Morality’s a group affair, but often individuals take the lead in exerting social pressure, and, when that doesn’t work, in initiating more assertive sanctions against deviants. Critical to this process is talking, and gossip’s a special kind of talking. We’re going to talk a lot about gossip here, for it’s because of language and gossiping that foraging bands are so likely to exhibit the universal, well-developed, and highly negative expressions of “public opinion” that are mentioned so regularly by anthropologists who live with small groups of nonliterates.
Gossiping tends to have a bad name with ourselves and hunter-gatherers alike, even though public opinion can also be focused on the positive qualities of “gossipees” as well as their faults. Most of this “talking” is in fact negative in its thrust—as is demonstrated anthropologically by John Haviland’s linguistic study of colorfully obscene gossiping in a Mayan peasant village.1 Whether they like it or not, this shapes people’s social reputations in Yucatan—and they’d better watch out, for gossip functions as a court of public opinion. It’s a special kind of court, however: the defendants don’t get to face the charges against them—and often there’s simply no way to defend themselves.
The same predominant negativity is true of hunting bands. The critical court of public opinion isn’t interested in holding balanced and fair hearings but rather in knowing about what people will try to hide. Anthropologist Polly Wiessner has made a detailed study of what Kalahari Bushmen talk about in the context of individual culpability, as a possible prelude to group social pressure or punishment.2 It appears that forager gossip is similar to Haviland’s peasant gossip and to the Serbian tribal gossip I listened to daily with such great interest—and, I admit it, great enjoyment—in Montenegro.
The !Kung people that Wiessner has studied for over three decades gossip intensively when trouble is shaping up and collective action may have to be taken. Her uniquely long-term data show what is talked about, and the leading social problem has, of course, been twenty-nine cases she counted of “big-shot” behavior—a pattern that creates a major social challenge in any egalitarian society. As we’ve seen in Chapter 4, when excessively dominant behavior seriously threatens the personal autonomy of others, this can result in capital punishment. And even moderate signs of big-shot behavior are certain to be of keen interest in egalitarian hunter-gatherer gossiping circles everywhere, for such behavior is best headed off at the pass.
Other !Kung problems that stimulated group “talking” and then possible collective action were, in order of incidence, (1) patterns of stinginess, greed, or laziness; (2) an individual acting as a troublemaker; (3) political or land-use disputes; and (4) someone being reclusively antisocial. Other problems included inappropriate sexual behavior. The two most frequent—big-shot behavior and patterns of stinginess, greed or laziness—can both be seen as free-riding attempts in that generous good citizens will be taken advantage of. Thus, Wiessner’s study provides excellent corroboration for what I’ve said earlier about the LPA focus on reduction of free-riding behavior.
It’s by adding up information that social deviants are identified and people can unite to cope with them. Without safe, private gossiping, free-rider suppression would not be likely to work very effectively in the case of scary bullies, because only a united group is a confident and safe group, and such political unity comes out of finding a consensus. Furthermore, a constantly communicating group is one that can quickly figure out diagnostically who is a thief or a lying cheater. Thus, effective punitive social selection is possible because a band’s better citizens can communicate in private, in a situation of trust.
Polly Wiessner has been visiting the !Kung Bushmen now for three decades, so on average this means that about once a year there’s a serious incident in which big-shot behavior is sufficiently worrisome that talking might lead to collective action. With respect to free-rider suppression, this means two things. First, the bullying free riders can be confronted by the group; this gives them a chance to reform and stop the behavior before it brings on dire consequences. And second, others harboring the same antisocial tendencies can learn by example and simply desist from the pushy or arrogant behaviors that come all too naturally to certain male hunters. Having an evolutionary conscience makes it easy to make the necessary calculations.
In this way groups often can prevent individuals who are unusually disposed to take a bullying free ride from carrying things to the point that their reproductive losses will become severe owing to capital punishment or other decisive and injurious sanctioning. However, even if collective action by the group leads to reform, the reformed deviants will have paid some costs because they’ve been temporarily excluded from cooperation, and there may be reputational costs to be paid in the future. The potential bullying free riders whose genes suffer no adverse consequences are those whose evolutionary consciences are so effective that they can efficiently inhibit themselves in the first place, keep people from feeling threatened, and maintain a decent reputation.
As we’ve seen, Jean Briggs’s intimidating adoptive Inuit father, Inuttiaq, had some decided difficulties in this area, but he was able to keep his potentially self-aggrandizing volatility in check. To stay out of political trouble, such an unusually assertive person must be aware that the rest of the group will be watching him carefully and will be privately comparing notes to make sure they can trust him to keep his aggressive tendencies under control.
Thus, there are a variety of outcomes for individuals disposed to bullying behavior. Some must be killed, and many others must be ridiculed or admonished and thereby reformed. But many have consciences that are up to the task of staying in line and can do this so well that group sanctions never come into play. Awareness of gossip and fear of it are part of this picture, for other people’s talking privately can have significant social consequences for deviants, be they bullies, cheaters, or whatever. And because everyone in a band is privy to gossip, all band members appreciate their own personal vulnerability to this type of private discourse.
