Aside from the vivid but brief qualitative introduction to people from two African forager societies in Chapter 2, I’ve been trying to identify patterns of moral behavior through representative statistics wherever possible. To provide now a richer and more culturally distinct impression of what moral life is like in several of today’s LPA moral communities, I’ll be turning in the next several chapters to the words of some of the individuals concerned as I develop additional ideas about their moral communities and about how our capacities for social conformity and self-sacrificial generosity could have evolved in the Late Pleistocene.
We’ve already met with Colin Turnbull’s vivid account of the meat-cheater Cephu’s shaming by his group,1 but the Mbuti Pygmies can’t really qualify as an LPA foraging society because they have Bantu partners who are tribal farmers—obviously a Pleistocene impossibility—and they regularly trade wild meat for domesticated grain. I chose to quote from Turnbull because his description of a Pygmy moral community in action was truly exceptional.
As a major founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim himself2 never did any fieldwork at all, and he made little reference to indigenous people as individuals. However, he certainly captured the collective side of social life and social control in these small moral communities when he described the tyranny of public opinion, which produces an often-fearful social conformity that goes with living in an intimate and potentially aggressive band of hunter-gatherers. Durkheim gained his insights vicariously from reading classical early ethnographies that described Australian Aborigines,3 and he read them well. Most critiques of Durkheim’s work have suggested that his “functionalist” image of small societies and their integration was seriously “beautified”—which surely it was in the absence of any serious emphasis on conflict4—but not that his reading of the ethnography and these social dynamics was incorrect.
Basically, my own hunter-gatherer insights, like Durkheim’s, are vicarious. The only pure foragers I’ve studied personally are wild chimpanzees, which are of great help in doing evolutionary analysis but obviously lack a moral life. However, in the 1960s the isolated nonliterate Navajos I studied in the field had moved only a few generations from their foraging roots. They continued their egalitarian worldview very strongly,5 with an emphasis on generosity and a condemnation of stinginess that were striking. The more traditional pastoralist Navajos I worked with were at least seminomadic and egalitarian, even if they were not “pure” foragers.
The quasi-tribal Serbian pastoralist-agriculturalists I lived with in an isolated mountain valley in Montenegro for several years were obviously of quite a different ethnographic type,6 yet as we’ve seen, their systems of indirect reciprocity bore some signal similarities to those of hunter-gatherers, and even after a century and a half of living mostly under a despotic tribal “state,” their egalitarian ethos was still quite evident. Spending two years in one small settlement of Upper Morača Tribe also allowed me the experience of living long term in a minuscule “Durkheimian” moral community as a speaker of the native language, and this background, too, was invaluable.
If I were obliged to single out just one LPA foraging society to exemplify the moral life of all such societies, I’d simply have to go with the one that was best described ethnographically. That said, I’d be hard pressed to choose between the Kalahari-dwelling Bushmen, including the !Kung, the !Ko, and the G/wi, and a pair of Inuit-speaking groups from central Canada called the Netsilik and the Utku.7 These two sets of cultures have ethnographies that are exceptional in their portrayal of moral life, and fortunately I don’t have to make a choice. We’ll use them both in this chapter.
This rich ethnography needs some introduction. The loquacious !Kung have been vividly described by author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and by professional anthropologists Richard Lee, Polly Wiessner, Pat Draper,8 and by many others, one of whom, anthropologist Marjorie Shostak, recorded the life history of Nisa—a !Kung woman whose story is somewhat atypical because Nisa has an unusually non-monogamous love life.9 She also seems quite concerned with issues of generosity and sharing for, as Nisa presents herself to Shostak, Nisa often appears to be not only quite stingy, but also equally demanding of generosity on the part of others.
As we’ll see, these feelings of jealousy over food may have been exacerbated when Nisa was, with great resistance, being weaned. That possibility noted, the scrappy Nisa is far from being an immoralist in her own !Kung culture, and even though her autobiography may be somewhat atypical, it provides a special and even unique window into Bushman life that will augment our qualitative analysis well, here and in Chapter 10.
In central Canada, the Netsilik Eskimos had the major advantage of being studied not long after the time of contact by an anthropologically sophisticated Danish explorer named Knud Rasmussen, and of being restudied just as they were giving up their traditional nomadic way of life by Asen Balikci,10 an ethnographer who also made a very fine and now classic series of films on these seal hunters. In addition, the Utku Inuit-speakers, who live in Back River and are regional neighbors of the Netsilik, were studied by my old friend Jean Briggs,11 who left Massachusetts for the Arctic in the 1960s just as I was beginning my graduate studies. She was adopted into an Utku family, the family of the carefully aggressive Inuttiaq, and her intimate description of Utku emotions and morals is remarkable. So is the fact that eventually she found herself at the center of a moral crisis. In Never in Anger Briggs recounts how she was ostracized for months by members of her host culture, and later this will provide us with a unique glimpse into indigenous social control—from the perspective of a sensitive “deviant” from an alien culture who had seriously violated the Utku code with respect to emotional self-control.
