The final widespread method is to kill the victim violently without the victim’s cooperation or consent, again by strangling or burying alive, or else by suffocating, stabbing, delivering an ax blow to the head, or breaking the neck or back. One Ache Indian man interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado described his methods of killing old women (as mentioned above, old men were instead left to walk off): “I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts [classificatory aunts] when they were still moving (alive)…. I would step on them, then they all died, there by the big river…. I didn’t used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. When they were still moving I would break them [their backs or necks]…. I wouldn’t care for old women; all by myself I would stick them [with his bow].”
Our reaction to these accounts of spouses, children, brothers or sisters, or fellow band members killing or abandoning an old or sick person is likely to be one of horror—just as is our reaction to the accounts in Chapter 5 of a mother killing her newborn baby if it is a twin or born damaged. But, just as in those cases of infanticide, we have to ask ourselves: what else could a nomadic society, or a society with not enough food for the whole group, do with its elderly? Throughout their lives, the victims have already watched old or sick people being abandoned or killed, and have probably already done it to their own parents. It is the form of death that they expect, and in which in many cases they cooperate. We are fortunate that we do not face that same ordeal ourselves as victim or suicide assister or killer, because we have the good fortune to live in societies with surplus food and medical care. As Winston Churchill wrote of the Japanese admiral Kurita, who had to choose between two equally awful courses of action in wartime, “Those who have endured a similar ordeal may judge him.” In fact, many of you readers of this book have endured or will endure a similar ordeal yourselves, when you find yourself forced to decide whether to tell the physician caring for your aged or sick parent in failing health that the time has come to halt further aggressive medical intervention, or just to administer pain-killers, sedatives, and palliative care.
Usefulness of old people
What useful services can old people perform for traditional societies? From a cold-blooded adaptive perspective, societies in which old people do remain useful will tend to prosper if those societies care for their elderly. More often, of course, young people who care for their elders couch their reasons not in terms of that evolutionary advantage but in terms of love, respect, and obligation. However, when a group of hunter-gatherers is starving and debating whom they can afford to feed, cold-blooded considerations may be voiced explicitly. Of the services rendered by older people, the first ones that I shall mention are also performed by younger people but are still within the power of older people, while other services involve skills perfected by long experience and hence especially suitable to old people.
People eventually reach an age at which men can no longer spear to death a lion, and women can no longer trot miles with a heavy load to and from the mongongo nut grove. Nevertheless, there are other ways in which older people can continue to obtain food for their grandchildren and thereby ease the provisioning burden on their children and children-in-law. Ache men continue to hunt and gather into their 60s by concentrating on small animals, fruit, and palm products and breaking trail when the band shifts camp. Older !Kung men set animal traps, gather plant food, and join younger men on hunts in order to interpret animal tracks and propose strategies. Among Hadza hunter-gatherer women of Tanzania, the age group working the hardest consists of post-menopausal grandmothers (Plate 21), who spend on the average seven hours a day foraging for tubers and fruit—even though they no longer have dependent children of their own to feed. But they do have hungry grandchildren, and the more time that a Hadza grandmother spends foraging for food, the faster her grandchildren gain weight as a result. Similar benefits have been described for 18th- and 19th-century Finnish and Canadian farmers: analyses of church and genealogical records show that more children survive to adulthood if they have a living grandmother than if both grandmothers are dead, and that every decade that a post-menopausal woman survives past age 50 is associated with her children producing on the average two extra children of their own (presumably because of the grandmother’s help).
Another service that older people can render even past the age of digging tubers seven hours a day is baby-sitting. That frees up the older person’s children and children-in-law to spend more time foraging unencumbered for their own children, the grandchildren of the older person. !Kung grandparents often take care of their grandchildren uninterruptedly for several consecutive days, thereby enabling their children to undertake overnight hunting and gathering trips on which the grandchildren would be an encumbrance. A main reason that elderly Samoans give today for migrating to the United States is to care for their grandchildren, and thus to enable their children to hold jobs outside the house and to face fewer burdens inside the house.
Old people can make things for their grown children to use, such as tools, weapons, baskets, pots, and woven textiles (Plate 22). For example, older Semang hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula were noted for making blowguns. This is an area where the elderly not only try to hang on to earlier abilities but are likely to excel: the best basket-makers and potters are often older people.
