So far, I was delighted and relieved. Everything was going well. The problems that I had feared hadn’t materialized. We had succeeded in finding a landing place for our helicopter in the forest, made a comfortable camp, and cleared an easy short trail to the summit. Best of all, we had found no signs of visits by nomads. The 17 days remaining to us would be ample time to establish which montane bird species were present and which weren’t. Gumini and I descended our new trail in good spirits and emerged from the forest into the small open patch that I had taken to be an old landslide clearing on the ridge above our camp.
Suddenly, Gumini stopped, bent over, and stared closely at something on the ground. When I asked what he found so interesting, he just said, “Look,” and he pointed. What he was pointing to was nothing more than a small stalk or tree seedling a couple of feet high, with a few leaves on it. I told him, “That’s just a very young tree. See, there are lots of other young trees growing up here in this clearing. What’s so special about this one?”
Gumini answered, “No, it’s not a young tree. It’s a stick stuck in the ground.” I disagreed: “What makes you think so? It’s just a seedling growing up out of the ground.” In reply, Gumini grasped it and pulled. It lifted out easily, without the need for any effort to break or pull out roots. When he had lifted it out, we saw that there were no roots at the base of the stick, which was broken off cleanly. I thought that perhaps Gumini’s pulling had snapped its roots, but he dug down around the hole left by the stick and showed me that there weren’t any broken-off roots. It must instead be a broken-off small stick inserted into the ground, as he had insisted. How had it gotten there and become inserted?
We both looked overhead at the small trees 15 feet tall above us. I suggested, “A branch must have broken off that tree overhead, and fallen down and gotten stuck in the ground.” But Gumini objected, “If that branch broke and fell, it’s not likely to have landed with the broken-off end pointing exactly down and the leaves pointing up. And it’s a light branch, not heavy enough to drive itself several inches into the ground. It looks to me like some person broke it off and inserted it with the sharp broken end into the ground and the leaves upwards, as a sign.”
I felt a shiver and my skin flushing on the back of my neck, as I thought of Robinson Crusoe cast ashore on his supposedly uninhabited island, suddenly coming across a human footprint. Gumini and I sat down, picked up and held the stick, and looked around us. For an hour we sat there, talking to each other about the possibilities. If a person really did this, why isn’t there any other sign of human activity, just this broken stick? If a person did plant it, how recently was he here to do it? It wasn’t today, because the leaves are already slightly wilted. But it wasn’t a long time ago either, because the leaves are still green, not shriveled and dry. Is this open area really an overgrown landslide clearing as I had assumed? Maybe, instead, it’s an old garden that has become overgrown. I kept coming back to my belief that a nomad would not have walked in there a few days ago from a hut 27 miles away, broken and planted a stick, and walked off without leaving any other signs. Gumini kept insisting that a broken stick wasn’t likely to insert itself into the ground, so as to mimic what a person does.
We walked back the short distance into camp, where the other New Guineans were, and told them what we had found. Nobody else had seen any hint of human presence. Now that I had gotten into this paradise about which I had been dreaming for a year, I wasn’t going to put out the red mattress as an emergency sign for evacuation on the first overflight three days later, just because there was one unexplained stick in the ground. That would be carrying constructive paranoia too far. There was probably some natural explanation for that stick, I told myself. Maybe it really had happened to fall vertically with enough force to insert itself, or maybe we had overlooked its roots broken off when we pulled it out. But Gumini was an experienced woodsman, one of the very best whom I had met in New Guinea, and he wasn’t likely to misread signs.
All that we could do was to be very careful, remain alert for other signs of people, and not do anything else to give away our presence to any nomads who might be lurking nearby. Our four noisy helicopter flights to establish our camp could be expected to have tipped off any nomad within dozens of miles. We would probably soon know if there were any. As precautions, we didn’t yell to each other from a distance. I made a point of being especially quiet when I went below camp to bird-watch at low elevation where any nomads were most likely to be. So that our campfire smoke wouldn’t give away our presence from afar, we reserved making a big fire for our main cooking until after dark. Eventually, after we found some large monitor lizards prowling around our camp, I asked my New Guinea friends to make bows and arrows for defense. They complied, but only half-heartedly—perhaps because freshly cut green wood wouldn’t make a good bow and arrow, or because four green bows and arrows in the hands of just my four New Guineans wouldn’t be of much use if there really were a band of angry nomads around.
As the days went on, no more mysterious broken sticks turned up, and there were no suspicious signs of humans. Instead, we saw tree kangaroos during the day, unafraid and not running away at the sight of us. Tree kangaroos are New Guinea’s largest native mammals and the first target of native hunters, so in inhabited areas they quickly become shot out. Surviving individuals learn to be active only at night and are very shy and flee if seen. We also encountered unafraid cassowaries, New Guinea’s biggest flightless bird, which is also a prime target of hunters and also rare and very shy in areas with people. The big pigeons and parrots in the area were also unafraid. Everything pointed to this being a location whose animals had never experienced human hunters or visitors.