Briggs’s scientific interest was not in ostracism, and certainly not her own ostracism, but in how children were socialized. Her studies of the Utku and later another Inuit-speaking group,12 far to the northeast in Cumberland Sound, provide an excellent idea of how Inuit societies lovingly nurture their young offspring while they are internalizing the group’s rules and values, even as they also use hypothetical-situation moral dilemmas to pose cruel and stressful choices for these same small children.
Another reason I have chosen to treat the quite disparate Kalahari Bushmen and Arctic Inuit speakers in tandem is that these rich ethnographies usefully showcase commonalities in hunter-gatherer moral life that prevail in spite of obvious and enormous environmental differences. Specifically, the Bushmen live in a hot and seasonally quite arid environment, with the bulk of their calories coming from plant foods even though nutritionally (and culturally) hunting is very important to them, whereas the Inuit are obliged to eat mostly seal blubber and caribou meat (they prefer the blubber) along with seasonal fish, even though a few plant foods are available in the stomachs of herbivorous prey. These differences are profound. Yet, as we’ll see, the moral feelings, styles of group sanctioning, and efforts to control conflicts are in many ways very similar. It all begins with having an evolved conscience, which facilitates the internalization of values and makes people think about both themselves and others in terms of virtuous right—and shameful wrong.
The process of absorbing the values and rules of a culture is subtle, and usually it’s all but invisible to observers—but it is important nonetheless. In considering the individual internalization of societal rules, we need to reconsider here several names. One is sociological theorist Talcott Parsons,13 who in portraying society functionally, as a system in equilibrium, followed Durkheim in seeing individuals as being deeply and all but automatically identified with their cultures and their group’s rules. Parsons saw the individual internalization of values as an important element in providing cultural continuity for social groups.
Another name is that of the well-known economist Herbert Simon. Basically, in his terms being culturally “docile” means that an individual can and does readily take on any behavior offered by the culture. As we’ve seen in Chapter 3, Simon came up with the idea that being innately good at learning the culture is so individually adaptive that it could actually be “subsidizing” some altruism.14 Economist Herb Gintis has advanced these concepts through a modern evolutionary economics approach that demonstrates the interaction of both genes and culture,15 and he has tied Simon’s piggybacking model directly to moral internalization.
In effect, both Parsons and Gintis are talking about one very basic conscience function, namely, the personal absorption of rules and values. And this leads to the conformist tendencies in humans that were discussed long ago by biologist Charles Waddington and more recently by psychologist Donald T. Campbell.16 Nothing could be more important for perpetuating the moralized kind of social life that humans lead, and children begin to learn about these rules early in life.
Our qualitative portrait of LPA moral internalization will begin with some suggestive if indirect evidence for hunter-gatherers’ rule-internalization—something that ethnographers in the field don’t usually even think about because they already have their hands full describing just the main adult social and subsistence patterns they meet with. Child-rearing is where this all begins, and the good news is that at least a few hunter-gatherer ethnographers have focused on children and the process of moral socialization. Still more fortunately, two of the best happen to have studied children among Bushmen and Inuit speakers, respectively, with attention to the details of internalization.
With respect to moral socialization, LPA foragers have benefited mainly from Briggs’s long-term, intensive studies of Eskimo children, and from Pat Draper’s investigations with the Bushmen. In laboratory settings, however, the moral development of children in modern societies has in fact been studied intensively by various scholars over the past several decades,17 and with great success, following the pioneering work of psychologist Jerome Kagan.18 And because the responses studied in modern children are innate, they apply as well to hunter-gatherer children because we all share the same genes.
The further internalization that takes place in adults is still largely taken for granted by scholars, even though the universal moralistic preaching in favor of altruism that Campbell discussed for early civilizations suggests that this is a human universal.19 I’ve already documented such adult-level preaching statistically for LPA foragers, but here some more direct and personal evidence of moral internalization will be useful.
For adults, probably the best one piece of evidence I’m aware of comes not from the usual ethnographic generalizations, which basically take internalization for granted, but from anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s active participation in an indigenous activity.20 The North American Cree do not quite qualify as LPA foragers because they were so heavily involved in the fur trade before they were studied, but the story I’m about to quote strikes me as typical, and it provides a major hint about how deeply-internalized altruistic giving can be among hunters who are all alone, out in the field.
