[Music]
tribes constitute thousands of natural
experiments in how to run a human
society they constitute experiments from
which we may learn we may be able to
learn things of practical use to us in
deciding how to raise our kids how to
treat our older people and other things
that we care a lot about the lives of
the elderly constitute a disaster area
of modern American society we can surely
do better by learning from the lives of
the elderly in traditional societies I
[Music]
wanted to talk this evening about a
topic in cultural geography to give me
an idea of how many of you will find
what I’m going to say this evening of
practical value I’d like to begin by
asking you to raise your hands in
response to either of two questions
first let me ask you to raise your hands
if you fall into any of the following
categories if you’re over 65 or if you
hope to live past age 65 or if you have
any parent or grandparent who has or did
live past age 65 would you please raise
your hands many positive responses
secondly if you are now under 65 and
have no intention of living past 65 and
have no parent or grandparent who
cleared 65 would you please raise your
hands not much response there but those
of you in the first category it’s you
who will find my talk this evening to be
a practical value and any of you in the
second category will still find what I’m
going to talk about this evening
fascinating even if it isn’t personally
relevant to you I’m going to talk about
growing older in traditional societies
this subject constitutes just one
chapter of my
latest book which compares traditional
small tribal societies with our big
modern societies all of us here this
evening are accustomed to living in big
industrial societies in permanent
housing with centralized governments to
make decisions with writing and books
and the internet where most people live
past age 60 where we are constantly
encountering strangers just as all of us
are this evening without freaking out
and where most of us eat food grown by
other people we forget that all of those
things arose very recently in human
history humans have constituted a
separate line of evolution for about 6
million years but almost all of the
things that I just mentioned didn’t
exist anywhere in the world eleven
thousand years ago they rose just within
the last 11 thousand years and some of
them such as the internet and the
phenomenon of most people living past
age 60 or only within the last century
or two that is the ancestors of all of
us here were living under traditional
tribal conditions until virtually
yesterday measured on the timescale of
human evolution until Europeans began to
expand around the globe 500 years ago
tribal societies still occupied large
parts of all continents but tribal
societies have recently been coming
under the control of modern societies
with state governments to the point
where today the last tribal societies
not yet under state control are confined
to small areas of New Guinea and the
Amazon basin those tribal societies
which constituted all human societies
for most of human history are far more
diverse than our modern big societies
all big societies that have governments
and where most people are strangers to
each other all of those big societies
are similar to each other and different
from tribal societies in many basic ways
regardless of whether the big societies
are American
German Chinese or Israeli tribes
constitute thousands of natural
experiments in how to run a human
society they constitute experiments from
which we may be able to learn we may be
able to learn things of practical use to
us in deciding how to raise our kids how
to treat our older people how to remain
healthy and other things that we care a
lot about the treatment of the elderly
varies enormous ly among traditional
societies from much worse to much better
than in our modern societies at the
worst extreme many traditional societies
get rid of their elderly in one of five
increasingly direct ways the most
indirect method to get rid of the
elderly is just to neglect old people
and not to feed them or to clean them
until they die the second method is to
abandon them when the group moves the
third method is to encourage older
people to commit suicide
a fourth more direct method is to kill
all the people with their own
cooperation for example among the cow
long people of Papua New Guinea a widow
whose husband has just died
traditionally asked her brothers or sons
to come strangle her and the fifth and
most direct method of getting rid of the
elderly is to kill them without their
consent or cooperation in what tribal
societies do children abandon or kill
their parents it happens mainly under
two sets of conditions one is in nomadic
hunter-gatherer societies that often
shift camp and that are physically
incapable of transporting old people who
can’t walk when the able-bodied young
people already have to carry their young
children and all of their physical
possessions the other condition is in
societies living in marginal or
fluctuating environments such as the
Arctic or deserts where there are
periodic food shortages and occasionally
there just isn’t enough food to keep
everybody alive what has to choose
whatever food is available has to be
reserved for the able-bodied people
still capable of contributing to the
tribes survival and to the children who
will grow up to be the tribes future
adults to us modern Americans it sounds
horrible to think of abandoning or
killing your own sick spouse or your own
elderly parent but what else could those
societies do they face a cruel choice
the old people had to do it to their own
parents and the old people know what now
is going to happen to them in fact many
of us many of you here have already
faced well you will face an ordeal
similar to the ordeal faced by those
