Sharing: John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick

Posted on February 16, 2009

In the Kalahari Desert of northwestern Botswana live tribes of hunter gatherers called the !Kung San. They are often described by outsiders as living proof of the survival advantages of strong social bonds. “Most creatures get what they need to live from their physical surrounding,” researcher Roy Baumeister wrote. “Humans, in contrast, get what they need from each other and from their culture.” A quick look at the !Kung’s physical environment shows us why they are so deeply embedded in each other’s lives.Coming alone into the !Kung’s home range, a city dweller would find miles and miles of dust and scrub vegetation. If dehydration didn’t kill him first, the same city dweller would most likely starve to death pretty quickly. Yet archaeological excavations show that this region has been occupied by the same cultural group, living the same way in the same spot, for more than eleven thousand years. In the Kalahari, rainfall is scarce, summer temperatures exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit, winter temperatures dip below freezing, and given the presence of lions, “fast food” could easily refer to you or me. Living off the land in a place this harsh makes clear why early humans could ill afford to be nasty and brutish, at least not toward members of their own social group.Even though the !Kung live in the midst of seemingly limitless real estate, a Kung village is half a dozen huts tightly clustered around a small, cleared circle. Despite any desire for privacy, all doors face in toward the communal space. If you were to spend the night in such a village and see lions’ eyes gleaming in the darkness just outside the ring of cooking fires, you might begin to appreciate why, for early humans, feelings of isolation were linked with fear, the fear that still remains at the core of our experience of loneliness.The anthropologists, Irven Devore and Richard Lee, first made contact with the !Kung living in the Gobe area of the Kalahari in 1963. Six years later a young woman named Marjorie Shostak arrived in Gobe for a two-year stay. She had no particular training in fieldwork—she was simply in Africa with her husband, the physician and anthropologist Mel Konner. But she decided to make use of her time by becoming fluent in the !Kung language and trying to get beyond the cultural and professional barriers to understand hunter-gatherer life on a personal level. The result was a book entitled Nisa:The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, in which Shostak’s account of life among the !Kung was interspersed with vivid monologues by the woman she called Nisa. The book became a literary sensation because it did not portray ancestral society as a war of all against all, or as a tableau vivant of the noble savage. Instead, it presented ancestral life as a soap opera, a tangle of intense social linkages in all their messy melodrama.For months, Marjorie Shostak engaged in the !Kung San equivalent of sitting around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. “Village life is so intimate,” she concluded, “that a division between domestic and public life…is largely meaningless.” The stories she compiled, stories independently corroborated by other fieldwork and dozens of interviews with other !Kung women, were filled with obscene jokes and lots of bed (or more accurately hut) hopping.Even with the (admittedly brutish) rigors of avoiding hungry predators while finding enough to eat, it seemed that a vast amount of !Kung men and women’s mental and emotional energy was devoted to managing social commitments. The opposite of solitary, the life among the !Kung involves juggling relationships with a spouse and children, ever present in-laws and other family members, assorted friends, enemies, and rivals who, nonetheless, contribute to one’s survival, as well as a succession of lovers on the side.The stories of Nisa, as well as the more straightforward accounts of traditional researchers, show that when the !Kung women are not out gathering, or the !Kung men off on a hunt, they spend a surprisingly large amount of time singing or composing songs, playing musical instruments, sewing intricate bead designs, telling stories, playing games, visiting, or just lying around chatting. They have no written language, but people sit together and talk for hours, repeating the same stories again and again. They have no calendar, but mark life as a progression of social events, from a baby’s first social smiling, to first words, all the way to senescence and death.This simple human society is a self-regulating system far more sophisticated than an ant colony or a beehive, but it operates on the same basic principle that each individual’s actions are shaped and constrained by the actions of other individuals. Social insects co-regulate by way of chemical communication; humans, having far greater behavioral latitude, rely heavily on culture, but the fact that humans can teach and learn non-genetic (cultural) information about how to behave does not mean that they have left body chemistry behind.The most significant way in which the !Kung demonstrate their predilection for closeness and co-regulation is in their approach to childrearing. Infants have access to the breast every moment of the day and night for at least the first three years of life. They nurse on demand several times an hour. They sleep by their mothers at night, and during the day are carried in a sling, skin to skin. Mothers carry their kinds, on average, fifteen hundred miles a year. Separation, when it comes, is initiated by the child as soon as he or she wants to venture forth and play with other children. Even so, last born children will sometimes nurse until age five or even longer, when the ridicule of other youngsters—a natural form of social regulation—makes them stop. On average, then, !Kung children have forty-four months of close attention from, and body contact with, their mothers.“Give me” is one of the first phrases that a !Kung child learns, and the cultural norm demands generous and free exchange. In fact, !Kung life is so completely egalitarian—an almost universal finding among pre-agricultural societies living this close to the edge—that there is no chief or headman. All food is shared. Access to land is collective, and stinginess is a serious matter, punished by social exclusion. The most successful hunters must be self-deprecating. They carry arrows given to them by others, and the person whose arrow brings down the animal is considered the provider of the meat and oversees its distribution. They have gift-giving rituals, name-sharing rituals, and as the ultimate co-regulating social behavior, seasonal congregations to bring together separate bands and to engage in ecstatic trance dancing.Make no mistake—the life of the !Kung is not “Eden in the outback” as some have dubbed it. Hemmed in by farming villages and limited to a depleted range, the !Kung today are not necessarily a perfect replica of the hunter gatherer life during all of human evolution. They are only one vestigial pocket, and no doubt their own customs have evolved over the past forty-thousand years, even as the global environment has seen many changes. And their generally peaceful and cooperative social life can be punctuated by co-regulation that takes the form of violence. With an estimated twenty-two killings in five decades, the fifteen-hundred member band studied by Mel Konner had a higher murder rate than the United States.Nonetheless, the !Kung’s way of life is the best illustration we have of the social forces that shaped our human ancestors throughout their long evolutionary trek from small hominid ape called Australopithecus afarensis to a much smarter, and much more cooperative and even altruistic species called Homo sapiens. And every pre-agricultural society we know about has this same basic structure. Against harsh odds they barely survive, but the fact that they survive at all they owe to the dense web of social contacts and the vast number of reciprocal commitments they maintain. In this state of nature, connection and social cooperation did not have to be imposed by a primitive form of state, or by an English philosopher. Nature is connection. Which is why disconnection leads to such dysregulation and damage, not just at the level of society, but at the level of the self.From: “Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection” by John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick. Available in bookstores everywhere.Walkabout Jones invites writers to enter our short story contest. In partnership with Artists Collective www.artistsforaccess.org we’re giving a $1,000 prize to the winner. See our December 15th entry for full contest rules. Send entries to: “Short Story Contest” at artistsforaccess@gmail.com

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