The story happened to me in 1976, on a Southwest Pacific island called Rennell. Because I had been sent to Rennell to prepare an environmental impact report for a proposed bauxite mine on the island, I wanted to find out how rapidly forests might regenerate after being cleared for mining, and which tree species were useful for timber, edible fruits, or other purposes. Middle-aged islanders proceeded to name for me 126 Rennell plant species in the Rennell language (anu, gangotoba, ghai-gha-ghea, kagaa-loghu-loghu, etc.). For each species, they explained whether its seeds and fruits were inedible to animals as well as to humans, or else eaten by birds and bats but not humans (naming the particular bird and bat species involved), or else edible to humans. Among those species eaten by humans, some were further distinguished as being “eaten only after the hungi kengi.”
Never having heard of a hungi kengi, I ask what it was and how it turned normally inedible fruits into edible ones. In explanation, my informants brought me to a hut where they introduced me to the source of that information, a very old woman unable to walk unassisted. It turned out that hungi kengi was the Rennell name for the biggest cyclone to have hit the island in living memory, apparently around 1910 to judge from European colonial records. The old woman had at that time been a child not quite ready to be married, so she was probably in her late 70s or early 80s when I met her in 1976. The cyclone had flattened Rennell’s forests, destroyed gardens, and threatened surviving islanders with starvation. Until new gardens could be planted and began producing, people had to resort to eating anything at all digestible, including not just the usual preferred wild fruit species but also fruits that would normally be ignored—i.e., the fruits identified for me as being “eaten only after the hungi kengi.” That required knowledge about which of those second-choice fruits were non-poisonous and safe to eat, or had poisons that could be removed by some method of food preparation. Fortunately, at the time of the hungi kengi, there were islanders alive who remembered an earlier cyclone and how they had coped then. Now, this old woman was the last person alive in her village with that inherited experience and knowledge. If another big cyclone were to strike Rennell, her encyclopedic memory of which wild fruits to eat would be all that stood between her fellow villagers and starvation. Such stories about the overwhelming importance of old people’s memories for their relatives’ survival abound for pre-literate societies.
Society’s values
Thus, much of the reason why societies do or don’t care for their aged depends on how useful old people are. Another part of the reason depends on a society’s values: whether old people are respected or scorned. Obviously, these two reasons are related: the more useful old people are, the more likely they are to be respected. But, as in so many other areas of human culture, the coupling between utility and values is a loose one: some societies emphasize respect for the aged more than do other societies that appear economically similar.
At least some respect for old people seems widespread among human societies. In the modern United States a relatively mild form of respect co-exists with some attitudes of devaluing: American children are often told to respect their elders, not to talk back to them, and to give up one’s seat on a bus if one sees an old person standing. Respect for old people is stronger among the !Kung, in part because there are proportionately far fewer old !Kung than old Americans: barely 20% of !Kung born reach the age of 60, and they deserve admiration for having survived lions, accidents, diseases, raids, and other dangers inherent in the !Kung lifestyle.
An especially strong form of respect is the doctrine of filial piety associated with Confucius, traditionally prevalent in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and actually written into law until the laws were changed by Japan’s constitution of 1948 and China’s marriage law of 1950. According to Confucian doctrine, children owe absolute obedience to their parents, and disobedience or disrespect is considered despicable. Concretely, children (especially oldest sons) have a sacred duty to support parents in their old age. Even today, filial piety remains alive and well in East Asia, where (at least until recently) almost all elderly Chinese and three-quarters of elderly Japanese have lived with their children or family.
Another strong form of respect is the emphasis on family in southern Italy, Mexico, and many other societies. As described by Donald Cowgill, “The family is depicted as the core of the social structure and the source of an all-pervading influence over its members…. The honor of the family was crucial, and individual members were expected to support the male authority, sacrifice for the family, respect parents, and avoid bringing shame on the family name…. [The family’s oldest male took on a godfather image as] a dominant authority who enforced conformity to family goals and did not countenance divided allegiance…. within this framework, there was only limited leeway for individual self-expression, which in any case was to be subordinated to the family interest…. Middle-aged children included elderly parents in the activities of their nuclear families, and a majority rejected outright the notion of ever committing their parents to be placed in a nursing home.”
These Confucian Chinese, southern Italians, and Mexican households provide examples of a widespread phenomenon termed the “patriarchal” family, whose main authority is vested in the family’s oldest living male. Other familiar examples include many or most contemporary herding and other rural societies, and in the past the ancient Romans and Hebrews. To appreciate how patriarchal families are organized, think by contrast of the modern American living arrangements that many readers of this book will take for granted, and that anthropologists term “neolocal.” That term means that a newly married couple establishes a new household (hence “neolocal”) separate from the household of either the groom’s or the bride’s parents. The new household contains a nuclear family, consisting of just the married couple and (eventually) their dependent children.
While this arrangement seems normal and natural to us, it is exceptional by geographic and historical standards: only about 5% of traditional societies have neolocal households. Instead, the commonest traditional arrangement is the “patrilocal” household, meaning that a newly married couple comes to live with the groom’s parents or family. In that case, the household unit consists not just of the nuclear family but of a wider family extended either horizontally or vertically. Horizontal extensions (i.e., within the same generation as the patriarch) may include multiple wives of the polygamous patriarch living within the same family compound, plus the patriarch’s unmarried sisters and perhaps some of his married younger siblings as well. Vertical extensions to other generations assemble within one house or compound the patriarch and his wife, one or more of their married children, and the latters’ children who are the patriarch’s grandchildren. Whether the extensions are horizontal or vertical or both, the whole household is an economic, financial, social, and political unit, all of its members live coordinated daily lives, and the patriarch is the primary authority.
Naturally, a patrilocal household lends itself to care for the elderly: they live in the same household as their children, they own and control the house or houses, and they enjoy economic and physical security. Of course, this arrangement doesn’t guarantee that adult children love their elderly parents; their feelings may be ambivalent or dominated by fear and respect for authority, and the children may just be biding their time until they too can tyrannize their own adult children. A neolocal household makes care for the elderly more difficult, whatever children’s feelings for their aged parents may be, because parents and children are physically separated.