nomadic or Arctic or desert tribal
society when you are the physician or
when you are the relative responsible
for the medical care of an old person
and when you’re the one who has to
decide whether and when to hold further
medical interventions and when just to
administer painkillers and sedatives for
a sick spouse or parent at the opposite
extreme in the treatment of the elderly
the happy extreme or the New Guinea
farming societies where I’ve been doing
my fieldwork for the past 50 years and
many other sedentary traditional
societies around the world in those
societies all the people are generally
cared for the affair they remain
valuable and they continue to live in
the same hot or else in a nearby Hut
near their children relatives and
lifelong friends in traditional New
Guinea societies where there aren’t
dentists and where all the people
gradually lose their teeth and can no
longer chew their own food their adult
children chew the food until it’s soft
spitting into a cup and give that soft
food to the toothless old person to eat
I don’t know of any modern Western
society in which such
care of old people is routine there were
two main sets of reasons for this
variation among societies in their
treatment of old people the variation
depends upon the usefulness of old
people and on the Society’s values first
as regards usefulness older people
continue to perform valuable services in
traditional societies and also in our
modern societies one use of older people
in traditional societies is that they
often are still effective at producing
food for example among Hadza
hunter-gatherers of Tanzania in Africa
grandmother’s are the most productive
women at finding and digging up wild
edible roots because grandmothers have
much more experience than do young women
finding the roots and they often still
have the necessary strength
hence measurements show that the growth
rate of the Hadza grandchild increases
with the amount of time that the child’s
grandmother spends foraging for food for
the child while older has a
hunter-gatherer of men they no longer
have the strength needed to spear a lion
they may still be useful at following
animal tracks and at capturing small or
slow prey that value of the experience
of older people in traditional societies
has also been confirmed for modern
farming societies among
nineteenth-century Canadian and Finnish
farmers each decade that a grandmother
survived past age 50 was correlated with
two extra grandchildren of that
grandmother eventually surviving because
of the resources made available by the
grandmother another traditional
usefulness of older people consists of
babysitting their grandchildren thereby
freeing up their own adult children the
parents of those grandchildren to go
hunting and gathering food for the
grandchildren
finally older people in traditional
societies have one more huge
significance
that would never occur to us in modern
literate societies where our sources of
information are books and the internet
in contrast in traditional societies
without writing older people are the
repositories of information their
knowledge spells the difference between
survival and death for their whole
society in a time of crisis caused by
rare events of which only the oldest
people alive have had experience in non
literate traditional societies the
knowledge of all the people spells the
difference between life and death for
the entire society the other set of
reasons for variation and treatment of
the elderly is the Society’s cultural
values cultural values that emphasize
respect for all the people such as
philia piety and patriarchal families
contrasts with the low status of the
elderly in the United States older
Americans are at a disadvantage in job
applications for example a sociologist
of Boston University carried out the
experiment of submitting dozens of job
applications in response to ads by
prospective employers all the
applications had fictitious names of
women and all the applications were
identical except that half of the
applications said that the woman’s age
was 25 to 40 while the other half the
application said that her age was 45 to
60 the result of the experiment was that
employers were twice as likely to call a
woman age 25 to 40 for a job interview
than a woman aged 45 to 60 there are
several reasons for this low status of
the elderly in the United States one is
our Protestant work ethic which places
high value on work so older people who
are no longer working on respected
another reason is our American emphasis
on the virtues of self-reliance and
independence so that we instinctively
scorn all the people who are no longer
self-reliant and independent until a
third reason is our American
cult of youth that shows up even in our
advertisements ads for coca-cola and
beer always depict smiling young people
even though old people as well as young
people buy coca-cola and beer well what
has changed in the status of the elderly
today compared to their status in
traditional societies there have been a
few changes for the better and more
changes for the worse big changes for
the better include the facts that today
we enjoy much longer lives much better
health in our old age and much better
recreational opportunities changes for
the worse start with a cruel reality
that we now have far more old people and
fewer young people than at any time in
the past that means that all those old
people are more of a burden on the few
young people and that each old person
has less individual value another big
change for the worse and the status of
the elderly is the breaking of social
ties with age because all the people
their children and their friends all
move and scatter independently of each
other
many times during their lives the
average American moves every five years
and so all the people are likely to end