Gossiping in private is not necessarily safe. The gossipers must still be careful about what they say, for if negative pronouncements are repeated, or overheard, this can spell real trouble both for themselves and for the entire group. (It was such a breach of confidentiality that triggered the infamous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.) Gossip can seriously damage a person’s reputation—and everyone knows that bad news, once started, travels rapidly. In my survey of hunter-gatherer societies, I actually found one case in the Arctic of an inveterate gossip’s being killed by her group, presumably because her malicious talk stirred serious and unnecessary conflicts.3
I could write a book about gossip. Any cultural anthropologist knows that until you begin to access the gossip networks in the group you’re studying, you’ll have little chance of understanding what’s really going on socially. Eliciting gossip was one aspect of the mid-1960s fieldwork with Montenegrin Serbs that both my wife and I enjoyed immensely once we were plugged in, not only because we were finally getting the “real story” about tribal affairs and people’s moral reputations, but also because reaching the point of having such intimate and trusting conversations made us feel we were gaining some real acceptance from the people we had chosen to work with. We were making friends, and friends who trust one another just naturally gossip.
In the tightly networked settlement where we were living, it was all too apparent that the preponderance of this “talking” was focused negatively on individuals suspected of deviant behavior.4 It also seemed, shades of Durkheim, that virtually all the settlement’s inhabitants felt they had something to hide and feared the social effect of others talking about them and jumping to wrong—or right—conclusions. This fear was realistic, for all this private talking involved zealous social “detective work” that could bring down reputations. As a result, people not only loved to gossip because of the insights they gained, but they also fiercely resented the fact that at the same time others surely were talking privately about them.
In the tribe we studied, one man whose proper name I shall not divulge was known as a prepritzalitza, which literally means “one who tells things over and over again,” or perhaps better, a “serial gossiper.” This man of fifty deviated from the local standard not because he so obviously enjoyed prying into other people’s affairs and spreading bad news, but because in doing so, he didn’t confine his gossip to small, careful, private networks of trusted and discreet close friends. Rather, at a sizable evening social gathering in front of a whole roomful of people, he’d start broadcasting information about individuals who were absent just as though he were in a tête-à-tête situation. There was never talk of taking action against him, but he was cordially disliked, and he himself was talked about for being a reckless gossip who openly endangered the reputations of others. Even though this lifelong behavior had seriously damaged his reputation, “Svetozar” was never actually confronted, probably because his loose talk wasn’t seriously disruptive to the settlement he lived in. Indeed, it seemed to be driven more by naïveté about how things worked socially than by any extraordinary degree of malice.
Normal gossiping serves as an agency of indirect social control. And aside from scaring many people sufficiently to deter them from discoverable acts of deviance, gossiping has other social benefits, as well. Over time, highly useful social information can be disseminated widely until a group consensus forms. Thus, for instance, a case can be built gradually against a main suspected thief where several other candidates were also under suspicion initially. I watched this happen in the remote Serbian tribal settlement we studied, and the process went on for months, all but obsessively.
Let’s return to bands. If a serious problem arises, it’s the combination of the group’s shared rules and a consensus about the actual facts of a particular case that enables a band to come down unanimously on a deviant like Cephu—or at least to come down on him as a largely united moral majority while the deviant’s close kinsmen may choose to stand to one side. This singularity of purpose is important because if a consensus is not built before action is taken, what might otherwise have been an instance of efficient group sanctioning can turn into sheer factional conflict, with both sides claiming moral rectitude. And this has the obvious effect of damaging the social fabric of the group, whereas putting an end to a seriously deviant pattern of behavior, doing so in the name of the group, will greatly improve that fabric.
Being tied in to intimate gossip networks surely has been individually adaptive ever since humans with some kind of symbolic language began to systematically identify and deal with intimidating or hard-to-detect deviants by privately comparing notes, thereby making them easier to avoid and more likely to pay for their depredations. Furthermore, when children overhear their parents gossiping, this provides their developing consciences with accurate information about values, rules, and proper behavior. This means that language has had an important role in moral evolution and values internalization, if perhaps not an absolutely necessary one: in resisting alpha domination, a nonmoral Ancestral Pan at least had the potential to find a political consensus through use of body language, nonsymbolic vocalizing, and astute reading of social contexts.
This capacity was evident in the group-sanctioning episode Frans de Waal interpreted for us when he told how the protesting voices of the female chimpanzees in his captive group reached unanimity and the alpha male knew that a physical attack was coming if he continued his bullying behavior. This was not close to being gossip, for the emotional outcry that resulted from “opinion sharing” was totally public and it lacked any symbolic expression—but the overall social context did give the communication obvious meaning in terms of a shared social diagnosis and shared hostility, with a successful past history of rebellious action against bullies providing part of the shared meaning. I believe that these collectivized angry communication functions in great apes at least have some basic similarities to what humans do in gossiping, where a moral consensus, based on explicit shared values and rules, leads similarly to social control.
Had earlier humans been totally unable to communicate privately through symbols, it’s unlikely that anything very similar to moral communities as we know them today could have evolved. The fact that a solid public opinion can be quietly formed without personal risk or conflict and through highly specific symbols provides a formidable social tool, especially against dangerous bullies, and when it’s time for action, the findings can be used surgically.
I’ve mentioned, in passing, gossip’s staying power as society modernizes. This appears to involve more than the purely habitual perseveration of a hunter-gatherer cultural habit. Indeed, it’s likely, after at least 45,000 years of individuals gaining fitness by whispering back and forth about other people’s behavior behind their backs, that discreet and intimate socially evaluative “talking” is part of our evolved capacity to behave morally—just as the internalization of rules surely is. Thus, gossiping serves us today as it served our ancestors in the past.
