The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Murphey, Dwight D.

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Jared Diamond

Penguin Books, 2012

For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors lived the way today's few still-existing primitive societies live. (Jared Diamond prefers to call them "traditional societies.") The intellectual significance is considerable: the traditional societies have amounted, he says, to "thousands of natural experiments in how to construct a human society." It is no surprise that they are fertile ground for scientific study; shaped on the anvil of long experience, they can't be replicated in a laboratory.

In The World Until Yesterday, Diamond examines 39 such cultures, ranging across the world to include several each from New Guinea and Australia, Africa, and North and South America. A great many aspects of those cultures are touched upon, but Diamond focuses primarily on selected features, to some of which he devotes considerable attention in extended and thoughtful essays. Among them: the origins and functions of religion; languages, their multiplicity but on-going extinction; the value of multilingualism; a comparison of diseases in the traditional societies with those prevalent in the United States; the ways disputes are handled; how children are reared; and how the elderly are treated. There are many things about those societies he does not discuss, which leaves readers eager to go farther. (1)

Jared Diamond is a cultural phenomenon in his own right. He's a splendid example of what people are capable of. Bits and pieces of his biography come to light as the book progresses. They show that he was born in 1937, studied in Cambridge, England, and at Harvard; did his Ph.D. thesis "on electricity generation by electric eels" (a subject important to evolutionary theory); became an "evolutionary biologist"; has pursued a career "as an author and university geographer" with a geography professorship at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA); has travelled to New Guinea countless times over a 49 year period since 1964 to do field work among primitive peoples there, along with much bird-watching; has lived in the United States, Germany, Scotland, Indonesia and Peru; and knows several languages that include English, German, Spanish, Tok Piksin and Russian. The book reviewed here is his fifth; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel.

It is possible to read The World Until Yesterday for its intriguing (though often repugnant) details about the cultures Diamond examines. We find, for example, that until about 1957 "the Kaulong people of the island of New Britain ... practiced the ritualized strangling of widows." Women "had grown up observing it as the custom," with the result that a widow "followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfill their solemn obligation to strangle her. and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her." Diamond tells of "endocannibalism," which is the eating of dead relatives. There are rituals calling for painful sacrifices, not the least of which is "subincising" (the splitting of the penis lengthwise). He writes of "the long list of head-hunting peoples that went to war to capture and kill enemies for their heads," and of "cannibalistic peoples who ate captured or dead enemies." There has also been "capture of enemies to use them as slaves." A belief in sorcery has sometimes led people "to blame anything bad that happens on an enemy sorcerer, who must be identified and killed." There has been, of course, much belief in spirits and ghosts. Diamond tells of one New Guinean explaining that his own people "believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to ... the place of the dead." A felicitous outcome was that when whites first arrived, the reaction was "Let's not kill them--they are our own relatives ... [who] have turned white and come back."

Such tidbits, however, though titillating, do not make up the core of Diamond's book, which is more appropriately read as a serious (though easily readable) work of cross-cultural field work. He starts by discussing the methodology, telling the combination of four approaches "scholars take towards trying to make sense of differences among human societies." They are: (1) to "send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people." (2) to "interview living non-literate people about their orally transmitted histories." (3) to try to view traditional societies as they were "before they were visited by scientists" by using "the accounts of explorers, traders, government patrol officers, and missionary linguists." (4) to examine the societies' distant past by archaeological excavation. Certain additional methods are brought into play, such as using radiocarbon dating to determine the age of past objects, and regression analysis "to tease out which factors have primary effects" on such a thing as language diversity. Diamond doesn't inquire into the origins of a given people, but if he did he would find DNA comparisons illuminating. Another methodological point is that physics' Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle carries over to investigations of primitive cultures; the very act of interacting with people in those cultures to study them, Diamond says, "inevitably has large effects on previously 'untouched' peoples." As we reflect on all this, we see that there is nothing pretentious, vacuous or silly about it. It is straight-forward fact-centered social science.

One of the topics Diamond explores at length is the origin and functions of religion. The chapter dealing with this contains an extended definitional essay seeking to discover what is and what is not included in "religion." It reminds this reviewer of his own grappling with the meaning of "socialism," (2) a word that has encompassed so many schools of thought endorsing varying models of society and of economic organization that defining it is like trying to say what is and what is not included in a river when it is fed by many tributaries, streams, rivulets and springs. Diamond reports, for example, "longstanding debates among scholars of religion about whether Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism should be counted as religions." If we think that "a belief in supernatural agents" is the essence of religion, it's worth keeping in mind that a number of such beliefs are not commonly thought of as "religious"; along these lines, Diamond mentions "belief in fairies, ghosts, leprechauns, and aliens in UFOs."

