Free Eavesdropping by John L. Locke Page A

the Sakalava still subsisted on hunting and gathering, but had also begun to farm.
    The primary dwelling place of the Sakalava was a one- or two-room structure with a doorway and no windows. Feeley-Harnik described it as “a portable set of walls, lashed to a timber frame and covered with thatch.” 19 The reference to “doorways” is because there was a taboo on the use of doors—or even, in most places, door curtains. The Sakalava also disapproved of fences around their houses. A house with curtains on the outside doors, or with fences and walls, was seen as a threat to normal sociality.
    The Sakalava were generally to be found—and were supposed to be found—outside their houses, in the company of others. “To stay alone in the house,” wrote Feeley-Harnik, “is considered a sure sign of evil intent.” 20 Even the house itself could pose problems, Feeley-Harnik wrote, since it is meant to remove the occupants from the larger social order. “Secrecy and separation,”she continued, “indicate at best a lack of generosity, a suspiciously anti-social striving for distinction.” 21
    The language of the Sakalava also contained an interesting clue to some perceived linkage between domestication and personal dishonesty. The word
mody
meant “at home” or “heading home,” but it also meant “to pretend to be what one is not.” 22 Later we will have opportunities to return to this intriguing connection when we examine a new being that was nurtured behind domestic walls—the public self.
The Zinacantecos
    A few years after Feeley-Harnik presented her study of the Sakalava, Leslie and John Haviland described the village of Nabenchauk, Mexico. Nabenchauk was one of a cluster of Indian villages known collectively as the township of Zinacantan, nestled in the high valleys of the mountains in southern Mexico. 23
    Like the Sakalava, the Zinacantecos had ambivalent feelings about privacy. “There are,” wrote the Havilands, “strict canons of privacy which pertain to the physical intrusion by others into private space.” 24 These canons were implemented, in part, with fences. All the houses were fenced in, and villagers were forbidden from passing through the fence without permission. They also had no windows—if the Zinacantecos wanted more light they had to open the door. This was not a matter of neglect; it was due to active resistance. A few years earlier the government had given them houses with large, unshuttered windows. When the Indians moved in, they papered the windows over or bricked them in.
    But as private as the Zinacanteco homes were built to be, staying indoors, or even closing the house door, was considered “a gross and open admission of being up to no good.” “Prying,” wrote the Havilands, “with the eyes and ears tuned to all goings on around one, is an ordinary behaviour in Nabenchauk. One expects that all one’s business that is carried on where it
could
be seen or overheardis, in fact, seen and overheard. Similarly, one presumes that ignoring any aspect of others that can be perceived is simply foolish.” 25
    To escape this microscopic existence, the Zinacantecos avoided using the area outside the house—even seemed, in some sense, to be afraid of it. Entering truly public places like the waterhole, the village paths, and the shops was tantamount to going on stage, for “the eyes of any of fifty houses may be watching.” 26 Even conversations were a contest in information control, with one party “trying his best to pump information from his interlocutor, while the interlocutor uses every ploy he can to evade and deflect the other’s purpose.” 27
    Clearly, the Zinacantecos and the Sakalava—two of many small-scale societies in which there was nervousness about personal information—were ambivalent about domestic walls. They were also hypocritical, for they were desperate to know what was going on behind the walls of others, but just as desperately fought to keep secret what