I’m not suggesting that there’s anything like a single gene for gossiping or that there’s a specific brain area—a “module,” as it’s sometimes called—that’s dedicated to informative backbiting. What I do propose is that such behavior is likely to be both ancient and innately fairly well prepared, precisely because individuals whose gossip networks are superior can gain a certain edge—both in staying out of serious trouble themselves and in better learning which social predators to watch out for. Gossiping creates fascinating information that is useful in everyday life and also helps fitness. That’s why it’s so prevalent and persistent. That’s also why millions of modern females (and many more males than you might think) watch soap operas—without quite understanding why they lock in so readily.
The need to share large game is one reason that people cluster together to live in bands. But there are others. Humans are naturally sociable, so these nomads also congregate simply because they enjoy the company; that way there’s also better protection against predators. Furthermore, bands link people with resources: when two bands recognize each other’s collective claims to specific, highly familiar natural resources, this aids subsistence efficiency on both sides. All of these factors militate for a minimum band size of twenty to thirty people and for a certain unity of purpose.
Because bands cooperate so strikingly, we tend to think of their members living in great harmony. However, even though in general these several dozen people will camp together and live in close physical proximity, and even though they have a shared subsistence fate as large-game hunters, some of a band’s families will choose to live closer to certain families than to others. I’m referring to physical space, but they also have a variety of ways of “distancing” themselves socially.
Social distancing theory began with the study of modern ethnic groups and their views of one another as “outsiders,” but I will be expanding this theory to include insiders treating other insiders as outsiders.5 With respect to factions within groups, Cephu contentiously referred to his little cluster of intimates as being separate from the rest of the Pygmy band, and in fact they built their shelters accordingly. The Kalahari Bushmen orient the openings of their huts according to feelings of social closeness or distance,6 and Briggs7 tells of an Utku family that was spatially distanced from the rest of the small band largely because one family member, a female named Niqi, had a seriously problematic personality. This included a free-riding lack of generosity, poor social skills, and a general emotional volatility that was distasteful to other Utku, and although Niqi’s whole family merely camped at a distance, Niqi herself was subject to some moderate ostracism.
Active social distancing by entire bands is aimed at individuals whose deviant behavior annoys, outrages, or threatens other group members, and most of the predictable reactions have already been described. It all begins with a social aloofness that reduces normal communication, as in curtailed everyday greetings by group members. Such reticence pertains also to conflicts just between pairs of individuals, and one way to keep a dyadic conflict from escalating is simply for the two to stop speaking bilaterally. When everyone in the band starts to restrict greetings and verbal intercourse, this curtails the deviant’s opportunities to enter into cooperation, while the social deprivation will be a major source of stress—unless the person chooses to move to a different band, which may or may not be feasible.
Although ostracism is fairly frequent and surely is universal among LPA foragers, the details are seldom reported in any detail. We are fortunate, therefore, to have the account from Jean Briggs of her own ostracism in an isolated Inuit camp of less than two dozen people. It’s hard to say just where it all began, for basically the Utku were upset with Jean’s emotional style long before the defining incident took place. For instance, if the igloo’s roof melted and a hunk of slush fell into her typewriter, she was prone to throw something (in one instance, a knife) simply to express her anger—a behavior that was frightening to the Utku because in their minds killing someone came next.8 In Jean’s New England culture of origin, this would, of course, be a mere fit of pique.
Here, greatly abbreviated, is the account I wrote in Hierarchy in the Forest of Jean’s unfortunate but illuminating ordeal. Inuttiaq, the man who has the problems with an overly assertive personality, is the band’s informal headman.
Several sportsmen who had flown in by seaplane were borrowing the Utku’s two rather fragile, irreplaceable canoes for fishing. The Utku approach to such exploitation, which they resented in spite of some trading with the whites, was to acquiesce to every request. Having been told in private about their resentment, Briggs made the mistake of actively intervening after the whites ruined one of the Utku canoes and still wanted to use the last one. She explained heatedly that the Utku depended on the canoes, and the guide replied that if the canoe’s owner did not choose to lend the boat they would do without it. Inuttiaq, put on the spot by Briggs, agreed to let the sportsmen use the last boat for fishing. Briggs could not hide her anger at both parties. She strode away from the scene to weep in her tent, unaware that her behavior had been the last straw. . . .
After the incident people continued to behave cordially and generously toward the turbulent visitor when she approached them—but she noticed that they were coming to visit her far less often, and stayed only briefly. Before long they began in subtle ways to discourage her own visits. It became evident that she was being ostracized like Niqi—but during the period of estrangement it also emerged that the Utku were willing to let her rehabilitate herself. Indeed, whenever she was able to control her feelings and avoid emotionalized negativity for a time, they began to respond positively. The problem was that Briggs could not maintain the flawless equanimity that the situation seemed to demand. She was being distanced, it hurt, and when she broke down and showed her frustration, she was distanced even more.