When our helicopter came back and evacuated us on schedule 19 days after we had arrived, the mystery of the broken stick was still unresolved. We had seen no other possible signs of humans than that one stick. In retrospect, I think it’s unlikely that nomads from the lowlands many miles away climbed up thousands of feet, made a garden, came back a year or two later, planted one stick by coincidence a couple of days before our arrival so that the leaves were still green, and left no other trace of themselves. While I can’t explain how that stick got there, my guess is that Gumini’s constructive paranoia was in this case unjustified.
But I can certainly understand how Gumini acquired his attitude. His area had come under government control recently. Until then, traditional fighting had been going on. Paia, 10 years older than Gumini, had grown up making stone tools. In Gumini’s and Paia’s society, people who weren’t super-attentive to signs of strangers in the forest didn’t live long. It does no harm to be suspicious of sticks not readily explained naturally, to spend an hour examining and discussing each one, and then to remain alert for other sticks. Before my canoe accident, I would have dismissed Gumini’s reaction as exaggerated, just as I had dismissed as exaggerated the reactions of New Guineans to the dead tree under which I had camped earlier in my New Guinea career. But I had now spent enough time in New Guinea to understand Gumini’s reaction. It’s better to pay attention 1,000 times to sticks that turn out to have fallen naturally into an unnatural-looking position, than to make the fatal mistake of ignoring one stick that really did get placed by strange humans. Gumini’s constructive paranoia was an appropriate reaction of an experienced, cautious New Guinean.
Taking risks
While the underlying caution that I term constructive paranoia has struck me frequently among New Guineans, I don’t want to leave the misimpression that they are thereby paralyzed and hesitant to act. To begin with, there are cautious and incautious New Guineans, just as there are cautious and incautious Americans. Then, too, the cautious ones are perfectly able to weigh risks and to act. They do some things that they know are risky, but that they nevertheless choose to do repeatedly and with appropriate care. That’s because doing those things is essential for their obtaining food and succeeding in life, or because they place value on doing them. I’m remi
nded of a line attributed to the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky, about the risks of attempting difficult hockey shots that might miss the net: “100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in!”
My New Guinea friends would understand Gretzky’s quip, and would add two footnotes to it. First, a closer analogy with traditional life would be if you were actually penalized for missing a shot—but you would still take shots, albeit more cautiously. Second, a hockey player can’t wait forever for the perfect opportunity to take a shot, because a hockey game has a time limit of one hour. Similarly, traditional lives include time limits: you’ll die of thirst within a few days if you don’t take risks in finding water, you’ll starve within a few weeks if you don’t take risks in obtaining food, and you’ll die within less than a century no matter what you do. In fact, traditional lifespans are on the average considerably shorter than those of modern First World people, because of uncontrollable factors such as diseases, droughts, and enemy attacks. No matter how cautious a person in a traditional society is, he or she is likely to die before age 55 anyway, and that may mean having to tolerate higher risk levels than in First World societies with an average lifespan of 80—just as Wayne Gretzky would have to take more shots if a hockey game lasted only 30 minutes instead of one hour. Here are three examples of calculated risks that traditional people accept but that horrify us:
!Kung hunters, armed with nothing more than small bows and poisoned arrows, wave sticks and shout to drive groups of lions or hyenas off of animal carcasses. When a hunter succeeds in wounding an antelope, the small arrow does not kill by impact: instead, the prey runs off, the hunters track it, and by the time that the prey has collapsed from the slow-acting poison’s effect many hours or a day later, lions or hyenas are likely to have found the carcass first. Hunters who are not prepared to drive those predators off carcasses are guaranteed to starve. Few things impress me as more suicidal than the thought of walking up to a group of feasting lions while shaking a stick to intimidate them. Nevertheless, !Kung hunters do it dozens of times a year, for decades. They attempt to minimize their risks by challenging sated lions with visibly bulging bellies and likely to be ready to retreat, and by not challenging hungry or emaciated lions that evidently just discovered the carcass and are likely to stand their ground.
Women in the Fore area of New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands move from their natal village to their husband’s village at the time of marriage. When married women later go back to their natal village to visit their parents and other blood relatives, they may travel either with their husbands or else alone. In traditional times of chronic warfare, a woman’s traveling alone involved the risk of her being raped or killed while traversing enemy territory. Women attempted to minimize those risks by seeking protection from other relatives living in the territory traversed. However, the dangers and the protection were both difficult to predict. A woman might be attacked in revenge for a killing carried out a generation ago; or her protectors might be outnumbered by those seeking revenge, or might acknowledge justice in the demand for revenge.
