CHAPTER 8
Lions and Other Dangers
Accidents Vigilance Human violence Diseases Responses to diseases Starvation Unpredictable food shortages Scatter your land Seasonality and food storage Diet broadening Aggregation and dispersal Responses to dangerDangers of traditional life
The anthropologist Melvin Konner spent two years living with !Kung hunter-gatherers in a remote area of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, far from any roads or towns. The nearest town was a small one with few motor vehicles, such that a car appeared along the road through town on the average only every minute or so. Yet when Konner brought a !Kung friend named !Khoma to the town, the man was terrified at the prospect of having to cross the road, even when no car was visible in either direction. This was a man whose lifestyle in the Kalahari involved driving lions and hyenas off the carcasses of game animals.
Sabine Kuegler, the German missionary couple’s daughter who grew up with her parents among the Fayu tribe in Indonesian New Guinea’s swamp forests, where there are also no roads or motor vehicles or towns, related a similar reaction. At the age of 17 she finally left New Guinea to attend boarding school in Switzerland. “There were unbelievably many cars here, and they roared along so unbelievably fast!… Every time that we had to cross the street without a traffic light, I began to sweat. I couldn’t estimate the cars’ speed, and I was panicked that I would be run over…. Cars raced by from both directions, and when there was a small gap in the traffic, my friends ran across the street. But I stayed there, as if turned to stone…. For five minutes I kept standing at the same place. My fear was just too great. I walked a huge detour until I finally found a street-crossing with a traffic light. From then on, all my friends knew that they had to plan crossing the street with me far in advance. To this day, I’m still afraid of rushing traffic in cities.” Yet Sabine Kuegler had become accustomed to watching out for wild pigs and crocodiles in New Guinea swamp forests.
These two similar stories illustrate several points. People in every society face dangers, but the particular dangers differ among societies. Our perceptions of both unfamiliar risks and familiar ones are often unrealistic. Konner’s !Kung friend and Sabine Kuegler were both correct, in that cars actually are the number-one danger in Western life. But American college students and women voters, asked to rank life’s dangers, both rated nuclear power as more dangerous than cars, despite nuclear power (even including the death tolls from the two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War II) having actually killed only a tiny fraction of the number of people that cars have killed. American college students also rate pesticides as extremely risky (close behind guns and smoking, in their opinion), and surgery as relatively safe, whereas in reality surgery is more dangerous than pesticides.
One could add that traditional lifestyles are overall more dangerous than the Western lifestyle, as expressed in a much shorter lifespan. That difference, though, is mostly recent. Before effective state government began around 400 years ago to reduce the impact of famines, and especially before public health measures and then antibiotics largely overcame infectious diseases less than 200 years ago, lifespans in European and American state societies were no higher than in traditional societies.
What, really, are the main dangers in traditional life? We shall see that lions and crocodiles are only part of the answer. As for reactions to dangers, we modern people sometimes respond rationally by adopting measures effective at minimizing the dangers, but in other cases we respond “irrationally” and ineffectively, e.g. by denial, or else by prayer and other religious practices. How do traditional peoples respond to dangers? I shall discuss what seem to me to be the four main groups of dangers faced by traditional peoples: environmental hazards, human violence, infectious and parasitic diseases, and starvation. The first two of those groups are still major problems in modern Western societies, the third and especially the fourth less so (although they are still important in other parts of the modern world). Then I’ll briefly mention ways in which our assessments of risks are distorted, such that we overreact to pesticides and underreact to surgery.
Accidents
When we imagine the dangers facing traditional societies, our first association is likely to be with lions and other environmental hazards. In reality, for most traditional societies environmental dangers rank only third as a cause of death, behind disease and human violence. But environmental dangers exert a bigger effect on people’s behavior than do diseases, because for environmental dangers the relation between cause and effect is much quicker and more easily perceived and understood.
Table 8.1 lists the main reported causes of accidental death or injury for seven traditional peoples for whom summaries are available. All seven live in or near the tropics and practise at least some hunting and gathering, but two (New Guinea Highlanders and the Kaulong) obtain most of their calories by farming. Obviously, different traditional peoples must face different dangers related to their different environments. For instance, drowning and being carried out to sea on an ice floe are risks for the Inuit of the Arctic coast but not for the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, while being struck by a toppling tree and being bitten by a poisonous snake are risks for Aka Pygmies and the Ache but not for the Inuit. Falling into a collapsing underground cavern is a risk for the Kaulong but for none other of the seven tabulated groups, because only the Kaulong live in an environment with many thinly roofed sinkholes. Obviously too, Table 8.1 lumps together the differences between sexes and age classes within a society: accidents kill more men than women among the Ache, the !Kung, and many other peoples, not only because hunting animals by men poses more dangers than does plant gathering by women, but also because men tend to be more risk-seeking than are women. But Table 8.1 still suffices to suggest some conclusions.
Table 8.1. Causes of accidental death and injury
| Ache (Paraguay) | 1. Poisonous snakes. 2. Jaguars, lightning, getting lost. 3. Tree-fall, falling from tree, infected insect bites and thorn scratches, fire, drowning, exposure, cut by ax. |
| !Kung (Southern Africa) | 1. Poisoned arrows. 2. Fire, large animals, poisonous snakes, falling from tree, infected thorn scratch, exposure. 3. Getting lost, lightning. |
| Aka Pygmies (Central Africa) | Falling from tree, tree-fall, large animals, poisonous snakes, drowning. |
| New Guinea Highlands | 1. Fire, tree-fall, infected insect bites and thorn scratches. 2. Exposure, getting lost. |
| Fayu (New Guinea lowlands) | Scorpions and spiders, poisonous snakes, pigs and crocodiles, fire, drowning. |
| Kaulong (New Britain) | 1. Tree-fall. 2. Falling from tree, drowning, cut by ax or knife, collapse of underground cavern. |
| Agta (Philippines) | Tree-fall, falling from tree, drowning, hunting and fishing accidents. |