The kind of overt hostility that had triggered the ostracism was scrupulously avoided by the Utku in applying their sanction. Briggs was basically alone in her tent with very few callers, and even their visits became perfunctory compared to her earlier rich social life. People were not impolite, they simply set up a great deal of social distance. By good luck, after months of this treatment a third party provided the Utku with some insight into why Briggs had tried to deny the canoe to the whites. Once they understood that her anger had been on their behalf and against unscrupulous men who cared nothing for their welfare, they eventually relaxed the social barriers they had so carefully erected and maintained.9
Jean was not shunned in the sense of an overtly hostile cutoff of all social intercourse such as takes place in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with the Amish.10 But it’s difficult to imagine being thousands of miles from your own culture and being socially rejected in this low-key but hostile way. People who engage in social ostracism know they’re inflicting emotional pain, and they tend to do so manipulatively—for generally they’re willing to permit rehabilitation. That’s the beauty of ostracism and also of all-out shunning, for neither is necessarily forever. It’s banishment that is forever.
In Never in Anger Jean interprets this act of social distancing in terms of the Utku fear of potentially violent emotions, which they themselves are so careful to control. However, there may have been another element that I might add. In going against the group’s decision, she may have been perceived as a person who was trying to make a decision individually for an entire egalitarian band, a consensus group that allowed none of its own to do this. Jean definitely was far too free in letting out her anger, but in Utku eyes she also may have been acting something like a big shot when she unilaterally presumed to speak for the entire group and thereby went against its wishes. The price she paid was that she was politely but firmly denied normal social contact for a matter of months.
Social scientists usually categorize such distancing in escalating terms of ostracism, shunning, temporary group ejection, and permanent banishment, but in fact capital punishment can be seen as the truly ultimate means of social distancing.11 Of course, taking a life unnecessarily within the group is a strong moral prohibition, but group-ordained capital punishment isn’t. And even though the ethnographic coverage is so incomplete, I believe that such punishment is all but certain to be potentially present in any band society, as a desperate final resort. Thus, social distancing usually is manipulative in the direction of reform, but as we’ve seen it also can become ultimate.
Unlike flagrant meat-cheating, some morally deviant acts seem not to directly threaten the interests of all group members, yet they, too, may elicit a collective response of lethal violence because they are, to use a nontechnical term, socially monstrous. Close incest is often viewed that way, although cultures vary considerably in how they define this social crime. This variation may be driven in part by the degree to which in the society’s past inbreeding’s consequences were consciously recognized.
Evolutionary anthropologist William Durham studied incest using a sample of five dozen societies, most of them tribal but with a few foragers, and in nearly half of this sample there was evidence to suggest that somehow incest taboos had been created because at some point in the past birth anomalies were noticed and associated with close inbreeding.12 In addition, a general human capacity for disgust could be hooking up with these strong moralistic reactions.13 However, I certainly would hesitate to suggest that there could be a very specific innate horror of, say, mother-son incest, even though this prohibition appears to be the strongest.
Sibling incest usually elicits abhorrence, but there are rare documented instances of socially approved brother-sister marriage among royalty (and others) in early civilizations. Especially in tribal societies, often marrying a true first cousin is heartily approved of, sought after, and strongly institutionalized. Thus, if we look at all world societies, the application of close-incest taboos is somewhat flexible even though mating between parents and children is always “against the law.”
To complicate matters, there’s the Westermarck Effect,14 which predicts that when children are raised in siblinglike relationships, whether they are very closely related or not, they will develop a mutual sexual inhibition that kills attraction and therefore radically reduces their breeding possibilities. This effect has been measured statistically,15 and similar effects are seen in promiscuously breeding great apes with respect to socially familiar relationships between mothers and sons or between siblings, both of which are naturally inhibited.16 However, if such an evolved inhibition is at work in humans, it doesn’t seem to be extremely strong with respect to the father-daughter incest relationship, for the rates in modern American society would seem to be noteworthy, with Appalachia as everyone’s favorite example.17 On the other hand, modern society provides far more privacy than does band life.
Durham found that active sanctions like ostracism, physical attacks, and even execution were measures taken against close incest as locally defined. Less often supernatural sanctions were an agency of social control. For example, there might be fear of being born with birth anomalies inflicted by imaginary entities. In some cultures, because these scary imaginary entities are thought to punish the entire group for the incestuous sins of individuals, band members will feel incest to be a serious threat to everybody and therefore punish it very severely.
Whatever the puzzles about incest, there appear to be two bases for punishment of monstrous acts by outraged moral majorities. One is that the deviance creates a clear and present danger to every other member of the group, either realistically or supernaturally. The other is that somehow the behavior is found to be so far beyond the pale that it simply becomes morally repugnant. In that sense, close incest and serious meat-cheating may be fairly similar, for they can fulfill both of these criteria.
Group opinion can come into play actively and lethally in the absence of moral malfeasance. There are rare cases where individuals who are patently unable to understand the damage their behavior is doing to others must be dealt with by their groups, and usually this is because group members feel seriously threatened for their lives—as with a psychotic person whose violent nature can turn to homicide. There are both Eskimo and Bushman examples. Here’s an Inuit case history from Balikci:
Shortly after, Arnaktark must have returned to his igloo and that same night he stabbed his wife Kakortingnerk in her stomach. She fled on foot with her child on her shoulders, and after arriving at the main camp she told what had happened.
