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.
NISA’S CRUEL SITUATION
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 lar
ge. 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 COEVOLUTION OF GENES AND CULTURE
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 co
me 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.
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