The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Read Free Page A

territory is attacked, it would then be preferable just to move to another area. Finally, territories are likely to be non-exclusive if group membership is fluid, and if group members often visit or transfer to other groups. It makes no sense to keep out another group if half of its members are visitors or transferees from your own group anyway.
    However, the usual form of land division under these conditions selecting for non-exclusivity isn’t the extreme of a free-for-all in which anybody can do anything anywhere. Instead, it still is the case that each group is identified with a specific core area. Non-exclusive societies differ from exclusive societies in that, instead of the Dani no-man’s land clearly delineated by watch-towers, recognized borders don’t exist, and land ownership just becomes increasingly vague as one moves increasing distances from one’s core area. Another distinction of non-exclusive from exclusive societies is that neighboring groups receive permission to visit your territory more often and for more different purposes—especially to obtain food and water at certain seasons or in certain years. Correspondingly, you can readily obtain permission to visit your neighbor’s territory when you are the one in need, so the arrangement becomes an exchange based on reciprocity and mutual benefit.
    An example of non-exclusive land ownership that has been described in detail is the !Kung hunter-gatherers ( Plate 6 ) of the Nyae Nyae area of the Kalahari Desert. When studied in the 1950s, they consisted of 19 bands, containing between 8 and 42 people per band, each band with its own “territory” (termed a
n!ore
) of between about 100 and 250 square miles in area. But boundaries between n!ores were vague: as anthropologists and !Kung informants walked together from the informants’ camp towards the next n!ore, the informants became increasingly uncertain, or disagreed increasingly with each other, about which n!ore they were now in, the further they got from the center of their n!ore. There were no watch-towers or ridge-line trails to mark n!ore boundaries.
    !Kung n!ores are occupied non-exclusively because it is both necessary and possible to share n!ores’ resources. Resource sharing is necessary because water in the Kalahari Desert is scarce, and each band needs to spend much of its time near a waterhole. But there is unpredictable variation in rainfall between years. Many waterholes in the area go dry in the dry season. Only 2 waterholes in the area never failed during the period studied; 3 more were usually available throughout the year but failed in some years; 5 more lasted only occasionally through the dry season; and 50 were seasonal and always went dry for part of the year. Hence in the dry season, up to 200 people from various bands gather at a permanent waterhole with the permission of its owners, who in turn are permitted to visit and use resources of other n!ores when those are abundant. Thus, water considerations
require
the !Kung to have non-exclusive territories: it would be pointless to claim exclusive use of an area if that area might run out of water and thus become useless. Conversely, the seasonal superabundance of some resources
permits
non-exclusivity: it is pointless to off end potentially useful allies by keeping them out of your territory at a time when it is producing far more food than you yourself can eat. That’s especially true of the food staple of mongongo nuts seasonally available in enormous crops, and it’s also true of seasonal crops of wild beans and melons.
    Supposedly, anyone from any band in the Nyae Nyae area can hunt anywhere, including outside of his own band’s n!ore. However, if you kill an animal outside your n!ore, you should give a present of its meat if you then encounter a member of the band owning that n!ore. But that freedom of access for hunting doesn’t apply to !Kung hunters from more distantareas. More generally, neighboring !Kung bands can