The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Read Online Free PDF Page A

geographic accident of proximity during childhood.
    In large hierarchical societies in which thousands or millions of people live together under the umbrella of a chiefdom or state, it’s normal to meet strangers, and doing so is safe and non-threatening. For example, every time that I walk across my University of California campus or along the streets of Los Angeles, I encounter without fear or danger hundreds of people whom I have never seen before, and may never see again, and with whom I have no traceable relationship by either blood or marriage. An early stage in this changed attitude towards strangers is illustrated by the Sudan’s Nuer people, whom I already mentioned as numbering about 200,000 and organized in a hierarchy of several levels from villages up to tribes. Obviously, no Nuer knows or has heard of all 199,999 other Nuer. Political organization is weak: each village has a figurehead chief with little real power, to be described in Chapter 2 . Nevertheless (in the words of anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard), “Between Nuer, wherever they hail from, and though they be strangers to one another, friendly relations are at once established when they meet outside their country, for a Nuer is never a foreigner to another as he is to a Dinka or a Shilluk. Their feeling of superiority and the contempt they show for all foreigners and their readiness to fight them are a common bond of communion, and their common tongue and values permit ready intercommunication.”
    Thus, compared to smaller-scale societies, the Nuer regard strangers no longer as threatening but instead as neutral or even as potentiallyfriendly—provided that they are Nuer. Strangers who are not Nuer are either attacked (if they are Dinka) or merely despised (if they belong to any other type of people). In still larger societies with market economies, strangers have a potential positive value as prospective business partners, customers, suppliers, and employers.
First contacts
    For traditional small-scale societies, the division of the world into friends of one’s own and neighboring groups, neighboring enemies, and more distant strangers resulted in knowledge of the world being very local. People knew their own core area or territory, and they knew much about the first surrounding tier of neighboring territories as a result of visits under reciprocal rights of use or during intermittent truces. But people were unlikely to know the next (the second) surrounding tier of nearby territories: intermittent hostilities with people of the first tier meant that you couldn’t cross that first tier during times of war to reach the second tier; and at times when you were at peace with a people of the first tier, they might in turn be at war with their neighbors in the second tier, again preventing you from visiting those neighbors.
    Even travel into the territories of your immediate neighbors (the first tier) at presumed times of peace posed dangers. You might not realize that those neighbors had just started a war with some other allies of your people and therefore considered you now to be an enemy. Your hosts and relatives in that neighboring society might then be unwilling or unable to protect you. For instance, Karl Heider, Jan Broekhuijse, and Peter Matthiessen described an incident that happened on August 25, 1961, among the Baliem Valley’s Dugum Dani people. The Dani were divided into several dozen confederations, of which two, called the Gutelu Alliance and the Widaia Alliance, fought over the Dugum neighborhood. Nearby was the separate Asuk-Balek confederation, founded by a Gutelu split-off group that had abandoned its original land and taken refuge along the Baliem River after battles. Four Asuk-Balek men allied to the Widaia Alliance visited a Gutelu hamlet called Abulopak, where two of the Asuk-Balek men had relatives. But the visitors did not realize that the Widaia had recentlykilled two Gutelus, that the Gutelus had been unsuccessful in