Much of his chapter discusses seven functions religions serve. "An original function. was explanation. Origin myths, like those of tribal people and of the book of Genesis, are widespread to explain the existence of the universe, people, and language diversity." A second is "in defusing our anxiety over problems and dangers. Our craving for relief from feeling helpless ..." Traditional peoples in particular experience much they can't control, leading them to "resort to prayer, rituals, omens, magic, taboos, superstitions, and shamans." To relieve their worry over the dangers of hunting in Africa's Kalahari Desert, !Kung men consult "oracle disks" made of antelope leather to prophesy what to expect; when the disks are thrown on the ground, a "diviner" reads them (like tea leaves) to see whether the hunt will go well. A similar function of religion has been "to provide comfort, hope, and meaning when life is hard." Diamond observes that "most religions provide comfort by in effect denying death's reality." It is a comfort even to believe "that those who did you evil will have a miserable afterlife." The other four functions Diamond discusses are "standardized organization, preaching political obedience, regulating behavior ... by means of formal moral codes, and justifying wars."

Wide swings of cultural diversity come to light in Diamond's essay on child-rearing. He points out that "over 98% of First World babies survive infancy and childhood, while the proportion is as low as 50% in traditional societies." It doesn't help the percentage among primitive peoples for the Ache Indians in Paraguay to kill children, mainly girls, "to accompany a dead adult into the grave." No doubt a larger percentage of premature deaths is caused by the fact that many hunter-gatherer societies give children total autonomy, allowing them to "do dangerous things." This reviewer recalls visiting the Grand Canyon in the United States and finding Navajo babies playing within feet of a 1,000-foot drop-off while their mothers sold trinkets spread out on a blanket nearby. (By way of contrast, Diamond tells of the extraordinary lengths parents in tropical rainforests go to protect their small children from such dangers as scorpions, spiders, jaguars, snakes and even stinging plants.) Some of the deaths come from infanticide: "in many traditional societies, infanticide is acceptable under certain circumstances," such as "when an infant is born deformed or weak" or too soon after the preceding child was born. Among the !Kung, "it is the mother's responsibility to examine the baby carefully for birth defects. If it is deformed, it is the mother's duty to smother it." Because "many societies value boys over girls," females born into them will sometimes die "through passive neglect, or (in exceptional cases) even [by] being intentionally killed by strangling, exposure, or burying alive."

In this essay, Diamond compares the roles taken by fathers, how parents in different cultures respond to their children's crying, whether corporal punishment is used, children's making of their own toys as distinct from the enjoyment of manufactured toys in developed societies, what obedience is expected, sexual privacy, and differing methods of childbirth. As to all of these things, the book conveys much that's informative.

Another essay has to do with the treatment of the elderly. Diamond writes disparagingly about how in the United States so many older people go into retirement homes and are seldom visited by loved ones. One Fiji Islander thought such a thing outrageous. On the other hand, some traditional societies, faced with the exigencies of their ways of life that often involve moving from place to place and suffering recurrent famines, "starve or abandon or actively kill them." He says of "the Lapps of northern Scandinavia, the San of the Kalahari Desert, the Omaha and Kutenai Indians of North America, and the Ache Indians of tropical South America" that they "intentionally abandon an old or sick person when the rest of the group shifts camp." He reports that "old Chukchi people who submitted to voluntary death were. assured that they would receive one of the best dwelling places in the next world." Further, "sick and old people in the Banks Islands begged their friends to end their suffering by burying them alive." It would seem that by reporting all this Diamond is painting a dire picture of those peoples. Despite it all, however, the overriding tone of the book is one of objectivity, mixed with empathy and respect.

Diamond tells us a lot about languages. The world, he says, has about 7,000 of them. One thousand of these are spoken exclusively in New Guinea; even the Pygmies in Central Africa have "at least 15 ethnolinguistic groups." Africa and India each have over 1,000. Nigeria has a remarkable 527 and Cameroon 286. "The small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (area less than 5,000 square miles) [has] 110 languages." "Lots of them have between only 60 and 200 speakers." "Most languages are unwritten," and it was a mere 4- to 5,000 years ago that writing began, starting in the Near East.