Leacock accompanies her informant Thomas on a hunting trip, and while they are far afield they encounter two men, known to them slightly, who are very hungry. Thomas gives these acquaintances all of his flour and lard, and Leacock’s quoted description makes clear that Thomas spoke considerable English:
This meant returning to the post sooner than he had planned, thereby reducing his possible catch of furs. I probed to see whether there was some slight annoyance or reluctance involved, or at least some expectation of a return at some later date. This was one of the very rare times Thomas lost patience with me, and he said with deep, if suppressed anger, “suppose now, not to give them flour, lard—just dead inside.” More revealing than the incident itself were the finality of his tone and the inference of my utter inhumanity in raising questions about his action.21
Mention of a “dead” feeling suggests deep internalization, and because this was a matter of being generous to mere acquaintances, we may assume that the generosity was extrafamilial. In a similar Hadza case, James Stephenson, an adventurous New York landscape architect who travels to northern Tanzania to hunt with the Hadza for extended periods, reports that one time a hungry pair of strangers were met hunting far out in the bush and, again, the quite-costly sharing seemed to be automatic and deeply ingrained.22 The Hadza are, in fact, LPA foragers, and I’m mentioning this anecdote, published by a nonethnographer, because it fits with what Leacock told us, and because normally such descriptions don’t find their way into standard ethnographies. I wish they did.
In searching my ever-growing coded database for additional direct evidence of adult values internalization, I found nothing to closely parallel these two very revealing generosity anecdotes. However, just after the turn of the twentieth century Edward Westermarck, a Finnish sociologist who was a sensitive analyst of moral emotions and who made adept use of world ethnography,23 spoke of internalization without using the word. He gave a number of examples from sedentary tribal societies of people identifying emotionally and deeply with the customs of their tribal groups, and he also gave one example from an LPA forager group, which I shall quote here: “Mr. Howitt once said to a young Australian native with whom he was speaking about the food prohibited during initiation, ‘But if you were hungry and caught a female opossum, you might eat it if the old men were not here.’ The youth replied, ‘I could not do that; it would not be right’; and he could give no other reason other than that it would be wrong to disregard the customs of his people.”24
These three anecdotes are at least suggestive. In fact, Leacock’s and Stephenson’s accounts have a ring of authenticity that speaks convincingly, to me, of extrafamilial generosity’s being deeply ingrained in the Cree and the Hadza. My qualification to make such a judgment comes from the hundreds and surely thousands of hours I’ve spent reading other people’s hunter-gatherer ethnographies and also from the time I’ve spent with Navajos and Serbs as nonforagers who still live in small, cooperative communities. I can only wish that such revealing case histories were available in all of the several hundred ethnographic reports I have covered.
With respect to Howitt’s anecdote, which does not relate to generosity, my ethnographic intuitions tell me that he was not necessarily getting a full account of what was going on. With respect to the youth’s breaking an important food taboo when cultural enforcers (the old men) were absent, there’s another enforcement agency that might well have been operative. We’ve seen that supernatural sanctions are widely believed in by LPA foragers, and it’s likely that clandestinely eating a proscribed “possum” would be noted by such forces. If so, in his mind he—or his entire group—might be visited with some kind of dire punishment. Belief in supernatural sanctioning can aid in the internalization of rules.
Of course, as a very different kind of evidence we have the universal group-level sharing patterns that are routinized with respect to large game. People engage in them by habit, and with little real conflict, precisely because they have internalized the values and rules involved. There’s also the fact that even the most prolific hunters seem to enjoy participating in these systems—and basically seem to give up their carcasses without too much ambivalence even though once in a long while cheating obtains. Even more telling is that injured or disabled band members are assisted by unrelated band members through their meat contributions on the basis of a group ethos that calls for helping those in need. As we’ll be seeing in Chapter 11, such contingent help is given in part on the basis of past generous behavior.
On the whole, internalization effects seem to be rather subtle, and they’re quite difficult to separate from other agencies of motivation involved with meat-sharing, such as apprehension about seeming stingy, which is based on reputational concerns and in extreme cases on fear of active punishment. For instance, the Cree trapper Thomas surely knew that if he turned down the pair of hungry men, they might “bad-mouth” him to people he knew and thereby damage his reputation as a properly generous man. At the same time, his costly generosity might very well be mentioned when they arrived back in their camp, and through the exchange of favorable gossip he might gain in his public esteem in his own camp. But neither of these socially expedient personal considerations would account for the “dead” feeling he mentioned with such gravity. He obviously had absorbed his culture’s values about sharing and in fact had internalized them so deeply that being selfish was unthinkable.
The depth of emotions that accompanies internalization has also been emphasized by Pat Draper, one of the earlier Bushman scholars. Draper’s account of a young !Kung woman who felt herself to have been shamed helps us to understand how shame feelings are involved with the internalization of values and rules:
When an individual runs afoul of some norm and the sentiment of the camp is against him, he reacts in a way that seems extreme to a Western observer. Further, the way the wrongdoer reacts to the frustration of criticism suggests that the social norms are very well internalized by the individual. For example, a young woman, N!uhka, about seventeen years old and unmarried, had insulted her father. Seventeen years of age is late to be still unmarried in this society, and her father often talked with her and with relatives about eligible men. She was rebellious and uninterested in the older men who were named. (She was also having a good time flirting with the youths in camp who were her age-mates but judged too young to make good husbands.) In a flippant way she cursed her father. He reprimanded her and immediately other tongues took up a shocked chorus. . . .