They started to fear that he might stab again at someone they loved, and they discussed what should be done. The discussion was held among family, and it was felt that Arnaktark, because he had become a danger to them, should be killed. Kokonwatsiark [a brother] said that he would carry out the verdict himself and the others agreed. Old father Aolajut was not supposed to do it, because Arnaktark was his own son; but if Kokonwatsiark for some reason would not have done it, the next oldest, Abloserdjuark, would have offered himself to do it. After the decision was taken, Kokonwatsiark notified the non-relatives, because they also were afraid. All agreed that there was no alternative.
Then the entire camp broke up: Aolajut, Kokonwatsiark, Abloserdjuark, Nerlongajok and Igiukrak traveled to Arnaktark’s igloo, and Krimitsiark led the others and the women and children along another route to the new camp at the coast. Upon arrival at Arnaktark’s place, the latter was standing outside, and Kokonwatsiark said to him: “Because you do not know very well any more (have lost control of your mind), I am going to ‘have’ you.” Then he aimed at his heart and shot him through the chest. Then they moved on to join the others at the coast. His grave is yonder, towards the end of Willerstedt Lake.18
This provides a sad example of a Netsilik delegated killing in that there was group agreement and a kinsman was the agent. However, the execution was expedient, rather than moral, because the deviant didn’t understand his own actions. There’s a !Kung Bushman case history, also with exceptional ethnographic detail, that I shall bring in later in the chapter. However, in that case it’s a bit less clear as to whether the killer was considered to be “psychotic,” and to say that the manner of execution was far less orderly is an understatement.
Given enough time, any band society is likely to experience a problem with a homicide-prone unbalanced individual. And predictably band members will have to solve the problem by means of execution even though all of these societies are strongly against killing within the group. As with infanticide or the frequent killing of twins, this is not capital punishment because moral malfeasance is not the issue. But there seems to be a similarity to capital punishment in that the Inuit act of execution was delegated to a family member, and in that a serious threat to everyone in the band begot community-sponsored action.
When a rational but incorrigible, selfish bully is taken out by his peers, the social and political dynamics are the same—but a moral element is added. In Table I, we saw that such executions seemed to be far more numerous than the killing of psychotics, so they, too, may be assumed to be universal in LPA societies. Give any of these groups a few hundred years to work with, and a reckless male, intent on domination, will all but certainly turn up and have to be coped with. And sometimes killing him is the only way out.
Scientists have often tended to view hunter-gatherer levels of violence as a window into our genetic nature, and of course the less violent our favorite forager example happens to be, the more we’re in luck with respect to thinking we must have a nice, as opposed to a nasty, human nature. Earlier studies of the Bushmen culminated in a book called The Harmless People, and even though the author, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, was aware that the contentious !Kung were always worried about having poisoned arrows around, she wrote that homicides were rare19—even though back then they’d been killing one another at the same rate as New Yorkers or Los Angelenos.
Thomas did accurately characterize the !Kung as people who are sensitive to group opinion and eager to resolve conflicts; indeed, when it came to lower levels of conflict, these people were likely to hold an all-night trance dance, which meant that the entire band would dance and sing together and restore the social harmony they valued. As we’ve seen, however, in the matter of serious conflicts and murder rates, Thomas’s information, like that of many others who practice the scientific art of ethnography, was seriously incomplete.20
It was only later, after Richard Lee finally persuaded a few !Kung informants to talk to him openly about homicide, that the facts of Bushman killing came spilling out, and it became apparent that these people, who are deeply against conflict in their values, have quite high homicide rates because they lose their tempers easily and are experts at killing sizable mammals. The Marshall expeditions began just as Bushman conflict was beginning to be greatly inhibited by state control, but later, by turning to ethnohistory, Lee was able to write about these guarded but well-remembered earlier conflicts as a prominent part of the Bushmen’s traditional social fabric.21
As with all forager societies, there’s a local cultural style for expressing personal differences among the !Kung. This begins with minor but potentially serious arguments that are confined to hostile joking, with merriment relieving the tensions. At the next level, angrier disputants drop the pretense of humor and the potential for violent conflict increases as arguments become more heated. Next comes za, or sexual-insult exchange, which means that violence is precariously near. For males the ultimate sexual insult is “May death pull back your foreskin,” whereas for females it is “Death on your vagina.”22 Because physical exposure of the body parts is shameful for the !Kung, such “verbal exposure” involves implications of shame, and such insults can lead in contrary directions. One, perhaps rather surprisingly, is suicide—presumably with the anger turned inward. More expectably, the other is retaliatory, violent, and potentially very harmful to the person who did the taunting.
Because the males are always packing poisoned arrows, a sudden and potentially lethal assault can be in the offing whenever a verbal conflict reaches the za level. When this happens, the band tends to quickly split up because everyone knows that a homicide is coming next, and as with the Netsilik, and as with all hunter-gatherers, apparently,23 further killing will be likely on a retaliatory basis. Avoidance is a prime method of conflict resolution among all LPA foragers, precisely because their nomadic lifestyle, along with their flexible approach to who can reside in which band, makes this use of physical separation such a practical strategy.24
For tribal people who are tied to agricultural land use, it’s much more costly to pick up and move, and such sedentary egalitarians are more likely to invest some limited authority in their headmen so that preemptive conflict resolution can become more effective. The !Kung are so zealously egalitarian that this doesn’t take place, and when a respected, peace-loving man with no authority tries to step in and stop a za-level conflict once it has become physical, Lee tells us that he’s likely to be killed himself.25
Unlike many LPA foragers, the !Kung seem to squabble about meat all the time, and this might make us wonder about all the claims I’ve made about sympathetic generosity, “equalized” meat distribution, joy in sharing, and avoidance of conflict. However, this is what happens with the !Kung. A large animal carcass is initially shared out to key people in the band, who then share it further, within large or small family groups, and by then the meat has been transformed by custom from what amounts to group property to personal property.26 The further sharing that takes place is optional, even though there are expectations and hopes, and along the way there are requests for meat and more requests for meat, and also some accusations of stinginess. But basically the entire band is getting meat, and the overall system is understood and appreciated.