He is especially fascinated by how many languages go out of existence. Sometimes this is the result of "language steamrollers" where a dominant incoming group swamps out the indigenous culture. This happened to "native languages in the Americas," and Diamond points, among other instances, to "the British conquest of Australia [that replaced] Aboriginal Australian languages" and "the Russian expansion over the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean replacing native Siberian languages." When the Indo-European language family began its spread into western Europe some 9,000 years ago, it "eliminated all the original languages of Europe except for the Basque language in the Pyrenees."

For a variety of reasons, most prominent of which is almost certainly the expanding globalization with its breaking down of localism, "languages are now vanishing more rapidly than at any previous time in human history. If current trends continue, 95% ... will be extinct or moribund by the year 2100." Since each "is the vehicle for a unique way of thinking and talking, a unique literature, and a unique view of the world," much is being lost because "there are so few linguists studying them." Diamond believes this deserves as much attention as the now-rapidly occurring extinctions of plants and animals.

We could go on with details about The World Until Yesterday's handing of its several other topics, but it's appropriate to leave those for readers to discover for themselves. It's obvious from all we've said that we highly recommend the book. We will end this review simply by mentioning a couple of additional items that have caught our eye but that haven't fit into the earlier flow.

For a reason we'll explain soon, it may interest American readers in particular to know that Diamond mentions the fear that people often have of someone who speaks an unrecognized language. "The instant distinction between friends and strangers still operates today: just see how you (my American readers) react the next time you're in Uzbekistan, and you finally to your relief hear someone behind you speaking English with an American accent." This has a bearing on the accusation that is sometimes levelled against white Americans for supposed "racism" when they act fearfully if they hear young black men behind them. This accusation was surprisingly rebutted in part by black-activist Jesse Jackson's own candid admission that he felt relieved one time when he found that footsteps behind him were those of whites rather than of his fellow blacks. Now, Diamond's Uzbekistan example puts the matter in a broader, more universal, context that transcends black/white relationships in the United States.

Diamond is a man of his time, and no renegade, so it can be expected that he sometimes toes the line of ideological correctness (though it doesn't come up often). An example of conventionality comes when he repeats the now-common criticism, often bitterly voiced, of earlier Americans for trying to assimilate Indian children into white society by putting them into English-speaking boarding schools. Nevertheless, Diamond takes issue with an anti-European myth when he sees it. One of these is "that people were traditionally peaceful until those evil Europeans arrived and messed things up." He says that "the mass of archaeological evidence and oral accounts of war before European contact makes [this] far-fetched." The effects of European contact are mixed, but overall "the long-term effect. has almost always been to suppress tribal warfare."

The dishonesty of a great deal of thinking is a major fact in today's world. Diamond doesn't cast it in so broad a light, but he tells us something that we ourselves may find indicative of ideological warping: "Archaeologists excavating fortifications associated with ancient wars have often overlooked, ignored, or explained them [signs of warfare] away, e.g., by dismissing defensive ditches and palisades surrounding a village as mere 'enclosures' or 'symbols of exclusion.'" This is why an author who "tells things straight" is much to be valued.

(1) This reviewer wondered why an observer such as Diamond would limit himself to selected facets, and so it is revealing when he mentions in the endnotes that "field observers are discouraged from going out on scientific 'fishing trips' and recording everything that they notice; they are expected to produce books and articles on some specific subject." Whether this is a justified prejudice on the part of the social science disciplines is hard to say, but it is one that comes at a certain cost to the general reader.

The same endnote shows us how much social science is itself a human activity, subject to the vicissitudes of ideology and intellectual convention: "At a given time there are also certain interpretations and phenomena that tend to be preferred, and others that are considered unpalatable." Diamond cites as an example that "there are still strong views that traditional peoples aren't warlike, or that if they are warlike it's an artifact of European contact...." The evidence Diamond gives throughout the book shows otherwise.

Social science as we have known it for well over the past century has often been pretentious, vacuous and silly; but that is hopefully the chaff that will fall by the wayside, leaving the great body of meaningful work that has in fact been done. Diamond's book is part of the latter. The amount of creditable work done in both the social and physical sciences quite literally "boggles the mind." An example that many will find amusing comes in Diamond's discussion of the salt consumption in various cultures: He refers to "Brazil's Yanomamo Indians, whose staple food is low-sodium bananas, and who excrete on the average only 50 milligrams of salt daily: about 1/200 of the salt excretion of the typical American." This tells us that somebody has actually made it his business to distill the respective urines for their salt content. When we think about it, that's quite remarkable. It's a minute example, but one that shows how far the web of investigation extends.

(2) See Chapter 28 of Dwight D. Murphey's Socialist Thought (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983). The book is available on the author's web site: www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info