Free Eavesdropping by John L. Locke Page B

was taking place behind their own. What was going on here? What were the
perceptual
consequences of living behind walls?
    It helps to consider the structure of sedentary societies. Where tiny hunter-gatherer bands had been mostly egalitarian, the larger agriculture-based settlements were structured in a more hierarchical fashion. 28 In such arrangements there is heightened competition to acquire resources. Those who succeed may be seen as selfish, their success occurring at the expense of others. It is likely that many of the early settlers were tempted to conceal obvious signs of success, including any unusual possessions, like scrub-jays that bury their food more strategically when other jays can see them, or Samoans who eat in closed houses.
    This hierarchical structure was functional. As hunter-gatherers, they had used their eyes and ears to prevent squabbles from arising, frequently by nipping things in the bud. When disputes were irresolvable, they occasionally appealed to outside sources for mediation, or as Richard Lee said, “voted with their feet.”But relocation was no longer an easy option when people began to see themselves as residential, with fixed addresses. In agricultural villages, leaders were needed to deal with the more complex issues arising within these larger communities, and to resolve the increased number of disputes. 29
    The new sedentists needed to keep an eye on each other, and they were acquiring new reasons for doing so. 30 Less and less did they look
horizontally
at individuals who had to be reminded of the need to share, collaborate, and play by a common set of rules. Increasingly, they looked
vertically
at people who had achieved higher status, or at competitors who were aspiring to greater power.
Over-exposure
    Rapoport was not sure why people built houses in places where the weather was pleasant, but he speculated that the reasons may have had something to do with religion, status, or some “other” factor. In his book on
The Domestication of the Human Species
, New Zealand anthropologist Peter Wilson speculated on what this “other” factor might be. It was surveillance. When groups enlarged, he suggested, openly living people couldn’t stand the perceptual pressure.
    It is widely known that human settlements, like primate colonies, have an optimum size. When they exceed this size, as the Kung camps occasionally did, they tend to fragment. Some of the members take off, a serious threat if the evacuees are skilled hunters. But Wilson had a different idea. “One immediate cause of such fission,” he suggested, is “the strain between neighbors unable to trust one another’s privacy or countenance one another’s surveillance … too diligent a scrutiny of the comings, goings, and doings of neighbors can quickly build to resentment, evasion, and the eruption of hostility.” 31
    What Wilson’s idea boils down to is this. Life in transparent or even semi-transparent societies can become hard to handle. If itdoes, continuous self-exposure is likely to be withdrawn when the objects of this attention—the other tribe members—cannot take it anymore. But it may not be enough to feign a preoccupation with objects, or face silently away from the group.
    The most dramatic exercises in withdrawal occur in precisely those societies that display the greatest exposure. The Mehinacu pushed the two extremes about as far as they could. On a personal level, they had a number of ways to achieve social isolation. They could plunge into the forest that surrounded the village, taking any of the paths that led through the thick foliage to small clearings. There, the villagers were free to carry on clandestine activities with little fear of detection.
    When they were at home, villagers were protected by a code of etiquette that forbade spontaneous invasion. 32 But the more significant feature of Mehinacu life was the existence of
formal seclusion rituals
when, by custom, villagers were expected to