To the mountain people and the river people, this visit was evidently a normal part of their complex relationship incorporating a broad range of behaviors: rarely, killings by stealth; more often, reputed killings by poison and sorcery; acknowledged reciprocal rights to do some things (such as passing in transit to the coast and making social visits) but not other things (such as gathering food and wood and water while in transit); disagreement about other things (such as that hut and garden) that sometimes flared into violence; and occasional intermarriage at about the same frequency as stealth murders (every couple of generations). All this between two groups of people who looked the same to me, spoke distinct but related languages, understood each other’s language, described each other in terms otherwise reserved for evil subhumans, and viewed each other as their worst enemies.
Mutually exclusive territories
In theory, the spatial relations between neighboring traditional societies could encompass a whole spectrum of outcomes, ranging at the one extreme from non-overlapping exclusive territories with definite patrolled boundaries and no shared use, to free access of everybody to all land and no recognized territories at the other extreme. Probably no society strictly conforms to either extreme, but some come close to the first extreme. For instance, my mountain friends whom I just described are not far from it: they do have territories with defined boundaries that they patrol, they do assert exclusive claim to resources within their territory, and they permit access by outsiders just for transit and rare intermarriage.
Other societies which approach that extreme of exclusive territories include the Dani (Plate 1) of the Baliem Valley of western New Guinea’s Highlands, the Iñupiat (an Inuit group)* of northwest Alaska, northern Japan’s Ainu, the Yolngu (an Aboriginal group of Arnhem Land in Northwest Australia), Shoshone Indians of Owens Valley in California, and Yanomamo Indians of Brazil and Venezuela. For instance, the Dani irrigate and till gardens separated by a garden-less no-man’s land from the gardens of the adjacent Dani group. Each group builds a line of wooden watch-towers up to 30 feet high on its own side of the no-man’s land, with a platform at the top big enough for one man to sit there (Plate 13). For much of each day, men take turns keeping watch from each tower, while companions sit at a tower’s base to protect it and the watchman, who scans the area to look out for stealthily approaching enemies and to give the alert in case of a surprise attack.
As another example, Alaska’s Iñupiat (Plate 9) consist of 10 groups with mutually exclusive territories. People from one territory caught trespassing on another territory were routinely killed, unless they proved to be related to the territory-owners who caught them trespassing. The two commonest causes of trespass were hunters crossing a boundary in hot pursuit of reindeer, and seal hunters hunting on an ice shelf that broke off and drifted away from land. In the latter case, if the ice subsequently drifted back to shore and the hunters found themselves landing in another territory, they were killed. To us non-Iñupiat, that seems cruelly unfair: those poor hunters were already taking a big risk to have gone out onto a floating ice shelf, they had the bad luck that their shelf broke off, they were then at risk of death from drowning or being carried out to sea, now they had the great good fortune to drift back to shore after all, they had no intentions of trespassing but were just carried innocently and passively by an ocean current—yet they were still killed just at the moment of their salvation from drowning or drifting to sea. But those were the rules of Iñupiaq life. Nevertheless, Iñupiaq territorial exclusivity wasn’t complete: outsiders occasionally were given permission to visit one’s territory for a specific purpose such as a summer trade fair, or to transit one’s territory for another specific purpose such as visiting or raiding a distant group living beyond the farther side of the transited territory.
When we collect the examples of societies (like my mountain friends, the Dani, and the Iñupiat) lying towards that extreme of mutually exclusive defended territories, we discover that that outcome arises under a combination of four conditions. First, defended territories require a population sufficiently large and dense that some people can be spared to devote time specifically to patrolling boundaries, so that the population doesn’t have to rely just on everyone casually keeping out an eye for trespassers while in the course of normal foraging. Second, exclusive territories require a productive, stable, predictable environment within which the territory-owners can count on usually finding most or all of their necessary resources, such that they rarely or never need to go outside their territory. Third, the territory must contain some valuable fixed resources or capital improvements worth defending and dying for, such as productive gardens, groves of fruit trees, or fishing weirs or irrigation ditches requiring much effort to build and maintain. Finally, group membership must be rather constant, and neighboring groups must be largely distinct, with little migration between groups—the main exception being movements of unmarried young people (more often women than men) leaving their natal group in order to marry into another group.
We can observe how those four conditions are satisfied by the groups I’ve just mentioned as approaching the extreme of exclusive territories and defended boundaries. My New Guinea mountain friends have a significant investment in their year-round gardens, pigs, and forests, which traditionally gave them everything that they needed. Clearing forests and developing gardens are laborious for them, and are even more so for western New Guinea’s Dani, who dig and maintain elaborate systems of ditches to irrigate and drain their gardens. The Iñupiat and Ainu occupy rich year-round territories with abundant marine resources of salt-water fish, seals, whales, and seabirds, fresh-water fisheries and waterfowl, and inland areas with terrestrial mammals to hunt. Arnhem Land’s Yolngu similarly lived in dense populations made possible by the combination of productive coastal and inland resources. Owens Valley’s Shoshone Indians were hunter-gatherers living at relatively high densities in an area with ample water that let them irrigate land to increase its yields of edible wild grass seeds, and that provided storable harvests of pine nuts. Those food stores, pine groves, and irrigation systems were worth defending, and there were enough Owens Valley Shoshones to defend them. Finally, Yanomamo Indians maintain plantations of peach palm and plantain trees that produce their staple foods for many years and are also worth defending.