For instance, the anthropologist Ronald Berndt related the story of a young woman named Jumu, from Ofafina village, who went to marry a man at Jasuvi. For Jumu later to return with her child to visit her parents and brothers at Ofafina required traversing the Ora district, where a woman named Inusa had recently been killed by Ofafina men. Hence Jumu’s Jasuvi in-laws advised her to seek protection from an Ora male relative named Asiwa, who also happened to be a brother’s son of the dead Inusa. Unfortunately, after finding Asiwa in his garden, Jumu was detected by some Ora men, who tricked and pressured Asiwa into allowing one of them to rape Jumu in Asiwa’s presence, and then killed Jumu and her child. Asiwa was apparently only half-hearted in his efforts to protect Jumu, because he felt that the killing of Jumu and her child constituted legitimate revenge for Inusa’s killing. As for why Jumu made what proved to be the fatal mistake of entrusting herself to Asiwa’s protection, Berndt commented, “Fighting, revenge, and counter-revenge are so commonplace that people become accustomed to this state of affairs.” That is, Jumu was unwilling to abandon forever the hope of seeing her parents again, and she accepted and tried to minimize the risks involved.
My remaining example of the delicate balance between constructive paranoia and knowingly accepting risks involves Inuit hunters. An important Inuit method of hunting seals in the winter involves standing, sometimes for hours, over one of the seal’s breathing holes in a shelf of sea ice, in the hopes that a seal will surface at that hole for a quick breath and can then be harpooned. This technique poses the risk that the ice shelf may break off and drift out to sea, leaving the hunter stranded on the ice and facing likely death from ice break-up and drowning, exposure, or starvation. It would be much safer for hunters to remain on land and not place themselves at that risk. But that in turn would make death from starvation probable, because land hunting offers no rewards to match killing seals at breathing holes. While Inuit hunters attempt to select ice shelves unlikely to break off, even the most careful hunter cannot predict shelf break-off with certainty, and other hazards of Arctic life result in a short average lifespan for traditional Inuit hunters. That is, if a hockey game lasted only 20 minutes, one would have to risk taking shots even if missed shots were penalized.
Risks and talkativeness
Finally, I would like to speculate about a possible connection between two features of traditional life: its risks, and what I have experienced as the talkativeness of traditional peoples. Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking. That makes it difficult for a Westerner like me, accustomed to nights spent in uninterrupted sleep and not punctuated with conversations, to get a good night’s rest in a hut shared with many New Guineans. Other Westerners have similarly commented on the talkativeness of the !Kung, of African Pygmies, and of many other traditional peoples.
Out of innumerable examples, here is one that stuck in my mind. One morning during my second trip to New Guinea, I was in a camp tent with two New Guinea Highland men, while other men from the camp were out in the forest. The two men belonged to the Fore tribe and were talking to each other in the Fore language. I had been enjoying learning the Fore language, and the men’s conversation was sufficiently repetitive and about a subject for which I had already acquired vocabulary that I was able to follow much of what they were saying. They were talking about the Highland staple food of sweet potato, for which the Fore word is isa-awe. One of the men looked at the large pile of sweet potatoes in the corner of the tent, assumed an unhappy expression, and said to the other man, “Isa-awe kampai.” (“There aren’t any sweet potatoes.”) They then counted how many isa-awe the pile actually contained, using the Fore counting system that mapped objects against the 10 fingers of the two hands, then against the 10 toes, and finally against a series of points along the arms. Each man related to the other how many isa-awe he himself had eaten that morning. Then they compared notes on how many isa-awe the “red man” had eaten that morning (i.e., me: the Fore referred to Europeans as tetekine, literally “red man,” rather than as “white man”). The man who had spoken first now said that he was hungry for isa-awe, although he had eaten breakfast only an hour ago. The conversation went on to estimate how much longer that pile of isa-awe would last, and when the red man (me again) would buy some more isa-awe. There was nothing unusual about that conversation: it stands out in my mind only because it indelibly reinforced my memory of the Fore word isa-awe, and because I was struck at the time by how long the men were able to continue a conversation consisting of variants just on the single the
me of isa-awe.
We may feel inclined to dismiss such talking as “mere gossip.” But gossip fulfills functions for us, and for New Guineans as well. One function in New Guinea is that traditional people have none of the means of passive entertainment to which we devote inordinate time, such as television, radio, movies, books, video games, and the Internet. Instead, talking is the main form of entertainment in New Guinea. Another function of New Guinea talking is to maintain and develop social relationships, which are at least as important to New Guineans as they are to Westerners.
In addition, I think that their constant stream of conversation helps New Guineans to cope with life in the dangerous world around them. Everything gets discussed: minute details of events, what has changed since yesterday, what might happen next, who did what, and why they did it. We get most of our information about the world around us from the media; traditional New Guineans get all their information from their own observations and from each other. Life is more dangerous for them than it is for us. By talking constantly and acquiring as much information as possible, New Guineans try to make sense of their world, and to prepare themselves better to master life’s dangers.