List of Tables and Figures
xi
Prologue: At the Airport 1(36)
An airport scene
Why study traditional societies?
States
Types of traditional societies
Approaches, causes, and sources
A small book about a big subject
Plan of the book
PART ONE SETTING THE STAGE BY DIVIDING SPACE
Chapter 1 Friends, Enemies, Strangers, and Traders
37(42)
A boundary
Mutually exclusive territories
Non-exclusive land use
Friends, enemies, and strangers
First contacts
Trade and traders
Market economies
Traditional forms of trade
Traditional trade items
Who trades what?
Tiny nations
PART TWO PEACE AND WAR
Chapter 2 Compensation for the Death of a Child
79(40)
An accident
A ceremony
What if...?
What the state did
New Guinea compensation
Life-long relationships
Other non-state societies
State authority
State civil justice
Defects in state civil justice
State criminal justice
Restorative justice
Advantages and their price
Chapter 3 A Short Chapter, About a Tiny War
119(10)
The Dani War
The war's time-line
The war's death toll
Chapter 4 A Longer Chapter, About Many Wars
129(44)
Definitions of war
Sources of information
Forms of traditional warfare
Mortality rates
Similarities and differences
Ending warfare
Effects of European contact
Warlike animals, peaceful peoples
Motives for traditional war
Ultimate reasons
Whom do people fight?
Forgetting Pearl Harbor
PART THREE YOUNG AND OLD
Chapter 5 Bringing Up Children
173(37)
Comparisons of child-rearing
Childbirth
Infanticide
Weaning and birth interval
On-demand nursing
Infant-adult contact
Fathers and allo-parents
Responses to crying infants
Physical punishment
Child autonomy
Multi-age playgroups
Child play and education
Their kids and our kids
Chapter 6 The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill?
210(33)
The elderly
Expectations about eldercare
Why abandon or kill?
Usefulness of old people
Society's values
Society's rules
Better or worse today?
What to do with older people?
PART FOUR DANGER AND RESPONSE
Chapter 7 Constructive Paranoia
243(33)
Attitudes towards danger
A night visit
A boat accident
Just a stick in the ground
Taking risks
Risks and talkativeness
Chapter 8 Lions and Other Dangers
276(47)
Dangers of traditional life
Accidents
Vigilance
Human violence
Diseases
Responses to diseases
Starvation
Unpredictable food shortages
Scatter your land
Seasonality and food storage
Diet broadening
Aggregation and dispersal
Responses to danger
PART FIVE RELIGION, LANGUAGE, AND HEALTH
Chapter 9 What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion
323(46)
Questions about religion
Definitions of religion
Functions and electric eels
The search for causal explanations
Supernatural beliefs
Religion's function of explanation
Defusing anxiety
Providing comfort
Organization and obedience
Codes of behavior towards strangers
Justifying war
Badges of commitment
Measures of religious success
Changes in religion's functions
Chapter 10 Speaking in Many Tongues
369(41)
Multilingualism
The world's language total
How languages evolve
Geography of language diversity
Traditional multilingualism
Benefits of bilingualism
Alzheimer's disease
Vanishing languages
How languages disappear
Are minority languages harmful?
Why preserve languages?
How can we protect languages?
Chapter 11 Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Sloth
410(42)
Non-communicable diseases
Our salt intake
Salt and blood pressure
Causes of hypertension
Dietary sources of salt
Diabetes
Types of diabetes
Genes, environment, and diabetes
Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders
Diabetes in India
Benefits of genes for diabetes
Why is diabetes low in Europeans?
The future of non-communicable diseases
Epilogue: At Another Airport
452(15)
From the jungle to the
405(62)
Advantages of the modern world
Advantages of the traditional world
What can we learn?
Acknowledgments 467(4)
Further Readings 471(12)
Index 483(16)
Illustration Credits 499