In areas with especially large and dense populations, such as those of the Dani and the Sudan’s Nuer, not only are there separate groups each with its own territory, but those territorial groups are further organized into hierarchies of three or more levels. Those hierarchies remind us of the hierarchical organization of land, people, and political control familiar to us in our modern state societies, starting with individual house plots, and ranging up through cities, counties, and states to the national government. For instance, the Nuer (Plate 7), numbering 200,000 people in an area of 30,000 square miles, are divided into tribes of 7,000 to 42,000 people each, each tribe divided and subdivided into primary and secondary and tertiary subtribes, down to villages of 50 to 700 people and separated by 5 to 20 miles. The smaller and hierarchically lower the unit, the fewer are the disputes about boundaries and other matters, the stronger are the pressures that relatives and friends bring to bear on disputants to settle disputes quickly and without violence, and the more limited is any fighting that does occur. For instance, the Nuer observe few restrictions in their treatment of neighboring Dinka tribes: they regularly raid the Dinka, steal Dinka livestock, kill Dinka men, and take home some Dinka women and children as captives while killing the others. But Nuer hostilities against other Nuer tribes consist only of sporadic cattle raids, killing of just a few men, and no killing or kidnapping of women and children.
Non-exclusive land use
The opposite extreme of less or no exclusivity is approached under conditions that are the mirror image of the conditions selected for exclusivity. One such condition is sparse and small populations that make patrolling (other than casually looking for trespasser
s while out doing other things) impossible. For instance, a society consisting of just a single family can’t afford dedicated patrols, because it can’t have its single adult man spending all day seated at the top of a watch-tower. A second condition involves unproductive, marginal, variable environments with sparse and unpredictable resources, such that any territory one might feasibly claim would often (at some seasons or in a bad year) not contain essential resources, and one would then periodically have to seek resources in another group’s territory and vice versa. Third, it doesn’t pay to risk one’s life defending a territory containing nothing worth dying for: if one’s territory is attacked, it would then be preferable just to move to another area. Finally, territories are likely to be non-exclusive if group membership is fluid, and if group members often visit or transfer to other groups. It makes no sense to keep out another group if half of its members are visitors or transferees from your own group anyway.
However, the usual form of land division under these conditions selecting for non-exclusivity isn’t the extreme of a free-for-all in which anybody can do anything anywhere. Instead, it still is the case that each group is identified with a specific core area. Non-exclusive societies differ from exclusive societies in that, instead of the Dani no-man’s land clearly delineated by watch-towers, recognized borders don’t exist, and land ownership just becomes increasingly vague as one moves increasing distances from one’s core area. Another distinction of non-exclusive from exclusive societies is that neighboring groups receive permission to visit your territory more often and for more different purposes—especially to obtain food and water at certain seasons or in certain years. Correspondingly, you can readily obtain permission to visit your neighbor’s territory when you are the one in need, so the arrangement becomes an exchange based on reciprocity and mutual benefit.
An example of non-exclusive land ownership that has been described in detail is the !Kung hunter-gatherers (Plate 6) of the Nyae Nyae area of the Kalahari Desert. When studied in the 1950s, they consisted of 19 bands, containing between 8 and 42 people per band, each band with its own “territory” (termed a n!ore) of between about 100 and 250 square miles in area. But boundaries between n!ores were vague: as anthropologists and !Kung informants walked together from the informants’ camp towards the next n!ore, the informants became increasingly uncertain, or disagreed increasingly with each other, about which n!ore they were now in, the further they got from the center of their n!ore. There were no watch-towers or ridge-line trails to mark n!ore boundaries.
!Kung n!ores are occupied non-exclusively because it is both necessary and possible to share n!ores’ resources. Resource sharing is necessary because water in the Kalahari Desert is scarce, and each band needs to spend much of its time near a waterhole. But there is unpredictable variation in rainfall between years. Many waterholes in the area go dry in the dry season. Only 2 waterholes in the area never failed during the period studied; 3 more were usually available throughout the year but failed in some years; 5 more lasted only occasionally through the dry season; and 50 were seasonal and always went dry for part of the year. Hence in the dry season, up to 200 people from various bands gather at a permanent waterhole with the permission of its owners, who in turn are permitted to visit and use resources of other n!ores when those are abundant. Thus, water considerations require the !Kung to have non-exclusive territories: it would be pointless to claim exclusive use of an area if that area might run out of water and thus become useless. Conversely, the seasonal superabundance of some resources permits non-exclusivity: it is pointless to offend potentially useful allies by keeping them out of your territory at a time when it is producing far more food than you yourself can eat. That’s especially true of the food staple of mongongo nuts seasonally available in enormous crops, and it’s also true of seasonal crops of wild beans and melons.
