Life-long relationships
In traditional New Guinea society, because networks of social relationships tend to be more important and lasting than in Western state societies, the consequences of disputes are prone to radiate beyond the immediate participants to a degree difficult for Westerners to understand. To us Westerners, it seems absurd that the damaging of the garden of a member of one clan by a pig belonging to a member of another clan could trigger a war between the two clans; to New Guinea Highlanders, that outcome is unsurprising. New Guineans tend to retain for life the important relationships into which they are born. Those relationships give each New Guinean support from many other people, but also bring obligations towards many other people. Of course we modern Westerners also have long-lasting social relationships, but we acquire and shed relationships throughout our lives much more than do New Guineans, and we live in a society rewarding individuals who seek to get ahead. Hence in New Guinea disputes the parties who receive or pay compensation are not just the immediate participants concerned, such as Malo and Billy’s parents, but also more distantly related people on both sides: Billy’s clansmen, from whom payback killings were feared; Malo’s fellow workers, who were the potential targets of retaliation, and whose employer actually paid the compensation; and any member of Malo’s extended family or clan, who would have been both a target of retaliation and a source of compensation payments if Malo had not been employed by a business. Similarly, if in New Guinea a married couple is considering a divorce, then other people are affected and get involved in the arguments about divorce far more than in the West. Those others include the husband’s relatives, who paid the bride-price and will now demand its repayment; the wife’s relatives, who received the bride-price and will now face demands for its repayment; and both clans, for whom the marriage may have represented a significant political alliance, and for whom the divorce would thus constitute a threat to that alliance.
The flip side of that overriding emphasis on social networks in traditional societies is our greater emphasis on the individual in modern state societies, especially in the United States. We not only permit, we actually encourage, individuals to advance themselves, to win, and to gain advantages at the expense of others. In many of our business transactions we aim to maximize our own profit, and never mind the feelings of the person on the other side of the table on whom we have succeeded in inflicting a loss. Even children’s games in the U.S. commonly are contests of winning and losing. That isn’t so in traditional New Guinea society, where children’s play involves cooperation rather than winning and losing.
For instance, the anthropologist Jane Goodale watched a group of children (the Kaulong people of New Britain) who had been given a bunch of bananas sufficient to provide one banana for each child. The children proceeded to play a game. Instead of a contest in which each child sought to win the biggest banana, each child cut his/her banana into two equal halves, ate one half, offered the other half to another child, and in turn received half of that child’s banana. Then each child proceeded to cut that uneaten half of the banana into two equal quarters, ate one of the quarters, offered the other quarter to another child, and received another child’s uneaten quarter banana in return. The game went on for five cycles, as the residual piece of banana was broken into equal eighths, then into equal sixteenths, until finally each child ate the stub representing one-thirty-second of the original banana, gave the other thirty-second to another child to eat, and received and ate the last thirty-second of another banana from still another child. That whole play ritual was part of the practising by which New Guinea children learn to share, and not to seek an advantage for themselves.
As another example of traditional New Guinea society’s deemphasis of individual advantage, a hard-working and ambitious teen-ager called Mafuk worked for me for a couple of months. When I paid him his salary and asked him what he intended to do with the money, he answered that he was going to buy a sewing machine with which he would mend other people’s torn clothes. He would charge them for the repairs, thereby recoup and multiply his initial investment, and start accumulating money to improve his lot in life. But Mafuk’s relatives were outraged at what they considered his selfishness. Naturally, in that sedentary society the people whose clothes Mafuk would be mending would be people whom he already knew, most of them his close or distant relatives. It violated New Guinea societal norms for Mafuk to advance himself by taking money from them. Instead, he was expected to mend their clothes for free, and in turn they would support him in other ways throughout his life, such as by contributing to his bride-price obligation when he married. Similarly, gold miners in Gabon who don’t share their gold and money with jealous friends and relatives become targets of sorcerers believed responsible for causing their victims to contract the usually fatal disease Ebola hemorrhagic fever.
When Western missionaries who have lived in New Guinea with their young children return to Australia or the United States, or when they send their children back to Australia or the U.S. to attend boarding school, the children tell me that their biggest adjustment problem is to deal with and adopt the West’s selfish individualistic ways, and to shed the emphasis on cooperation and sharing that they have learned among New Guinea children. They describe feeling ashamed of themselves if they play competitive games in order to win, or if they try to excel in school, or if they seek an advantage or opportunity that their comrades don’t achieve.
Other non-state societies
What about differences in dispute resolution among non-state societies? While resort to mediation, as in the case of Billy and Malo, may work well in traditional New Guinea villages, it may be either unnecessary or ineffective in other types of societies. It turns out that there is a virtual continuum, from small societies with no centralized authority or justice system, through chiefdoms in which the chief resolves many disputes, on to weak states in which individuals often still take justice into their own hands, and concluding with strong states exercising effective authority. Let us consider peaceful dispute resolution in five different non-state societies, ranging from ones smaller than New Guinea villages to a large society with the beginnings of political centralization (Plate 15).
We begin with disputes in the smallest societies, consisting of local groups with just a few dozen members. The !Kung (Plate 6) impressed a visiting anthropologist as a society in which people talked constantly, disputes were in the open, and everybody in the band became involved in disputes between any two band members. The anthropologist happened to visit for a month when a husband and wife were unhappy with each other, and when other band members (all of them somehow related to the husband or wife or both) were constantly joining in the couple’s arguments. A year later, the anthropologist returned for another visit, to find the couple still together, still unhappy with each other, and other band members still involved in the resulting arguments.