N!uhka was furious but also shamed by the public outcry. Her reaction took this form: she grabbed her blanket, stomped out of the camp off to a lone tree about seventy yards from the circle of huts. There she sat all day, in the shade of the tree, with a blanket over her head and completely covering her body. This was full-scale Bushman sulk. She was angry but did not further release her anger apart from this gesture of withdrawal. She kept her anger inside, incidentally at some personal cost, for that day the temperature in the shade was 105 degrees Fahrenheit—without a blanket.25
My own interest in moral socialization goes back to the beginning of my life as an academic, and it involves what might be called an anthropological tragedy as far as my earlier professional career trajectory was concerned. For sedentary nonliterate people who are tribal, as opposed to foragers, the moral socialization of children has been a focus in a small group of earlier tribal or peasant ethnographies,26 and I would have contributed to this body of work had it not been for a type of mishap that sometimes catches up with ethnographers as they try to do fieldwork under exotic and politically tricky circumstances.
In 1972, I completed a Ph.D. dissertation that was based on collecting 10,000-plus definitions of 256 morally based cue words, which I had elicited from forty Serbian friends and neighbors in Upper Morača Tribe.27 In 1975, I returned to Montenegro to conduct similar interviews with children of different ages in order to study the stages at which these moral concepts became partially or fully articulated. Unfortunately, just as I was returning to the field, a colleague from a large American university was accused of seriously abusing his research privileges elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, and I was forbidden to begin this fieldwork in Montenegro. This was a real shock, but the result was that I eventually turned my interests to the study of wild chimpanzees—a decision I have never regretted, even though I still wonder what I might have learned about the formative Serbian conscience and the internalization of values and rules.
LPA hunter-gatherers everywhere are deeply moralistic about their rules of conduct, which is a good general way of demonstrating that they have internalized the underlying values. But how, exactly, did N!uhka develop into a Kalahari person of such moral sensitivity? When laboratory scientists working with children in our own culture demonstrate experimentally when and how rule internalization takes place and a conscience begins to form,28 I believe they are tapping into a universal aspect of moral life that is far more difficult to document ethnographically than experimentally.
At about two years of age our children in America not only begin to recognize themselves in mirrors, but they also start to blush with embarrassment and experience feelings of shame.29 Couple these patterns with tendencies to help others in need, which appear in the same age range or earlier,30 and we’re extremely well evolved to become both extrafamilially generous and moral—as long as an appropriate cultural environment is present. These ingrained developmental windows are so predictable that surely LPA foragers are dealing with the same developmental potential.
We also may assume, however, that some cultural diversity exists in how their children are morally socialized. In this respect, in studying Inuit moral socialization, Briggs’s role was that of careful describer, not experimenter, and a striking finding she made was that the Inuit go out of their way to force children to think very early about serious moral problems they’ll be facing later in life. In fact, they do this very frequently, and in our eyes they do so rather cruelly, through stressful teasing.
What they do is to pose hypothetical moral dilemmas fully as nasty as the ones used by Harvard philosophers in their research on the responses of adults, whose MRIs they are monitoring. Two contrasting runaway-trolley dilemmas have been designed to produce different degrees of psychological stress that will light up different areas of the brain depending on whether the fat man has to be pushed off the bridge to his death actively or the subject merely is throwing a switch to stop the trolley and save five lives by sacrificing one.31 The dilemmas studied by Briggs are totally natural, and in this context one of her research articles is titled “Why Don’t You Kill Your Baby Brother? The Dynamics of Peace in Canadian Inuit Camps.”32 Confronting children shockingly with their own emotions, including antisocial emotions, takes place in various parts of the far-flung Arctic, so this is not just a local anomaly. Briggs says:
These games are small exchanges, spontaneous in occurrence but highly stereotyped in form, between a child and one or more other people, who may be older children or adults of either sex. Sometimes the older person teases the child in some standardized way: “Where’s your [absent] daddy?” “Whose child are you?” “Do you wrongly imagine you’re lovable?” “Shall I adopt you?” “Shall I hit your nasty old mother?” At other times the game consists in tempting the child to engage in some disvalued behavior: “Don’t tell your sister you have that candy; it’s the last one; eat it all yourself.” There are a great many such games; they are played all the time by everybody and a very high proportion of interactions with small children take this form. Most interesting is the fact that the games occur with only minor variations in Inuit groups that have no contact with one another, and their forms remain stable over generations. . . . By making conflicts salient to children, they help to create a sense of danger and, ultimately, commitment to the values.33
Commitment to values means internalization, and Briggs makes clear how this emotionally based internalization of values and rules of behavior prepares the Inuit child for a conformative social life as an adult:
All these playful messages are delivered in a form that is extremely vivid, personal, and larger than life, and that makes it easy for children to see the problems posed for them by their contradictory feelings, to perceive emotionally the fatal consequences of a wrong choice of behavior, and to feel that since they have “bad” feelings, they are themselves vulnerable to the sanctions illustrated for them. To be sure, at one level the medium of the message is just a game, and therefore a cathartic way of coping with the contradictions that trouble us in real life. But at the same time, at another level, a doubt is engendered as to whether it really is a game, and the dangerous possibility that it might not be—the resulting fear—must make children try harder to conform than they might do if they did not feel themselves vulnerable to sanction.34
In Briggs’s opinion internalization is about the interplay of conflicting emotions:
Moreover, the values themselves become emotionally charged as a result of the threats that surround them. A child who is asked, “Why don’t you die so I can have your shirt?” may start to value the shirt and keeping it, more; and on the other hand, s/he may come to place a high value on giving, because it is difficult to give away something one wants to keep. And when s/he gives—the shirt or something else—the recipient too will value the gift because s/he knows it was hard to make. Similarly, the child who is asked, “Why don’t you kill your baby brother?” may love more strongly, and may value loving more, to compensate for the dislike s/he is made aware of feeling, along with his/her affection.35
This clinical analysis accords with something we know from common sense. Humans are set up to be ambivalent when it comes to many of the social choices we make.36 On one side there will always be our usefully egoistic selfish tendencies, and on the other there will be our altruistic or generous impulses, which also can advance our fitness because altruism and sympathy are valued by our peers. The conscience helps us to resolve such dilemmas in ways that are socially acceptable, and these Inuit parents seem to be deliberately “exercising” the consciences of their children to make morally socialized adults out of them. This was particularly the case with the Inuit Briggs studied in Cumberland Sound.
Deliberately and stressfully subjecting children to nasty hypothetical dilemmas is not universal among foraging nomads, but as we’ll see with Nisa, everyday life also creates real moral dilemmas that can involve Kalahari children similarly. There’s also Briggs’s later, highly detailed case study of Chubby Maata,37 a three-year-old Inuit child in the eastern Arctic, which involved six months of intensive observation. In this distant settlement morally instructive “teasing” was a routine and frequent aspect of socialization, more so than with the Utku.
Such well-focused studies are lacking for other LPA hunter-gatherers, but this is not because hunter-gatherer childhood has been totally neglected. Recently, a large edited academic volume, Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods,38 came out showcasing a wide variety of studies. However, after a century of serious neglect of moral socialization, these more recent interests have been in areas such as the age at which children begin to forage, what patterns of breastfeeding and weaning prevail, who act as substitute parents, maternal availability, children’s play, or how children conceive of death. These are all useful and fascinating topics, but stages of moral development or, more specifically, the internalization of rules and values remains to be further investigated in its own right.
Melvin Konner, who is both an anthropologist and a medical doctor, has written a still heftier recent volume on The Evolution of Childhood,39 and because he is a member of the sizable cadre of scholars who early on studied the !Kung Bushmen, he uses hunter-gatherer information where it is available. He discusses Jean Piaget’s pioneering work on how Swiss children go through stages in understanding rules, and he also considers physical punishment. His conclusion is that, in general, people who are egalitarian use punishment far less, whereas people who are hierarchical, or who practice warfare, use it more. The first definitely applies to LPA foragers, for they’re always egalitarian; with them a warfare level of intergroup conflict seems to have been highly optional, at least under recent Holocene conditions. Thus, when children of most egalitarian foragers internalize rules, this is likely to take place mostly through gentle, firm guidance, rather than by anything like regular or severe use of the rod.
We must assume, in the absence of plentiful data, that foragers in different culture areas are quite diverse in some aspects of their child-rearing strategies, and later in this chapter we’ll see how !Kung parents handle a real-life weaning problem. But at the same time, I emphasize that adults’ socialization of their children will always be geared to mesh with the aforementioned inborn stages of moral development and the rule internalization they make possible.
Here are some educated guesses, then, about how rules become internalized among all LPA foragers. First, as children respond to their caretakers, they spontaneously come to understand that certain behaviors are approved and others disapproved. Physical punishment may be unnecessary, but sometimes, as we’ll see with the !Kung, it’s used when reasoning, scaring, and shaming won’t do the job. Second, caretakers may deliberately inculcate rules and values, keying their manipulations to the child’s readiness to learn. And because infants are so early in developing spontaneous tendencies to help others in need, in theory teaching them to share generously could show major results from quite an early age. However, in our own culture—in spite of this early innate readiness, which in terms of altruistic perspective taking leads to simple acts of spontaneous helpfulness—Konner tells us that socially at age three, children tend to hoard their possessions; only at age five do they become much more prone to share.40 It would be interesting to see if the timing is different among foragers, whose special needs to share widely in everyday life may well make their socialization practices differ from ours.