Other areas in which abilities grow with age include medicine, religion, entertainment, relationships, and politics. Traditional midwives and medicine men are often old, as are magicians and priests, prophets and sorcerers, and the leaders of songs, games, dances, and initiation rites. Older people enjoy a huge social advantage, insofar as they have spent a lifetime building up a network of relationships, into which they can then introduce their children. Political leaders are usually older people, so much so that the phrase “tribal elders” has become virtually a synonym for tribal leaders. That remains generally true even in modern state societies: for instance, the average age on taking office is 54 for American presidents and 53 for American Supreme Court justices.
But perhaps the most important function of older people in traditional societies is one that may not have occurred to readers of this book. In a literate society the main repositories of information are written or digital sources: encyclopedias, books, magazines, maps, diaries, notes, letters, and now the Internet. If we want to ascertain some fact, we look it up in a written source or else online. But that option doesn’t exist for a pre-literate society, which must rely instead on human memories. Hence the minds of older people are the society’s encyclopedias and libraries. Time and time again in New Guinea, when I am interviewing local people and ask them some question to which they are unsure of the answer, my informants pause and say, “Let’s ask the old man [or the old woman].” Older people know the tribe’s myths and songs, who is related to whom, who did what to whom when, the names and habits and uses of hundreds of species of local plants and animals, and where to go to find food when conditions are poor. Hence caring for older people becomes a matter of life or death, just as caring for one’s hydrographic charts is a matter of life or death for modern boat captains. I’ll illustrate this value of old people by the story of a case involving knowledge essential for a tribe’s survival.
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 a
s 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.
At the opposite extreme from this strong status of the elderly in traditional patriarchial societies is their status in much of modern American society (with conspicuous exceptions among some immigrant communities that retain traditional values). To quote Cowgill’s list of depressing attributes, “We associate old age with loss of usefulness, decrepitude, illness, senility, poverty, loss of sexuality, sterility, and death.” Those views have practical consequences for the job opportunities and medical care of older people. Mandatory retirement ages were until recently widespread in the United States, and they are still widespread in Europe. Employers tend to consider older people as set in their ways and less manageable and teachable, hence employers prefer to invest in young employees who are considered more flexible and more easily trained. In an experimental study carried out by Joanna Lahey for Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, responses to false résumés sent to prospective employers and differing only in the applicants’ names and ages revealed that a woman aged 35–45 applying for an entry-level job is 43% more likely to be called for an interview than an applicant 50–62 years old. The explicit hospital policy termed “age-based allocation of health care resources” is to give youn
ger patients priority over older patients whenever health-care resources are limited, on the grounds that medical time, energy, and money should not be invested in saving elderly lives written off as “fragile and failing.” Is it any surprise that Americans and Europeans, even already in their 30s, respond by investing much money of their own in measures to preserve a youthful appearance, such as hair dyeing and plastic surgery?
At least three sets of values, some of them shared with European society, contribute to this low status of the elderly in modern America. One set, emphasized by the sociologist Max Weber, is the work ethic, which Weber stressed in connection with John Calvin’s form of the Protestant Revolution, and which Weber formulated especially with regards to Germany, but which is more broadly relevant to modern Western society. At the risk of reducing his long and complex books and articles to one sentence, Weber may be said to have viewed work as the central business of one’s life, the source of one’s status and identity, and good for one’s character. It follows that retired elderly people who are no longer working lose their social status.
A more specifically American set of values is a cluster related to our emphasis on the individual. That individualism is the opposite of the emphasis on extended family discussed above for many other societies. An American’s sense of self-worth is measured by his/her own achievements, not by the collective achievements of the extended family to which he/she belongs. We are taught to be independent and to rely on ourselves. Independence, individualism, and self-reliance are all praised as virtues, and the opposite traits of dependence, inability to stand on one’s own feet, and inability to take care of oneself are disparaged. In fact, for Americans a dependent personality is a clinical diagnosis used by psychiatrists and psychologists, and labeled Mental Disorder number 301.6 by the American Psychiatric Association, to identify a condition requiring treatment, whose goal is to help the regrettably dependent individual achieve the American virtue of independence.