Free Eavesdropping by John L. Locke

del Fuego, an archipelago off the southern tip of South America. The climate is almost arctic there, but the natives contented themselves with windbreaks made of seal or animal skins, sewn together and attached to a circular arrangement of poles that were stuck into the ground. 12 Very similar shields were built on the Pampas, in southern Buenos Aires Province, and by the aborigines in Tasmania. In many places where it was hot, however, people built elaborate houses. Witnessing these paradoxes, Rapoport concluded that from a climatic perspective, the housing pattern of primitive and peasant builders is “
irrational
.” 13 A similar conclusion was reached by Edmund Carpenter after he inspected Eskimo igloos that feature large open areas rather than the series of small internal enclosures that one expects in frigid climates. The Eskimos, wrote Carpenter, display “a magnificent disregard for environmental determinism.” 14
    In places where people did build houses, many
resisted the temptation to live in them
. Sedentism had encouraged the construction of houses in some places, but it was not enough, by itself, to produce homes. Why? By modern standards, it seems strange that a person would go to the effort to build a house, store all of his possessions in it, spend the bulk of his free time around it, develop a sense of territoriality about the place and the structure, but continue living on the outside.
    What was being resisted was the cessation of social transparency. Peter Wilson pointed out that this meaning of privacy, a by-product of domestication, was “not natural to human existence.” 15 Private living, in any form, drew curiosity and suspicion.
    Evidence of this was acquired in the early 1970s, when anthropologists John Roberts and Thomas Gregor investigated the relationship between certain aspects of small-scale societies and the amount of privacy afforded members by their houses. Roberts and Gregor constructed a privacy index based on the permeability of dwellings to sight and sound, and the presence or absence of closable windows, doors, and internal partitions. It also took into account the number of persons that lived together under one roof, and the openness of the villages. By these criteria,
in fully three-quarters of the societies people were considered highly visible. 16
    The residents of tiny villages were reluctant to live privately, but it is not as though their homes were luxurious. By modern standards they were cramped and dark, and in many parts of the world they were cold and damp. The early homes were also malodorous—domesticated animals slept inside with their owners—and none had tables, chairs, or beds. The new “insiders” slept on the ground. It was like camping “in.”
    One might suppose that the new homeowners set about rectifying these problems as soon as they got the hang of indoor living. But there are no indications that they did. In fact, homes—what they were, physically, and what they afforded, psychologically—remained unchanged, essentially, for
thousands of years
. In seventeenth-centuryEngland most lower middle-class families still had little or no furniture—they continued to sit and sleep on the floor—and in semi-rural areas the situation was little better a hundred years later. 17
    With so little comfort in their homes, and so little interest in home improvement, one gathers that our ancestors were ambivalent about walled life. Were they, like porcupines, struggling to find the right place to draw the line between safety and warmth? Clues are available in two societies, the Sakalava and the Zinacantecos.
The Sakalava
    Some sort of domestic ambivalence was evident among the Sakalava people of Madagascar—a perfect society for us to examine since, by coincidence, they were in transition when anthropologist Gillian Feeley-Harnik studied them in the 1970s. At that time, Sakalava villages numbered between twenty and eighty people. 18 The interesting thing is that