Comparable in important ways to the Inuit-wide, teasing style of moral confrontation is a real-life problem of triage that involved Nisa, as a Kalahari child who was well past being an infant. Nisa’s active struggle to avoid being weaned as the birth of a younger sibling approaches is all but epic, and it provides, I think, a major clue as to how the !Kung Bushmen introduce their children to social control—and to how rules of conduct are internalized in that culture. And eventually this involved her in a much larger dilemma that was faced by her mother.
As a still-nursing child Nisa was very persistent as weaning began, and as a result she seemed to be highly ambivalent about her future sibling:41
I remember when my mother was pregnant with Kumsa. I was still small and I asked, “Mommy, that baby inside you . . . when that baby is born, will it come out from your belly button? Will the baby grow and grow until Daddy breaks open your stomach with a knife and takes my little sibling out?” She said, “No, it won’t come out that way. When you give birth, a baby comes from here,” and she pointed to her genitals. Then she said, “And after he is born, you can carry your little sibling around.” I said, “Yes, I’ll carry him!”
Later, I asked, “Won’t you help me and let me nurse?” She said, “You can’t nurse any longer. If you do, you’ll die.” I left her and went and played by myself for a while. When I came back, I asked to nurse again but she still wouldn’t let me. She took some paste made from the dch’a root and rubbed it on her nipple. When I tasted it, I told her it was bitter.
It was at this point that physical punishment entered the picture:
When mother was pregnant with Kumsa, I was always crying. I wanted to nurse! Once, when we were living in the bush and away from other people, I was especially full of tears. I cried all the time. That was when my father said he was going to beat me to death; I was too full of tears and too full of crying. He had a big branch in his hand when he grabbed me, but he didn’t hit me; he was only trying to frighten me. I cried out, “Mommy, come help me! Mommy! Come! Help me!” When my mother came, she said, “No, Gau, you are a man. If you hit Nisa you will put sickness into her and she will become very sick. Now, leave her alone. I’ll hit her if it’s necessary. My arm doesn’t have the power to make her sick; your arm, a man’s arm, does.”
When I finally stopped crying, my throat was full of pain. All the tears had hurt my throat. Another time, my father took me and left me alone in the bush. We had left one village and were moving to another and had stopped along the way to sleep. As soon as night sat, I started to cry. I cried and cried and cried. My father hit me, but I kept crying. I probably would have cried the whole night, but finally, he got up and said, “I’m taking you and leaving you out in the bush for the hyenas to kill. What kind of child are you? If you nurse your sibling’s milk, you’ll die!” He picked me up, carried me away from camp and set me down in the bush. He shouted, “Hyenas! There’s meat over here. . . . Hyenas! Come and take this meat!” Then he turned and started to walk back to the village.
After he left, I was so afraid! I started to run and, crying, I ran past him. Still crying, I ran back to my mother and lay down beside her. When my father came back, he said, “Today, I’m really going to make you shit! You can see your mother’s stomach is huge, yet you still want to nurse.” I started to cry again and cried and cried; then I was quiet again and lay down. My father said, “Good, lie there quietly. Tomorrow, I’ll kill a guinea fowl for you to eat.”
Nisa’s father hoped this would do the trick, but it didn’t: “The next day, he went hunting and killed a guinea fowl. When he came back, he cooked it for me and I ate and ate and ate. But when I was finished, I said I wanted to take my mother’s nipple again. My father grabbed a strap and started to hit me, ‘Nisa, have you no sense? Can’t you understand? Leave your mother’s chest alone!’ And I began to cry again.”42
What happened soon after is reminiscent of Inuit use of hypotheticals to ground children in thinking about major and stressful moral dilemmas, except that Nisa’s dilemma was far from being merely hypothetical. Her mother was contemplating infanticide right after the younger sibling’s birth, and rather than shielding little Nisa, she involved her very directly:
Mother’s stomach grew very large. The first labor pains came at night and stayed with her until dawn. That morning, everyone went gathering. Mother and I stayed behind. We sat together for a while, then I went and played with the other children. Later, I came back and ate the nuts she had cracked for me. She got up and started to get ready. I said, “Mommy, let’s go to the water well, I’m thirsty.” She said, “Uhn, uhn, I’m going to gather some mongongo nuts.” I told the children that I was going and we left; there were no other adults around.
We walked a short way, then she sat down by the base of a large nehn tree, leaned back against it, and little Kumsa was born. At first, I just stood there; then I sat down and watched. I thought, “Is that the way it’s done? You just sit like that and that’s where the baby comes out? Am I also like that?” Did I have any understanding of things?”
Many hunter-gatherers practice infanticide, and the way they deal with this act morally is to dispose of the infant immediately, before they consider it a human being. In this respect, Nisa was in for a frightening surprise:
After he was born, he lay there, crying. I greeted him, “Ho, ho, my baby brother! Ho, ho, I have a little brother! Some day we’ll play together.” But my mother said, “What do you think this thing is? Why are you talking to it like that? Now, get up and go back to the village and bring me my digging stick.” I said, “What are you going to dig?” She said, “A hole. I’m going to dig a hole so I can bury the baby. Then you, Nisa, will be able to nurse again.” I refused. “My baby brother? My little brother? Mommy, he’s my brother! Pick him up and carry him back to the village. I don’t want to nurse!” Then I said, “I’ll tell Daddy when he comes home!” She said, “You won’t tell him. Now, run back and bring me my digging stick. I’ll bury him so you can nurse again. You’re much too thin.” I didn’t want to go and started to cry. I sat there, my tears falling, crying and crying. But she told me to go, saying she wanted my bones to be strong. So, I left and went back to the village, crying as I walked.