There are very few serious disputes over meat.27 Lee does provide one case history of a homicidal conflict that was caused by adultery but was triggered by a disagreement over meat, but outright forager conflicts about meat are not that frequent, even though the bickering, in certain societies like the !Kung, can be constant. Pat Draper clarifies the Bushmen’s sometimes-contentious sharing style as follows:
Verbal aggression is commonplace among !Kung. In fact, the reason that goods are shared equitably and more or less continuously is that the have-nots are so vociferous in pressing their demands. Are these a people who live in communal harmony, happily sharing among all? Not exactly, but the interpretation of meaning in any culture inevitably founders on these kinds of ambiguities. At one level of analysis, one can show that goods circulate, that there are no inequalities of wealth and that peaceable relations characterize dealings within and between bands. At another level, however, . . . one sees that social action is an ongoing scrimmage—often amicable but sometimes carried on in bitter earnest.28
Inuit conflict has been studied almost as intensively as with the Bushmen. By interviewing willing older informants as Lee did, and by making use of reports by early explorers, Geert van den Steenhoven managed to create a reliable account of past homicidal patterns in central Canada.29 Asen Balikci has drawn on these materials to good effect. Balikci details how the Inuit deal with angry conflicts, and even though their style is quite different from what takes place out on the Kalahari, there are similarly escalating social mechanisms to resolve smoldering or overt conflict.
In a small band, conflict is both stressful and, in its potential, economically costly. In both of these societies, conflicts easily become lethal because neither permits the development of leaders who have enough authority to step in and readily stop a serious quarrel between angry males. (Keep in mind that as killers of large mammals, male hunter-gatherers are armed with very effective hunting weapons.) Balikci writes:
The Netsilik knew of a number of rather formalized techniques for peacemaking that were positive in the sense that usually they brought conflict into the open and resolved it in a definitive manner. These techniques were fist fights, drum duels, and approved execution.
Any man could challenge another to a fist fight for any reason. Usually they stripped to the waist and the challenger received the first blow. Only one blow was given at a time, directed against temple or shoulder. Opponents stood without guard and took turns, the contest continuing until one of the fighters had had enough and gave up. This seemed to settle the quarrel, for, as one informant put it: “After the fight, it is all over; it was as if they had never fought before.”
. . . The song duel was a ritualized means of resolving any grudge two men might hold against each other. The songs were composed secretly and learned by the wives of the opponents. When ready, the whole group assembled in the ceremonial igloo, with a messenger finally inviting the duelists. As was the case with all drum dancing, each wife sang her husband’s song in turn, while the latter danced and beat the drum in the middle of the floor, watched by the community. The audience took great interest in the performance, heartily joking and laughing at the drummers’ efforts to crush each other by various accusations of incest, bestiality, murder, avarice, adultery, failure at hunting, being henpecked, lack of manly strength, etc. The opponents used all their wits and talent to win the approval of the assembly. . . .
Song duels thus undoubtedly had a cathartic value for the individual opponents, and in this particular sense conflicts became “resolved.” Sometimes one or both of the opponents at the end of a song duel continued to feel enmity. When this was the case, they often decided to resume fighting, this time with their fists. This definitely settled the matter.30
In both cultures homicide is frequent, and such patterns of conflict and conflict resolution may well have been fairly widespread among LPA foragers before contact. In this connection, some of the best Inuit data were collected by early explorers soon after contact, when the people were not yet reticent about such matters. In the rest of the fifty-society database, we’ve already seen that often ethnographic reports of capital punishment were seriously underrepresented, or sometimes even absent in many of the ethnographies—just as they would have been for the Bushmen had Lee not made his retrospective breakthrough.
My assumption is that prehistorically, lethal conflict would have been a serious potential problem in this type of society, even though local conditions and differing cultural traditions surely impinged on the rates of killing. For instance, the Netsilik had such a high rate of female infanticide (it’s a son as hunter who’ll support a parent in old age) that some men had difficulty finding wives and therefore were prone to kill another man and take his.31 This upped the murder rate, but other male killings took place just because personalities clashed and assertive hunters were prone to quarrel. With the Bushmen, women as wives were not so scarce, yet quarrels over courtship or, more often, over adultery provided a regular source of conflict that could result in homicide.32
Murder is conceived of indigenously as a monstrous act. Nevertheless, when an Inuit man slaughters another man in the same band just to take his wife, more often than not his morally outraged band is likely to do nothing about it collectively. Band members know that the victim’s close male relatives are likely to take revenge and that usually the killer and his family will quickly get out of town because if he’s brazen enough to stay in the band, he may well pay with his life.33
Thus, it’s revenge slaying by relatives, not capital punishment by the whole band, that he must fear as a first-time offender. This seems to be true of LPA foragers generally, even though our data will never be complete. This retaliatory pattern and the social avoidance it engenders are widespread,34 and I believe it’s the combination of acute loss and grief, combined with deep-seated revenge tendencies,35 that makes killing for a lost close kinsman (rarely, a kinswoman) so predictable.