up living distant from their children
and the Friends of their youth but
perhaps the biggest of all the changes
for the worse on the status of I Olli is
that they are objectively less useful
than in traditional societies widespread
literacy means that they are no longer
useful as repositories of knowledge when
we want some information we look it up
in a book or we Google it instead of
finding some old person to ask
finally the slow pace of technological
change in traditional societies means
that what someone learns there as a
child is still useful when that person
is old but the rapid pace of
technological change today means that
what we learn as children is no longer
useful 60 years later and it also means
that we older people aren’t fluent in
the technologies essential to
iving in modern society today just to
watch a television program on the
television set in my own house I have to
operate a 40 one-button TV remote that I
find utterly confusing even though my
sons have written out the instructions
for me to watch television I have to
telephone my 25 year old sons and I have
to ask them to talk me through it while
I attempt to follow their instructions
and push those wretched 41 buttons what
can we do to improve the lives of the
elderly in the US and to make better use
of their value that’s a huge problem one
value of old people is that they are
increasingly useful for offering high
quality childcare as more and more young
women into the workforce and as fewer
young parents stay home as full-time
caretakers of their children at the same
time all the people have gained in value
today precisely because of their unique
experience of former conditions that
have now become rare because of rapid
change but that could come back for
example only people in their 70s or
older today can remember the experience
of living through a Great Depression can
remember the experience of living
through a world war the experience of
living through food and gas rationing
and the experience of debating whether
or not dropping atomic bombs would be
more horrible than the likely
consequences of not dropping atomic
bombs older people had that experience
younger people don’t we can surely do
better by learning from the lives of the
elderly and traditional societies their
lives are usually socially far richer
than our lives
although materially poorer their
children are often perhaps usually more
self-confident more independent more
socially skilled more precocious than
are our children they never die almost
never die of diabetes heart disease high
blood pressure stroke and the other non
communicable diseases
that would be the causes of death of
most of us in this room today those are
just some examples of what we can learn
from traditional societies I hope that
all of you will find it as fascinating
to read in my book about traditional
societies as I’ve found to live in them
[Applause]
you
tribes constitute thousands of natural
experiments in how to run a human
society they constitute experiments from
which we may learn we may be able to
learn things of practical use to us in
deciding how to raise our kids how to
treat our older people and other things
that we care a lot about the lives of
the elderly constitute a disaster area
of modern American society we can surely
do better by learning from the lives of
the elderly in traditional societies I
[Music]
wanted to talk this evening about a
topic in cultural geography to give me
an idea of how many of you will find
what I’m going to say this evening of
practical value I’d like to begin by
asking you to raise your hands in
response to either of two questions
first let me ask you to raise your hands
if you fall into any of the following
categories if you’re over 65 or if you
hope to live past age 65 or if you have
any parent or grandparent who has or did
live past age 65 would you please raise
your hands many positive responses
secondly if you are now under 65 and
have no intention of living past 65 and
have no parent or grandparent who
cleared 65 would you please raise your
hands not much response there but those
of you in the first category it’s you
who will find my talk this evening to be
a practical value and any of you in the
second category will still find what I’m
going to talk about this evening
fascinating even if it isn’t personally
relevant to you I’m going to talk about
growing older in traditional societies
this subject constitutes just one
chapter of my
latest book which compares traditional
small tribal societies with our big
modern societies all of us here this
evening are accustomed to living in big
industrial societies in permanent
housing with centralized governments to
make decisions with writing and books
and the internet where most people live
past age 60 where we are constantly
encountering strangers just as all of us
are this evening without freaking out
and where most of us eat food grown by
other people we forget that all of those
things arose very recently in human
history humans have constituted a
separate line of evolution for about 6
million years but almost all of the
things that I just mentioned didn’t
exist anywhere in the world eleven
thousand years ago they rose just within
the last 11 thousand years and some of
them such as the internet and the
phenomenon of most people living past
age 60 or only within the last century
or two that is the ancestors of all of
us here were living under traditional
tribal conditions until virtually
yesterday measured on the timescale of
human evolution until Europeans began to
expand around the globe 500 years ago
tribal societies still occupied large
parts of all continents but tribal
societies have recently been coming
under the control of modern societies
with state governments to the point
where today the last tribal societies
not yet under state control are confined
