From my previous unpleasant experiences over perceived territorial trespassing in New Guinea, I realized that I had better take this situation seriously. Anyway, regardless of how I might assess the danger myself, the mountain people weren’t going to let me camp on that ridge without a strong escort. They demanded that I be accompanied by 12 men, and I responded with a proposal of 7 men. We ended up “compromising” between 12 and 7: by the time that our camp was established, I counted about 20 men staying in camp, all armed with bows and arrows, and joined by women to do cooking and to fetch water and firewood. Furthermore, I was warned not to step off the ridge-line trail into that nice-looking forest on the gentle south slope. That forest unequivocally belonged to the river people, and it would cause big trouble, really big trouble, if I were caught trespassing there, even if just to watch birds. Also, the mountain women in our camp couldn’t fetch water from the nearby gully on the south slope, because that would constitute not only trespass but also removal of valuable resources, for which a compensation payment would be due if the matter could be settled amicably at all. Instead, the women walked every day all the way back down to the village and carried 20-liter water containers 1,500 vertical feet uphill to our campsite.
On my second morning in camp there was some heart-pounding excitement that taught me how territorial relations between mountain people and river people were more complicated than just black-and-white claims of complete mutual exclusion from each other’s land. With one of the mountain men I went back to the trail T-junction and continued left along the ridge-line to clean up an old trail that had become overgrown. My mountain companion didn’t seem worried about our being there, and I figured that, even if river people found us there, they shouldn’t object to our standing on the ridge-line as long as we didn’t stray over to their side. But then we heard voices coming uphill from the south side. Uh-oh! River people!! If they carried on uphill as far as the ridge-line and T-junction, they would see the signs of fresh trail clearance and track us down, we’d be trapped there, they might consider us as violating their territory, and who knew what action they would take.
I listened anxiously and tried to follow the movements of the voices and estimate their location. Yes, they were indeed ascending towards the ridge-line from their side. Now, they must be at the T-junction, where they couldn’t fail to notice the signs of our fresh trail. Were they coming after us? I kept following the voices as they seemed to get louder, over the noise of my heart-beats throbbing in my ears. But then the voices didn’t come closer; they were definitely growing fainter. Were they returning towards the south side and the river people’s village? No! They were descending the north side towards our mountain village! Incredible! Was this a war raid? But there seemed to be only two or three voices, and they were talking loudly: hardly what one would expect from a stealthy raiding party.
There was nothing to worry about, explained my mountain companion; everything was really OK. We mountain people (he said) acknowledge the right of river people to descend our trail peacefully to our village, and then to walk from there to the coast in order to trade. River people aren’t permitted to get off the trail in order to gather food or cut wood, but just walking on the trail is OK. What’s more, two river men had actually married mountain women and resettled in the mountain village. That is, there wasn’t pure enmity between the two groups, but instead a tense truce. Some things were permitted and other things were forbidden by common consent, while still other things (such as land ownership at the abandoned hut and garden) were still in contention.
Two days later, I hadn’t heard voices of river people again nearby. I still hadn’t seen a river person and had no idea what they looked like and how they dressed. But their village was close enough that I once heard the sound of drums in their village coming up from the south watershed at the same time as I could hear faintly the sounds of shouting far below from the mountain village on the north watershed. As my mountain guide and I were walking back towards our campsite, we were making silly jokes with each other about what we would do to a river person if we caught one there. Suddenly, just as we turned a corner in the trail and were about to enter our camp, my guide stopped joking, raised his hand to his mouth, and warned me in a hushed voice, “Sh-h-h! River people!”
There, in our camp, was a group of our familiar mountain companions, talking with six people whom I had never seen before: three men, two women, and one child. There, at last, I saw the dreaded river people! They were not the dangerous monsters that I had been unconsciously imagining, but instead normal-looking New Guineans, no different from the mountain people who were my hosts. The river child and the two women were completely unintimidating. The three men carried bows and arrows (as did all the mountain men as well) but were wearing T-shirts and not looking as if they were dressed for war. The conversation between the river people and the mountain people seemed friendly and free of tension. It turned out that this group of river people was traveling down to the coast and had made a point of visiting our camp, perhaps just to make sure that their peaceful intent didn’t get misinterpreted and that we didn’t attack them.
To the mountain people and the river people, this visit was evidently a normal part of their complex relationship incorporating a broad range of behaviors: rarely, killings by stealth; more often, reputed killings by poison and sorcery; acknowledged reciprocal rights to do some things (such as passing in transit to the coast and making social visits) but not other things (such as gathering food and wood and water while in transit); disagreement about other things (such as that hut and garden) that sometimes flared into violence; and occasional intermarriage at about the same frequency as stealth murders (every couple of generations). All this between two groups of people who looked the same to me, spoke distinct but related languages, understood each other’s language, described each other in terms otherwise reserved for evil subhumans, and viewed each other as their worst enemies.
Mutually exclusive territories
In theory, the spatial relations between neighboring traditional societies could encompass a whole spectrum of outcomes, ranging at the one extreme from non-overlapping exclusive territories with definite patrolled boundaries and no shared use, to free access of everybody to all land and no recognized territories at the other extreme. Probably no society strictly conforms to either extreme, but some come close to the first extreme. For instance, my mountain friends whom I just described are not far from it: they do have territories with defined boundaries that they patrol, they do assert exclusive claim to resources within their territory, and they permit access by outsiders just for transit and rare intermarriage.
Other societies which approach that extreme of exclusive territories include the Dani (Plate 1) of the Baliem Valley of western New Guinea’s Highlands, the Iñupiat (an Inuit group)[4] of northwest Alaska, northern Japan’s Ainu, the Yolngu (an Aboriginal group of Arnhem Land in Northwest Australia), Shoshone Indians of Owens Valley in California, and Yanomamo Indians of Brazil and Venezuela. For instance, the Dani irrigate and till gardens separated by a garden-less no-man’s land from the gardens of the adjacent Dani group. Each group builds a line of wooden watch-towers up to 30 feet high on its own side of the no-man’s land, with a platform at the top big enough for one man to sit there (Plate 13). For much of each day, men take turns keeping watch from each tower, while companions sit at a tower’s base to protect it and the watchman, who scans the area to look out for stealthily approaching enemies and to give the alert in case of a surprise attack.
4
People of Arctic North America refer to themselves as Inuit, and that is the term to be used in this book. The more familiar lay term is Eskimo.