Even though murder certainly is not condoned, most initial killings seem not to be felt as a generalized threat by all band members. However, if an individual becomes a serial killer, meaning killing two victims or more, then all members of the band are likely to feel threatened on an immediate if probabilistic basis, and they’re likely to be galvanized into collective action.
We’ve seen in Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 that active executions accomplished simultaneously by entire groups are rather rarely reported. They’re still more rarely described in any detail, but fortunately we have Richard Lee’s specialized study of !Kung Bushman homicides to work with.36 The !Kung hunt with arrows tipped with poison taken from one of several Kalahari beetles, which can bring down an animal as large as a giraffe after a few days, and which can kill a human much more quickly—unless the wound is shallow and can be quickly lanced to suck out the poison. These foragers are careful to keep their arrows out of the reach of children, lest a heated childish quarrel become lethal, and bystanders will act quickly to try to head off serious quarrels involving two or more adult males because in the heat of the moment one man may grab his bow to shoot another—or may simply stab his adversary lethally with a hand-held poisoned arrow.
Lee’s thorough interviews give a degree of ethnographic richness to the statistical patterns we’ve been describing, and they also help to make clear why delegating a kinsman as executioner is usually preferred over a collective attack by the group—even though either strategy will obviate retaliation by male kin. Keep in mind, here, that we’re talking about taking out an intimidating repeat killer who is an expert at killing large mammals as a hunter, who is already experienced at taking human life, and who, because in this case the group poisons its arrows, can still do damage to others while he is dying.
Lee’s systematic research encompasses four different regions inhabited by nomadic !Kung from the 1920s through the 1950s, and his case histories include original killings, revenge killings by relatives, group-sponsored executions of repeat killers, and several inadvertent killings of good Samaritans who tried to stop fights that had already become za-intense. In this forty-year period, for a region with not a great a number of bands, there were twenty-two killings in all, and in several cases they came in a flurry because chains of retaliation were involved. I emphasize, again, that Lee had the advantage of gaining the trust of informants who had participated in either killings or executions of killers in the period before the government of Botswana began to punish all killing with jail time.
Once the government became very active in this way, in small nomadic camps the !Kung’s homicide rates actually dropped out of sight. This supports what I said earlier about hunter-gatherers becoming reticent about their capital punishment practices after contact: knowledge of such organized authority can have a profound effect on these egalitarians, even though they share power equally within their bands and normally make their own decisions about deviants.
The following account is based upon cross-checked interviews with participants who were interviewed by Lee after people became willing to trust him with such information. What we have here is a poorly executed group execution that begins with the use of a poisoned arrow. Lee points out that, even though Bushmen are excellent archers when out hunting, when they get into fights their aiming of poisoned arrows is mediocre at best. In this one uniquely detailed description of what seems to begin as a delegated execution and eventually becomes a fully communal killing, things are so chaotic that it’s easy to understand why with hunter-gatherers the usual mode of execution is to efficiently delegate a kinsman to quickly kill the deviant by ambush. (As with the exclamation point in front of !Kung, the various diacritical symbols represent several different phonemic “clicks” in the Bushman dialect.)
The most dramatic account of a collective killing concerns the death of /Twi, a notorious killer who had been responsible for the deaths of two men . . . in the 1940s. A number of people decided that he must be killed. The informant is =Toma, the younger brother of /Twi.
My brother was killed southwest of N//o!kau (in the /Du/da area). . . . People said that /Twi was one who had killed too many people so they killed him with spears and arrows. He had killed two people already, and on the day he died he stabbed a woman and killed a man.
It was Xashe who attacked /Twi first. He ambushed him near the camp and shot a poisoned arrow into his hip. They grappled hand to hand, and /Twi had him down and was reaching for his knife when /Xashe’s wife’s mother grabbed /Twi from behind and yelled to /Xashe, “Run away! This man will kill everyone!” And /Xashe ran away.
/Twi pulled the arrow out of his hip and went back to his hut, where he sat down. Then some people gathered and tried to help him by cutting and sucking out poison. /Twi said, “This poison is killing me. I want to piss.” But instead of pissing, he deceived the people, grabbed a spear, and flailed out with it, stabbing a woman named //Kushe in the mouth, ripping open her cheek. When //Kushe’s husband N!eishi came to her aid, /Twi deceived him too and shot him with a poisoned arrow in the back as he dodged. And N!eishi fell down.
Now everyone took cover, and others shot at /Twi, and no one came to his aid because all those people had decided he had to die. But he still chased after some, firing arrows, but he didn’t hit any more.
Then he returned to the village and sat in the middle. The others crept back to the edge of the village and kept under cover. /Twi called out, “Hey are you all still afraid of me? Well I am finished, I have no more breath. Come here and kill me. Do you fear my weapons? Here I am putting them out of reach. I won’t touch them. Come kill me.”
Then they all fired on him with poisoned arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then he lay flat. All approached him, men and women, and stabbed his body with spears even after he was dead.
Then he was buried, and everyone split up and went their separate ways because they feared more fights breaking out.
