More elaborate conventional monopolies prevail among Brazil’s and Venezuela’s Yanomamo Indians, and among Brazil’s Xingu Indians. Each Yanomamo village could be self-sufficient, but it isn’t. Instead, each village specializes in some product that it provides to its allies, including arrow points, arrow shafts, baskets, bows, clay pots, cotton yarn, dogs, hallucinogenic drugs, or hammocks. Similarly, each Xingu village specializes in producing and exporting bows, pottery, salt, shell belts, or spears. Lest you think that most Yanomamo villagers really couldn’t make the crude and undecorated Yanomamo pottery, consider recent changes in how the Yanomamo village of Mömariböwei-teri obtained pots. Initially, Mömariböwei-teri imported pots from another politically allied village, Möwaraöba-teri. In explanation, Mömariböwei-teri villagers vigorously insisted then that they didn’t know how to make pots, that they formerly did make pots but had long ago forgotten how to do so, that the clay in their area was no good for making pots anyway, and that they got all the pots that they needed from Möwaraöba-teri. But then a war interrupted the alliance between Mömariböwei-teri and Möwaraöba-teri, so that Mömariböwei-teri could no longer import pots from Möwaraöba-teri. Miraculously, Mömariböwei-teri villagers suddenly “remembered” how they had long ago made pots, suddenly “discovered” that the hitherto scorned clay in their area was perfectly good for making pots, and resumed making their own pots. Thus, it’s clear that the Mömariböwei-teri villagers had previously been importing pots from Möwaraöba-teri out of choice (to cement a political alliance), not out of necessity.
It’s even clearer that !Kung engage in extensive trade of arrows out of choice, because all !Kung make similar arrows, which they nevertheless trade back and forth between each other. Anthropologist Richard Lee asked four !Kung men to tell him who owned each of the 13 to 19 arrows in each of their quivers. Of the four men, only one (Kopela Maswe) had no arrows from other men. One man (/N!au) had 11 arrows from a total of four other men, and only two arrows of his own. The other two men (/Gaske and N!eishi) had no arrows of their own: instead, each was carrying the arrows of six other men.
What is the point of these conventional monopolies and of arrow-for-arrow trading, seemingly senseless to us Westerners accustomed to trading only for objects that we can’t readily provide for ourselves? Evidently, traditional trade has social and political as well as economic functions: not merely to obtain items for their own sake, but also to “create” trade for advancing social and political goals. Perhaps the foremost such goal is to strengthen an alliance or bond on which one can call if the need arises. Trade partners among the northwest Alaska Inuit had the obligation of supporting each other if necessary: should a famine arise in your district, you have the right to go to live with your trade partner in another district. Agta hunters “trading” among themselves or with Philippine farmers regard their exchanges as based on need rather than on supply and demand: it’s assumed that different partners are likely to have surpluses or needs at different times, and that it will balance out in the long run, so a strict accounting is not kept. Each side in an Agta exchange makes major sacrifices at a time of crisis for the partner, such as at the time of a wedding or funeral ceremony, a typhoon, or a crop or hunting failure. For the Yanomamo, embroiled in constant warfare, the alliances developed through trade’s regularly bringing neighbors together under friendly circumstances are far more important to survival than are the traded pots and hammocks—even though no Yanomamo would openly say that trade’s real function is to maintain alliances.
Some trade networks and ceremonies—such as the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders, the Tee ceremonial exchange cycle of Highland New Guinea’s Enga people, and the Siassi trade network upon which I stumbled at Malai Island—became the major means to gain and display status in their respective societies. It may seem silly to us that the Siassi Islanders spend months carrying cargos by canoe through treacherous seas just in order to feast publicly at the year’s end on as many pigs as possible—until we reflect on what Siassi Islanders would say about modern Americans who toil in order to flaunt jewels and sports cars.
Tiny nations
Thus, traditional societies of the past, and those that survived into modern times, behaved like tiny nations. They maintained their own territories or core areas, visited and received visitors from some but not other nations, and in some cases delineated, defended, and patrolled boundaries as rigorously as do modern nations. They were far more restricted in their knowledge of the outside world than are citizens of modern nations, who increasingly use television, cell phones, and the Internet to learn about the rest of the world even if they never leave their own homeland. They divided other peoples more sharply into friends, enemies, and strangers than does even North Korea today. They intermarried with people of some other nations, sometimes. They traded with each other as do modern nations, and political and social motives played an even larger role in their trade relationships than they do in ours. In the next three chapters we shall discover how these tiny traditional nations maintained peace, and how they made war.
PART TWO
PEACE AND WAR
CHAPTER 2
Compensation for the Death of a Child
A ceremony What if…? What the state did New Guinea compensation Life-long relationships Other non-state societies State authority State civil justice Defects in state civil justice State criminal justice Restorative justice Advantages and their priceAn accident
Late one afternoon towards the end of the dry season, a car driven by a man named Malo accidentally struck and killed a young schoolboy, Billy, on a road in Papua New Guinea. Billy was riding home from school in a public mini-bus (not a marked school bus), and his uncle Genjimp was waiting to meet him on the other side of the road. Malo, the driver for a local small business, was bringing office staff home at the end of the day and was driving in the opposite direction from the mini-bus carrying Billy. When Billy jumped down from the mini-bus, he saw his uncle Genjimp and started running across the road to join him. However, in crossing the road, Billy didn’t walk in front of the mini-bus, which would have left him visible to Malo’s car and other on-coming traffic. Instead, Billy ran out of sight behind the mini-bus and became visible to Malo only at the instant when he darted out into the middle of the road. Malo couldn’t stop in time, and his car’s hood struck Billy in the head and tossed him into the air. Uncle Genjimp took Billy straight to the hospital emergency room, but Billy died there several hours later from massive head injuries.