EPILOGUE
At Another Airport
Advantages of the modern world Advantages of the traditional world What can we learn?From the jungle to the 405
At the end of an expedition of several months to New Guinea, mostly spent with New Guineans at campsites in the jungle, my emotional transition back to the modern industrial world doesn’t begin at Papua New Guinea’s Port Moresby airport, with which I began this book’s Prologue. That’s because, on the long plane flight from New Guinea back to Los Angeles, I use the time to transcribe my field notes, relive daily events of my months in the jungle, and remain mentally in New Guinea. Instead, the emotional transition begins in the baggage claim area of Los Angeles airport, and it continues with the reunion with my family waiting outside baggage claim, the drive home along the 405 Freeway, and my confrontation with piles of accumulated mail and e-mails on my desk. Shifting from New Guinea’s traditional world to Los Angeles pummels me with a conflicting mixture of feelings. What are some of them?
First and foremost are the joy and relief of being back with my wife and children. The U.S. is my home, my country. I was born and grew up here. Americans include friends whom I’ve known for 60 or 70 years, and who share and understand my life history, my culture, and many of my interests. I’ll always speak English better than any other language. I’ll always understand Americans better than I understand New Guineans. The U.S. has big advantages as a base to live. I can expect to have enough food, to enjoy physical comfort and security, and to live almost twice as long as the average traditional New Guinean. It’s much easier to satisfy my love of Western music, and to pursue my career as an author and university geographer, in the U.S. than in New Guinea. All of those are reasons why I choose to live in the U.S. Much as I love New Guinea and New Guineans, I’ve never considered moving there.
A different emotion hits me when I exit the Los Angeles airport onto the 405 Freeway. The landscape around me on the freeway consists entirely of an asphalt road grid, buildings, and motor vehicles. The sound environment is traffic noise. Sometimes but not always, the Santa Monica Mountains, rising 10 miles north of the airport, are visible as a blur through the smog. The contrast with New Guinea’s pure clear air, the variegated green shades of its dense jungle, and the excitement of its hundreds of bird songs could not be starker. Reflexively, I turn down the volume knobs on my senses and my emotional state, knowing that they will stay turned down for most of the time during the following year until my next New Guinea trip. Of course one can’t generalize about differences between the traditional world and the industrial world just by contrasting New Guinea jungle with the 405 Freeway. The advantage of beauty and of emotional opening-up would be reversed if I were instead returning from months in Port Moresby itself (one of the world’s most dangerous cities) to our summer home in Montana’s gorgeous Bitterroot Valley, under the snow-capped forested peaks of North America’s Continental Divide. Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons why I choose Los Angeles as my base, and why I choose New Guinea jungle and the Bitterroot Valley just for trips. But LA’s advantages come at a heavy price.
Returning to urban life in the U.S. means returning to time pressures, schedules, and stress. Just the thought of it raises my pulse rate and my blood pressure. In New Guinea jungle there is no time pressure, no schedule. If it’s not raining, I walk out of camp each day before dawn to listen to the last night bird songs and the first morning bird songs—but if it’s raining, I sit in camp, waiting for the rain to stop; who knows when that will be. A New Guinean from the nearest village may have promised me yesterday that he’ll visit camp “tomorrow” to teach me bird names in his local language: but he doesn’t have a wristwatch and can’t tell me when he’ll come, and perhaps he’ll come another day instead. In Los Angeles, though, life is heavily scheduled. My pocket diary tells me what I shall be doing at what hour on what day, with many entries months or a year or more off in the future. E-mails and phone calls flood in all day every day, and have to be constantly re-prioritized into piles or numbered lists for responding.
Back in Los Angeles, I gradually shed the health precautions that I adopted as reflexes in New Guinea. I no longer press my lips tightly shut while showering, lest I inadvertently contract dysentery by licking a few drops of infected water off my lips. I no longer have to be so scrupulous about frequently washing my hands, nor about keeping an eye on how the plates and spoons in camp are washed or on who touched them. I no longer have to monitor each scratch on my skin, lest it develop into a tropical ulcer. I stop taking my weekly anti-malaria pills and constantly carrying vials of three types of antibiotics. (No, all those precautions are not paranoid: there are serious consequences to omitting any of them.) I no longer have to wonder whether a twinge in my abdomen might mean appendicitis, at a jungle location from which I couldn’t get to a hospital in time.
Returning to Los Angeles from New Guinea jungle carries for me big changes in my social environment: much less constant, direct, and intense interactions with people. During my waking hours in New Guinea jungle, I’m almost constantly within a few feet of New Guineans and ready to talk with them, whether we are sitting in camp or out on a trail looking for birds. When we talk, we have each other’s full attention; none of us is distracted by texting or checking e-mail on a cell phone. Camp conversations tend to switch back and forth between several languages, depending on who is in camp at the moment, and I have to know at least the bird names in each of those languages even if I can’t speak the language. In contrast, in Westernized society, we spend far less time in direct face-to-face conversation with other people. It’s estimated that the average American instead spends eight hours per day in front of a screen (of a computer, TV, or hand-held device). Out of the time that we do spend interacting with other people, most of that interaction is indirect: by e-mail, phone, text-messaging, or (decreasingly) letters. By far most of my interactions in the U.S. are monolingual in English: I count myself lucky if I get to converse in any other language for a few hours a week. Of course, those differences don’t mean that I constantly cherish New Guinea’s direct, intense, omnipresent, full-attention, multilingual social environment: New Guineans can be frustrating as well as delightful, just as can Americans.
After 50 years of commuting between the U.S. and New Guinea, I’ve worked out my compromises and found my peace. Physically, I spend about 93% of my time in the U.S. and occasionally in other industrial countries, and about 7% of my time in New Guinea. Emotionally, I still spend much of my time and thoughts in New Guinea, even when I am physically in the U.S. New Guinea’s intensity would be hard to shake off even if I wanted to do so, which I don’t. Being in New Guinea is like seeing the world briefly in vivid colors, when by comparison the world elsewhere is gray.
Advantages of the modern world
Because most of the remainder of this chapter will be about features of traditional life from which we in the modern world can usefully learn, let’s begin by reminding ourselves of an obvious conclusion. Traditional life should not be romanticized: the modern world does offer huge advantages. It’s not the case that citizens of Westernized societies are fleeing in droves from steel tools, health, material comfort, and state-imposed peace, and are trying to return to an idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Instead, the overwhelming direction of change is that hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers who know their traditional lifestyle, but who also witness a Westernized lifestyle, are seeking to enter the modern world. Their reasons are compelling, and include such modern amenities as material goods that make life easier and more comfortable; opportunities for formal education and jobs; good health, effective medicines, doctors, and hospitals; personal security, less violence, and less danger from other people and from the environment; food security; much longer lives; and a much lower frequency of experiencing the deaths of one’s children (e.g., about two-thirds of traditional Fayu children died in childhood). Naturally, it is not true that every traditional village that modernizes, and every villager who moves to a city, succeed in obtaining these hoped-for advantages. But some do, and most villagers can see that other people enjoy these advantages, and many villagers aspire to them.