Commentary. This exceptionally graphic account brings out some of the drama of the action. The killer shot so full of arrows that he looked like a porcupine is a remarkable image of the capacity for collective action and collective responsibility in a noncorporate and nonhierarchical society. I interviewed the mother, father, and sister of the dead /Twi and the relatives of his victims. All agreed he was a dangerous man. Possibly he was psychotic.37
Interestingly, it was not the man who actively led things off who was killed by /Twi, but a bystander after his bystanding wife was wounded.
If ever there were a flawed “communal” execution, this was it. That’s why a delegated close kinsman usually does the job. Close male kin execute oppressive bullies, including maliciously wayward shamans, if such exist, along with the occasional thief, cheater, or nonpsychotic deviant, as seen in previous chapters. In Chapter 7, Table IV showed that out of a sample of ten LPA foragers, six of these societies reported a single group member’s stepping forward to fulfill the executioner’s role, so we may assume this strategy to be predominant among contemporary hunter-gatherers and also to have been very widespread 45,000 years ago.
This ultimate type of social distancing is matched with a social problem-solving ability that is astute, for these hunter-gatherer societies engage in such ultimate social distancing only under special circumstances that make killing someone seem necessary. With relatively tractable deviants like Cephu, people take a chance on personal reform. But in their minds today’s serial killers are likely to be tomorrow’s serial killers, and there’s only one sure way to deal with them.
In this context it’s generally males who have to be socially eliminated, and these men are hunters whose contributions usually are beneficial to all. The obvious practical disadvantages inherent in losing hunters help to motivate band members to stop conflicts before they become homicidal and to refrain from using capital punishment if any other method will solve the problem at hand.
The possibility of reforming a deviant whose behavior is seriously perturbing group functions is helped by the fact that sympathetic feelings can play an important part in how such dilemmas are resolved. Feeling for the person makes it difficult to methodically execute any normal human being with whom social bonds exist. Thus, sympathy feeds into the universal prescriptions against murder that are found in all foraging societies and in human societies more generally—however “murder” may be locally defined. And feelings of sympathy also inform the reluctance of most moral majorities to use capital punishment at all, unless this is the only way out.
As they do their work in hunting societies, these small moral majorities are quite consistent in the ways they deal with social problems. Many deviants are treated as human beings who happen to be erring right now but are capable of reform, which is why with deviants like Cephu ostracism and shaming are used. It’s the incorrigible bullies, serial killers, aggressively selfish or malicious shamans gone bad, and others who seriously threaten the lives or welfare or moral sensibilities of most or all group members, who are killed or expelled.
As we’ve seen, capital punishment affects a deviant’s reproductive success profoundly, and the capital punishers have been kept in business in terms of natural selection because they are coming out ahead reproductively. Kill a major bully, and in an egalitarian group every member will, on average, share in the resources so gained. The same applies to a recidivist meat-cheater or an effective thief. Because the contest between good citizens and deviants is so often a zero-sum game, execution can pay off handsomely as far as the community is concerned—but so can reforming a lesser deviant who is contributing to the group economy.
In the preceding chapters, capital punishment of free-riding bullies or cheats has played an important part in our moral origins scenarios. The first scenario involved the appearance of a conscientious sense of right and wrong coupled with internalization of values, which explains moral origins without any Garden of Eden. It seems likely that the acquisition of a conscience as an effect of harsh social control involved not only physical elimination of individuals whose problems with lack of self-control were severe, but also lesser sanctions taking their toll on the fitness of lesser social deviants.
Once an effective conscience had evolved, the threat of severe group punishment had a major role in suppressing the potential predatory behaviors of free riders, and this brought quite a different effect. This development opened the way for modest yet socially significant human degrees of altruism to evolve genetically, bringing a greater degree of generosity to the operation of our consciences and to the overall tenor of our social lives.
Both of these developments were possible because ancestrally preadapted coalitions enabled our human ancestors to act as large groups in order to solve social problems. At first it was simply political majorities that did this, but once a conscience was in place, these majorities became moral.
In the minds of band members, social sanctioning comes from “the group,” and it doesn’t matter whether the entire group has reached a true consensus or whether a few people—often a deviant’s kin—are staying neutrally to one side while the moral majority exerts its will. Nor does it matter very much whether one or just a few individuals are stepping forward to act on behalf of the group; what counts is that they know they have the group—a moral majority—behind them. If they don’t, an attempt to sanction can turn into simply a factional dispute, which degrades everybody’s quality of social life and, as we’ve seen, likely splits the group.
Being able to arrive at a reasonably well-unified moral majority is critical to the continuing viability of any egalitarian band’s social life, precisely because individual peacemakers are allowed too little authority to take on the tougher conflicts, and because some deviants are simply too awesome to be taken on without help or backing. These dynamics are understood by people in tiny bands that lack policemen, judges, and juries and often don’t even recognize a single permanent headman.
A deviant who seriously irritates or threatens the majority of the band while at the same time violating a norm that has strong moral backing is definitely asking for trouble. The impending group reactions are easy enough to predict by an adult who has previously experienced such sanctioning—be it as a deviant or as a sanctioner. And simply participating in gossip is a constant reminder that group public opinion is, in general, coiled to strike. Such judgmental communities make the fabric of human social life moral, and they do so in predictable ways that have been in place for thousands of generations.