Nisa was involved in a real-life dilemma, from which she was not shielded, and she was now bonded with her younger sibling:
I was still crying when I arrived. I went to the hut and got her digging stick. My mother’s younger sister had just arrived home from the nut groves. She put the mongongo nuts she had gathered into a pile near her hut and sat down. Then she began roasting them. When she saw me, she said, “Nisa, what’s wrong? Where’s your mother?” I said, “By the nehn tree way out there. That’s where we went together and where she just now gave birth to a baby. She told me to come back and get her digging stick so she could . . . bury him! This is terrible!” and I started to cry again. Then I added, “When I greeted him and called him ‘my little brother’ she told me not to. What she wants to do is bad. . . . That’s why I’m crying. Now I have to bring this digging stick to her!”
My mother’s sister said, “Oooo . . . people! This Chuko, she’s certainly a bad one to be talking like that. And she’s out there alone with the baby! No matter what it is—a boy or a girl—she should keep it.” I said, “Yes, he’s a little boy with a little penis just resting there at the bottom of his stomach.” She said, “Mother! Let’s go! Let’s go and talk to her. When I get there I’ll cut his umbilical cord and carry him back.”
I left the digging stick behind and we ran to where my mother was still sitting, waiting for me. Perhaps she had already changed her mind, because, when we got there, she said, “Nisa, because you were crying like that, I’ll keep the baby and carry him back with me.” My aunt went over to Kumsa lying beside my mother and said, “Chuko, were you trying to split your face into pieces? You can see what a big boy you gave birth to, yet you wanted Nisa to bring back your digging stick? You wanted to bury this great big baby? Your own father worked to feed you and keep you alive. This child’s father would surely have killed you if you had buried his little boy. You must have no sense, wanting to kill such a nice big baby.”
My aunt cut his umbilical cord, wiped him off, put him into her kaross, and carried him back to the village. Mother soon got up and followed, shamed by her sister’s talk. Finally she said, “Can’t you understand? Nisa is still a little child. My heart’s not happy that she hasn’t any milk to drink. Her body is weak. I want her bones to grow strong.” But my aunt said, “When Gau hears about this, he’ll beat you. A grown woman with one child following after another so nicely, doesn’t behave like this.” When we arrived back in the village, my mother took the baby and lay down.
Bushmen and other foragers may not use hypothetical moral dilemmas systematically to socialize small children as the Inuit do. But children who live in such intimate groups, where so little remains private, are still likely to be emotionally involved in serious real-life moral dilemmas that involve them directly or indirectly. I suggest that this provides a universal means of helping children to internalize their group’s values and apply these values to everyday situations, and that all the Inuit teasing with “hypotheticals” is merely a brilliant—if stressful—way of manipulating and intensifying this natural learning process.
After this, Nisa’s competitive desire to continue nursing was dealt with in terms of rules she was supposed to follow, but her ambivalence seems to have continued unabated:
After Kumsa was born, I sometimes just played by myself. I’d take the big kaross and lie down in it. I’d think, “Oh, I’m a child playing all alone. Where could I possibly go by myself?” Then I’d sit up and say, “Mommy, take my little brother from your kaross and let me play with him.” But whenever she did, I hit him and made him cry. Even though he was still a little baby, I hit him. Then my mother would say, “You still want to nurse, but I won’t let you. When Kumsa wants to, I’ll let him. But whenever you want to, I’ll cover my breasts with my hand and you’ll feel ashamed.”
Here we have an explicit mentioning of shame, which means that the mother is linking rules of conduct with moral feelings. This obviously contributes to Nisa’s moral socialization. It seems likely that with hunter-gatherers more generally, a small child’s rule internalization may often first begin just with a sensitive but highly intuitive awareness of parental approval versus disapproval of specific acts in self and others. Later the process becomes engaged with manipulative verbal instructions as to how to behave and references to impropriety and shamefulness.
We must not allow Nisa’s complaint-oriented autobiographical style to obscure the fact that just as Briggs suggests, Nisa eventually was able to face this moral dilemma of sibling rivalry and resolve it in the light of internalized values that favored being generous within the family. Indeed, as adults she and her younger brother, Kumsa, were quite close. But the childish dilemma she faced was real, not hypothetical, and it seems to have enabled her to work through a problem arising from her own ambivalence and behave eventually in a socially acceptable way. This took place in a society in which both nepotistic and altruistic generosity were openly and pointedly praised, and as Nisa internalized these values, this likely helped her to get past what seems to have been a nearly traumatic experience.