to small areas of New Guinea and the
Amazon basin those tribal societies
which constituted all human societies
for most of human history are far more
diverse than our modern big societies
all big societies that have governments
and where most people are strangers to
each other all of those big societies
are similar to each other and different
from tribal societies in many basic ways
regardless of whether the big societies
are American
German Chinese or Israeli tribes
constitute thousands of natural
experiments in how to run a human
society they constitute experiments from
which we may be able to learn we may be
able to learn things of practical use to
us in deciding how to raise our kids how
to treat our older people how to remain
healthy and other things that we care a
lot about the treatment of the elderly
varies enormous ly among traditional
societies from much worse to much better
than in our modern societies at the
worst extreme many traditional societies
get rid of their elderly in one of five
increasingly direct ways the most
indirect method to get rid of the
elderly is just to neglect old people
and not to feed them or to clean them
until they die the second method is to
abandon them when the group moves the
third method is to encourage older
people to commit suicide
a fourth more direct method is to kill
all the people with their own
cooperation for example among the cow
long people of Papua New Guinea a widow
whose husband has just died
traditionally asked her brothers or sons
to come strangle her and the fifth and
most direct method of getting rid of the
elderly is to kill them without their
consent or cooperation in what tribal
societies do children abandon or kill
their parents it happens mainly under
two sets of conditions one is in nomadic
hunter-gatherer societies that often
shift camp and that are physically
incapable of transporting old people who
can’t walk when the able-bodied young
people already have to carry their young
children and all of their physical
possessions the other condition is in
societies living in marginal or
fluctuating environments such as the
Arctic or deserts where there are
periodic food shortages and occasionally
there just isn’t enough food to keep
everybody alive what has to choose
whatever food is available has to be
reserved for the able-bodied people
still capable of contributing to the
tribes survival and to the children who
will grow up to be the tribes future
adults to us modern Americans it sounds
horrible to think of abandoning or
killing your own sick spouse or your own
elderly parent but what else could those
societies do they face a cruel choice
the old people had to do it to their own
parents and the old people know what now
is going to happen to them in fact many
of us many of you here have already
faced well you will face an ordeal
similar to the ordeal faced by those
nomadic or Arctic or desert tribal
society when you are the physician or
when you are the relative responsible
for the medical care of an old person
and when you’re the one who has to
decide whether and when to hold further
medical interventions and when just to
administer painkillers and sedatives for
a sick spouse or parent at the opposite
extreme in the treatment of the elderly
the happy extreme or the New Guinea
farming societies where I’ve been doing
my fieldwork for the past 50 years and
many other sedentary traditional
societies around the world in those
societies all the people are generally
cared for the affair they remain
valuable and they continue to live in
the same hot or else in a nearby Hut
near their children relatives and
lifelong friends in traditional New
Guinea societies where there aren’t
dentists and where all the people
gradually lose their teeth and can no
longer chew their own food their adult
children chew the food until it’s soft
spitting into a cup and give that soft
food to the toothless old person to eat
I don’t know of any modern Western
society in which such
care of old people is routine there were
two main sets of reasons for this
variation among societies in their
treatment of old people the variation
depends upon the usefulness of old
people and on the Society’s values first
as regards usefulness older people
continue to perform valuable services in
traditional societies and also in our
modern societies one use of older people
in traditional societies is that they
often are still effective at producing
food for example among Hadza
hunter-gatherers of Tanzania in Africa
grandmother’s are the most productive
women at finding and digging up wild
edible roots because grandmothers have
much more experience than do young women
finding the roots and they often still
have the necessary strength
hence measurements show that the growth
rate of the Hadza grandchild increases
with the amount of time that the child’s
grandmother spends foraging for food for
the child while older has a
hunter-gatherer of men they no longer
have the strength needed to spear a lion
they may still be useful at following
animal tracks and at capturing small or
slow prey that value of the experience
of older people in traditional societies
has also been confirmed for modern
farming societies among
nineteenth-century Canadian and Finnish
farmers each decade that a grandmother
survived past age 50 was correlated with
two extra grandchildren of that
grandmother eventually surviving because
of the resources made available by the
grandmother another traditional
usefulness of older people consists of
babysitting their grandchildren thereby
freeing up their own adult children the
parents of those grandchildren to go
hunting and gathering food for the
grandchildren
finally older people in traditional
societies have one more huge
significance
that would never occur to us in modern
literate societies where our sources of