Supposedly, anyone from any band in the Nyae Nyae area can hunt anywhere, including outside of his own band’s n!ore. However, if you kill an animal outside your n!ore, you should give a present of its meat if you then encounter a member of the band owning that n!ore. But that freedom of access for hunting doesn’t apply to !Kung hunters from more distant areas. More generally, neighboring !Kung bands can readily obtain permission to use each other’s n!ore for other purposes as well, such as obtaining water, nuts, beans, and melons—but they must first ask for permission, and they incur an obligation to reciprocate later by permitting the hosts to visit the visitors’ n!ore. Fighting is likely to break out if they don’t ask for permission. More distant bands have to be especially careful in requesting permission, and should limit the length of their visit and the number of people visiting. Outsiders who have no recognized connection by blood or marriage to the n!ore’s owners cannot visit at all. Thus, non-exclusive territories certainly don’t mean a free-for-all.
Rights to use land and resources, whether exclusively or non-exclusively, imply the concept of ownership. Who owns the n!ore of a !Kung band? The answer is: the band’s k’ausi, meaning a core group of older people or else one older person descended from the people who have lived in that area for the longest time. But band composition is fluid and changes from day to day, because people often go visit relatives in other n!ores, people make seasonal visits to other n!ores for waterholes or for superabundant food, some people shift bands permanently for various reasons, and a new bridegroom plus his dependents (his old parents, and his first wife and children if he is now taking a second wife) may live with his new wife’s band for about a decade until he and his new wife have given birth to several children. As a result, many !Kung spend more time outside than inside their n!ore. In an average year 13% of the population shifts residence permanently from one camp to another, and 35% of the population is dividing its residential time equally between two or three camps. Under those circumstances the band in the neighboring n!ore consists partly of your own people; they’re not evil subhumans with whom the only inter-group transfers are just two intermarriages over the course of several generations, as in the case of my New Guinea mountain friends. You’re not going to take a hard-line exclusive approach to your resources when many of the “intruders” are actually your siblings and cousins, your adult children, and your aged parents.
Another interesting illustration of non-exclusive territories involves North America’s Great Basin Shoshone, Native Americans belonging to the same language group as the Owens Valley Shoshone whom I already mentioned as illustrating exclusive territories. Their Great Basin cousins differed in land use because of differences between the environments. Whereas Owens Valley land was well watered, suitable for irrigation, and worth defending, the Great Basin is a harsh dry desert, very cold in the winter, with sparse and unpredictable resources and little opportunity for food storage. Human population densities in the Great Basin were only about one person every 16 square miles. The Great Basin Shoshone lived in separate families for much of the year, aggregating in the winter into camps of 5 or 10 families near springs and pine nut groves, and infrequently aggregating into larger groups of up to 15 families for communal hunts of antelopes and rabbits. They did not maintain well-marked territories. Instead, individual families owned specific sites such as pine groves, which could be shared with other families but only by agreement: trespassers who attempted to harvest pine nuts without an agreement were driven off by a barrage of stones. Other plant and animal resources were shared under flexible non-exclusive rights.
Finally, a minimum in recognizing and patrolling territories was achieved by Peru’s Machiguenga Indians and Bolivia’s Siriono Indians in tropical forested areas. At the times that those groups were studied by anthropologists, the Machiguenga were gardeners living at only modest population densities, possibly because a previously denser population had crashed from effects of European-introduced diseases or else killings during the rubber boom, and also because agriculture in their area offered only low yields. The Machiguenga undertook seasonal movements for wild foods and cleared slash-a
nd-burn gardens that produced food for just a few years and weren’t worth fighting over. There were no territories: in theory all resources of all forests and rivers were open to all Machiguengas. In practice, multi-family groups maintained some distance from each other’s home ranges. Similarly, the Siriono Indians studied by Allan Holmberg lived by hunting-gathering and some casual agriculture in bands of 60 to 80 people possessing no defined territories. But if one band came across hunting tracks made by another band, it chose not to hunt in that other band’s area. That is, there was informal mutual avoidance.
Thus, traditional land use ranged over a spectrum, from well-marked territories that were patrolled and defended and from which outsiders were excluded on pain of death, through fuzzy home ranges without clear boundaries and which outsiders could use by mutual agreement, to home areas kept separate just by informal mutual avoidance. No traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern Americans or European Union citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere within the U.S. or European Union and can travel in many other countries as well merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a border passport control officer. (Of course the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack has pushed Americans back towards a traditional suspicion of strangers and has resulted in restrictions on free travel, such as no-fly lists and airport security checks.) But one could also argue that our modern system of relatively open access is an upscale extension of traditional access rights and restrictions. Traditional peoples, living in societies of a few hundred individuals, obtain access to others’ lands by being known individually, by having individual relationships there, and by asking permission individually. In our societies of hundreds of millions, our definition of “relationship” is extended to any citizen of our state or of a friendly state, and the asking of permission is formalized and granted en masse by means of passports and visas.