I believe that all hunter-gatherer societies offer such learning experiences, not only in the real-life situations children are involved with, but also in those they merely observe. What the Inuit whom Briggs studied in Cumberland Sound have done is to not leave this up to chance. And the practice would appear to be widespread in the Arctic. Children are systematically exposed to life’s typical stressful moral dilemmas, and often hypothetically, as a training ground that helps to turn them into adults who have internalized the values of their groups.
The habit of discussing innate dispositions and culture as separate entities goes back to Darwin and even beyond, and this can be useful analytically. However, as anthropologist William Durham43 has nicely exemplified, behaviors ranging all the way from lactose tolerance to incest prohibitions44 can be better understood as the product of both in combination, and his highly detailed work on incest will come to the fore in the next chapter.
The egalitarian syndrome that contextualizes the cultural learning of LPA foragers has been in place long enough for an ever-improving fit to develop between useful cultural practices, which are shaped by moral communities, and the useful genetic predispositions that make such practices very easy to learn. This can be readily assumed—even though for humans scientists can tell us very little about behavior genes per se. Thus, whenever we find a behavior that is universal among the fifty foraging societies I have studied, we can appropriately ask if it is likely to have some substantial (if less than wholly “determinative”) genetic preparation.45
One rule of thumb might be that if a behavior is universal, and if it also goes back to antecedents reconstructed for Ancestral Pan, and if its adaptive benefits to individuals can be explained logically, it’s likely to be rather well prepared by genes. This is true of early language acquisition, and likewise there are the predictable stages of moral development we have seen for children. Ancient predispositions at least include a child’s using its mother as a behavioral model, along with a primitive capacity for self-recognition, innately based dominance and submission tendencies, and also a strong resentment of being dominated. For instance, as children today on playgrounds we readily learn to not only form pecking orders but also actively join in subordinate coalitions to work against the dominance of powerful individuals, and sometimes we pick on newcomers. I remember this well.
Learning to follow rules is something else that we readily learn when our development reaches a certain point, and this, too, was true of Ancestral Pan. Then there are the aforementioned human stages of moral readiness that prepare infants and small children to color with embarrassment and blush with shame and later help them to learn complex rules of conduct through playing children’s games. Mel Konner believes that very significant rule learning comes through these children’s games, as studied by Piaget,46 and such games appear to be universal. In fact, young apes I’ve watched spend a lot of their time play-fighting, which teaches them how to express and control their aggressions. And their mothers impose “rules” on them such as not playing too roughly.
The games of human children all have rules, even though the specific games and rules vary greatly from culture to culture. And from our own earlier experiences on the playground, we know that as games are learned, children make newcomers aware of rules and deliberately instruct novices or those who inadvertently break them.
I remember as a lightly built first-grader being taken by my mother (who knew nothing about the game) to the grassy Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to join a regular Sunday morning tackle football game that was presided over by one of the boy’s fathers. Having never heard of football, and being completely untutored in its rules, I took one look and assumed that the point of the game was to enter a chaotic rough and tumble competition and gain possession of the ball. I proceeded to compete in this way, and at the end of the first play I illegally wrestled the ball away from the downed ball carrier. I was removed from the game diplomatically, but nonetheless I had the distinct sense that I was being treated as a social pariah. And I was, in fact, being excluded, if not aggressively ostracized. The feeling of suddenly discovering that I was a social deviant who flagrantly went against the rules that everyone else was following haunts me to this day, even though a few years later I did learn the rules and came to love the game of football.
In their play, children learn a great deal about things like how to apply their dominance and submission tendencies and how to form political alliances. Sometimes they behave this way to enhance their own power, but sometimes they form coalitions to punish deviance in the form of cheating or bullying. Thus, games turn children’s groups into minimoral communities that provide learning experiences in dealing with adult rules of conduct. The internalization of rules appears not to end with childhood. Adults’ active and universal verbal amplification of altruism, which we have discussed at some length, works off of very much the same innate tendencies. It reinforces earlier teachings in favor of being generous, and participation in the punishment of behaviors like stealing, cheating, and bullying has a reinforcing effect.
When Cephu was being confronted and went to sit down as usual by the fire, the Mbuti hunters who faced him down knew exactly what they were doing when they denied this cheater his customary place. They were acting as contributing members of a punishing group, and their feelings about having been cheated were especially strong because the rules for fair meat-sharing were embedded so deeply in people’s psyches. Cephu’s meat-cheating went against a well-learned and strongly believed in sharing ethic that was held by all band members, and the result was systematic collective shaming and a real threat of banishment.
In this type of experience it is quite difficult to separate out the genetic preparations and the cultural input, for the two are closely intertwined. But because the cultural glove fits the genetic hand so well, social selection was able to have consistent effects on both group social life and gene pools over many generations and, in fact, over scores of millennia.