information are books and the internet
in contrast in traditional societies
without writing older people are the
repositories of information their
knowledge spells the difference between
survival and death for their whole
society in a time of crisis caused by
rare events of which only the oldest
people alive have had experience in non
literate traditional societies the
knowledge of all the people spells the
difference between life and death for
the entire society the other set of
reasons for variation and treatment of
the elderly is the Society’s cultural
values cultural values that emphasize
respect for all the people such as
philia piety and patriarchal families
contrasts with the low status of the
elderly in the United States older
Americans are at a disadvantage in job
applications for example a sociologist
of Boston University carried out the
experiment of submitting dozens of job
applications in response to ads by
prospective employers all the
applications had fictitious names of
women and all the applications were
identical except that half of the
applications said that the woman’s age
was 25 to 40 while the other half the
application said that her age was 45 to
60 the result of the experiment was that
employers were twice as likely to call a
woman age 25 to 40 for a job interview
than a woman aged 45 to 60 there are
several reasons for this low status of
the elderly in the United States one is
our Protestant work ethic which places
high value on work so older people who
are no longer working on respected
another reason is our American emphasis
on the virtues of self-reliance and
independence so that we instinctively
scorn all the people who are no longer
self-reliant and independent until a
third reason is our American
cult of youth that shows up even in our
advertisements ads for coca-cola and
beer always depict smiling young people
even though old people as well as young
people buy coca-cola and beer well what
has changed in the status of the elderly
today compared to their status in
traditional societies there have been a
few changes for the better and more
changes for the worse big changes for
the better include the facts that today
we enjoy much longer lives much better
health in our old age and much better
recreational opportunities changes for
the worse start with a cruel reality
that we now have far more old people and
fewer young people than at any time in
the past that means that all those old
people are more of a burden on the few
young people and that each old person
has less individual value another big
change for the worse and the status of
the elderly is the breaking of social
ties with age because all the people
their children and their friends all
move and scatter independently of each
other
many times during their lives the
average American moves every five years
and so all the people are likely to end
up living distant from their children
and the Friends of their youth but
perhaps the biggest of all the changes
for the worse on the status of I Olli is
that they are objectively less useful
than in traditional societies widespread
literacy means that they are no longer
useful as repositories of knowledge when
we want some information we look it up
in a book or we Google it instead of
finding some old person to ask
finally the slow pace of technological
change in traditional societies means
that what someone learns there as a
child is still useful when that person
is old but the rapid pace of
technological change today means that
what we learn as children is no longer
useful 60 years later and it also means
that we older people aren’t fluent in
the technologies essential to
iving in modern society today just to
watch a television program on the
television set in my own house I have to
operate a 40 one-button TV remote that I
find utterly confusing even though my
sons have written out the instructions
for me to watch television I have to
telephone my 25 year old sons and I have
to ask them to talk me through it while
I attempt to follow their instructions
and push those wretched 41 buttons what
can we do to improve the lives of the
elderly in the US and to make better use
of their value that’s a huge problem one
value of old people is that they are
increasingly useful for offering high
quality childcare as more and more young
women into the workforce and as fewer
young parents stay home as full-time
caretakers of their children at the same
time all the people have gained in value
today precisely because of their unique
experience of former conditions that
have now become rare because of rapid
change but that could come back for
example only people in their 70s or
older today can remember the experience
of living through a Great Depression can
remember the experience of living
through a world war the experience of
living through food and gas rationing
and the experience of debating whether
or not dropping atomic bombs would be
more horrible than the likely
consequences of not dropping atomic
bombs older people had that experience
younger people don’t we can surely do
better by learning from the lives of the
elderly and traditional societies their
lives are usually socially far richer
than our lives
although materially poorer their
children are often perhaps usually more
self-confident more independent more
socially skilled more precocious than
are our children they never die almost
never die of diabetes heart disease high
blood pressure stroke and the other non
communicable diseases
that would be the causes of death of
most of us in this room today those are
just some examples of what we can learn
from traditional societies I hope that
all of you will find it as fascinating
to read in my book about traditional
societies as I’ve found to live in them
[Applause]
you
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