New Guinea compensation Life-long relationships Other non-state societies State authority State civil justice Defects in state civil justice State criminal justice Restorative justice Advantages and their price CHAPTER A Short Chapter, About a Tiny War The Dani War The war’s time-line The war’s death toll CHAPTER A Longer Chapter, About Many Wars Definitions of war Sources of information Forms of traditional warfare Mortality rates Similarities and differences Ending warfare Effects of European contact Warlike animals, peaceful peoples Motives for traditional war Ultimate reasons Whom people fight? Forgetting Pearl Harbor PART THREE: YOUNG AND OLD Bringing Up Children CHAPTER Comparisons of child-rearing Childbirth Infanticide Weaning and birth interval On-demand nursing Infant-adult contact Fathers and allo-parents Responses to crying infants Physical punishment Child autonomy Multi-age playgroups Child play and education Their kids and our kids The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill? CHAPTER The elderly Expectations about eldercare Why abandon or kill? Usefulness of old people Society’s values Society’s rules Better or worse today? What to with older people? PART FOUR: DANGER AND RESPONSE Constructive Paranoia CHAPTER Attitudes towards danger A night visit A boat accident Just a stick in the ground Taking risks Risks and talkativeness Lions and Other Dangers CHAPTER Dangers of traditional life Accidents Vigilance Human violence Diseases Responses to diseases Starvation Unpredictable food shortages Scatter your land Seasonality and food storage Diet broadening Aggregation and dispersal Responses to danger RELIGION, LANGUAGE, AND HEALTH PART FIVE: What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion CHAPTER Questions about religion Plate 31 First contact: a New Guinea Highlander weeps in terror at his first sight of a European, during the 1933 Leahy Expedition (Pages and 58) Plate 32 Traditional trade: a canoe of New Guinea traders, carrying goods to be given to traditional trade partners in return for other goods (Page 60) Plate 33 Modern trade: a professional store-keeper, selling manufactured goods to anyone who enters the store, in return for the government’s money (Page 61) Plate 34 A modern border between nations: a Chinese trader presenting his passport and visa to a Russian police officer near the Russia-China border (Page 37) Plate 35 Ellie Nesler, a California woman tried for killing a man charged with sexually abusing her son Any parent will understand Ellie’s outrage But the essence of state justice is that government would collapse if citizens took justice into their own hands (Page 98) Plate 36 Traditional warfare: Dani tribesmen fighting with spears in the Baliem Valley of the New Guinea Highlands The highest one-day death toll in those wars occurred on June 4, 1966, when northern Dani killed face-to-face 125 southern Dani, many of whom the attackers would personally have known (or known of) The death toll constituted 5% of the southerners’ population (Chapter 3) Plate 37 Modern warfare: the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud of August 6, 1945 The American soldiers who dropped the bomb did not personally know their victims and did not look them in the face as they were killing them The 100,000 Japanese killed at Hiroshima represent the highest oneday death toll in modern warfare, and constituted 0.1% of Japan’s population at that time That is, large modern populations are associated with high absolute death tolls in modern warfare, but the methods of traditional warfare can result in much higher proportional death tolls (Pages 127 and 142) Plate 38 Traditional transport of children commonly places the child in immediate physical contact with the care-giver, vertically erect, looking forward, and thus seeing the same field of view as the caregiver This is a Pume Indian baby from Venezuela being carried by an older sister (Pages 185, 188, and 201) Plate 39 Modern transport of children often removes the child from physical contact with the caregiver, and places the child looking backwards and reclining horizontally rather than vertically erect This is an American baby being pushed in a baby carriage by its mother (Page 184) Plates 40 and 41 The composers Richard Strauss (left) and Giuseppe Verdi (right) learned how to make the best use of their musical talents as they changed with age The results were among their greatest compositions: Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and Verdi’s operas Otello and Falstaff, completed at ages 84, 74, and 80, respectively (Page 239) Plate 42 Traditional dangers: a man climbing a tree to harvest aỗaớ berries in Brazil Falling out of a tree, or being struck by a falling tree, is a major hazard in many traditional societies (Page 280) Plate 43 Traditional dangers: a large crocodile that was killed after it had killed people in Indonesia Wild animals are major hazards in most traditional societies (Page 280) Plate 44 Modern dangers: car crashes are a major hazard of modern life (Page 279) Plate 45 Risk management: Harvard University’s endowment principal and income crashed during the worldwide financial meltdown of 2008-2009 Harvard’s investment managers should have followed the risk management strategy of peasant farmers, who maximize long-term time-averaged yields only insofar as that is compatible with maintaining yields above a certain critical level (Page 307) Plate 46 A dowser, a person who claims that rotation of a forked stick can reveal the presence of hidden underground water for land-owners wanting to know where to dig a well Dowsers illustrate our tendency to resort to rituals in situations whose outcomes are hard to predict (Page 342) Plate 47 Vanishing languages: Sophie Borodkin (died January 2008), the last speaker of Eyak, a distinctive Native American language formerly spoken in Alaska (Page 397) ALSO BY JARED DIAMOND Collapse Guns, Germs, and Steel Why Is Sex Fun? The Third Chimpanzee