The remaining type of traditional trade, which scarcely has a parallel today, has been called “conventional monopolies.” This term refers to trade in an item which either of the two trade partners could obtain or manufacture, but which one side chooses to rely on the other partner to supply, as an excuse for maintaining trade relations. For example, among the items that the Dugum Dani receive from the Jalemo area are wooden arrows with elaborate barbs and decorations, plus net bags with bright orchid fibers woven around the strings. The Dani make simple undecorated arrows and bags themselves. With a Jalemo arrow or bag in front of them, the Dani could perfectly well duplicate it, because the level of carving or weaving skill required is not high. But the Dani instead continue to depend on ... (查看原文)
For example, until around 500 years ago Finland’s population was concentrated on the seacoast and Finland’s forested interior was sparsely inhabited. When individual families and small groups began moving as colonists into the interior, they tried to live as far as possible from each other. Finnish friends told me a story to illustrate how those colonists hated feeling crowded. A man cleared for himself and his family a small farm by a river, pleased that there were no signs of any neighbors. But one day he was horrified to observe a cut log floating down the river. Someone else must be living somewhere upstream! Enraged, the man started walking upstream through unbroken forest to track down the trespasser. On his first day of walking he met no one; on the second day, again no one. At last... (查看原文)
Among……Brazil’s Piraha Indians (Plate 11), social pressure to behave by the society’s norms and to settle disputes is applied by graded ostracism. That begins with excluding someone from food-sharing for a day, then for several days, then making the person live some distance away in the forest, deprived of normal trade and social exchanges. The most severe Piraha sanction is complete ostracism. For instance, a Piraha teen-ager named Tukaaga killed an Apurina Indian named Joaquim living nearby, and thereby exposed the Piraha to the risk of a retaliatory attack. Tukaaga was then forced to live apart from all other Piraha villages, and within a month he died under mysterious circumstances, supposedly of catching a cold, but possibly instead murdered by other Piraha who felt endangered by Tuka... (查看原文)
As for variation within the same society between generations, spanking of children was much more widely practised in the United States in my parents’ generation than it is today. The German chancellor Bismarck commented that, even within a given family, spanked generations tend to alternate with non-spanked generations. That conforms to the experience of many of my American friends: those who were spanked as children swear that they will never inflict such barbaric cruelties on their own children, while those who were not spanked as children swear that it is healthier to administer a brief spanking than to practise the guilt manipulation and other behavioral controls that substitute for spanking, or to spoil kids entirely. (查看原文)
Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking. That makes it difficult for a Westerner like me, accustomed to nights spent in uninterrupted sleep and not punctuated with conversations, to get a good night’s rest in a hut shared with many New Guineans. (查看原文)
Out of innumerable examples, here is one that stuck in my mind. One morning during my second trip to New Guinea, I was in a camp tent with two New Guinea Highland men, while other men from the camp were out in the forest. The two men belonged to the Fore tribe and were talking to each other in the Fore language. I had been enjoying learning the Fore language, and the men’s conversation was sufficiently repetitive and about a subject for which I had already acquired vocabulary that I was able to follow much of what they were saying. They were talking about the Highland staple food of sweet potato, for which the Fore word is isa-awe. One of the men looked at the large pile of sweet potatoes in the corner of the tent, assumed an unhappy expression, and said to the other man, “Isa-awe kampai.”... (查看原文)
作者: Jared Diamond 副标题: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? isbn: 0670024813 书名: The World Until Yesterday 页数: 512 定价: USD 36.00 出版社: Viking Adult 出版年: 2012-12-31 装帧: Hardcover
