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

recent attempts to even the score by killing a Widaia, and that tension among the Gutelus was high.
    The arrival of the unsuspecting Asuk-Baleks, allied to the Widaia, provided the Abulopak Gutelus with the next-best opportunity for revenge, second only to killing a Widaia. The two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were spared, but the two without relatives were attacked. One managed to escape. The other took refuge in a hut’s sleeping loft, but was dragged down and speared. That attack triggered an explosion of general rejoicing among the Abulopaks, who dragged the not-yet-dead Asuk-Balek’s body along a muddy path to their dance ground. The Abulopaks then danced with joy that night around the corpse and finally threw it into an irrigation ditch, pushed it under water, and covered it with grass. On the following morning the two Asuk-Baleks with Abulopak relatives were permitted to retrieve the corpse. The incident illustrates the need for prudence verging on paranoia while traveling. Chapter 7 will say more about this need for what I term “constructive paranoia.”
    Traditional distances of travel and of local knowledge were low in areas of high human population density and environmental constancy, and high in areas with sparse human population and variable environments. Geographic knowledge was very local in Highland New Guinea, with its dense populations and relatively stable environment. Travel and knowledge were wider in areas with stable environments but lower populations (such as the New Guinea lowlands and the African rainforests inhabited by African Pygmies), and were still wider in areas with variable environments and low populations (such as deserts and inland Arctic areas). For example, Andaman Islanders knew nothing about Andaman tribes living more than 20 miles distant. The known world of the Dugum Dani was largely confined to the Baliem Valley, most of which they could see from hilltops, but they could visit only a fraction of the valley because it was divided up by war frontiers that it was suicidal to cross. Aka Pygmies, given a list of up to 70 places and asked which of them they had visited, knew only half of the places lying within 21 miles and only one-quarter of the places within 42 miles. To place these numbers in perspective, when I lived in England in the 1950s and 1960s, it was still true that many rural English people had spent their lives in or near theirvillages, except possibly for traveling overseas as soldiers during World War I or II.
    Thus, knowledge of the world beyond one’s first or second neighbors was nonexistent or only second-hand among traditional small-scale societies. For instance, no one in the densely populated mountain valleys of the main body of New Guinea had seen or even heard of the ocean, lying at distances of only 50 to 120 miles. New Guinea Highlanders did receive in trade marine shells and (after European arrival on the coast) a few steel axes, which were prized. But those shells and axes were traded from one group to another and passed through many successive hands in covering that distance from the coast to the Highlands. Just as in the children’s game of telephone, in which children sit in a row or circle, one child whispers something to the next child, and what the last child hears bears no relation to what the first child said, all knowledge of the environment and people that supplied the shells and axes was lost by the time that they reached the Highlands.
    For many small-scale societies, those traditional limitations on knowledge of the world were ended abruptly by so-called first contacts, when the arrival of European colonialists, explorers, traders, and missionaries proved the existence of a previously unknown outside world. The last peoples remaining “uncontacted” today are a few remote groups in New Guinea and tropical South America, but by now those remaining groups at least know of the outside world’s existence, because they have seen