Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History

Studies in Social and Cultural History

Barrington Moore, Jr

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351696760
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: History

This title was first published in 1984. Focusing on Brazil, this text covers issues such as: the legacy of colour; social realities; and diversions and assertive behaviour.

Anthropological Perspectives
Chapter 1

Privacy, Anger, and Dependence: Notes on an Eskimo Community

Occasionally a good ethnographic report can reveal unsuspected yet elementary aspects of human feelings and behavior. They are elementary in the sense of being psychological and social processes that recur very widely as essential components of more complex human relationships. There seem to be several ingredients in such a discovery. One is a reader with a moderately but not too narrowly focused curiosity on an issue with which the anthropologist is not explicitly concerned. Unintentionally revealed evidence is less likely to be contaminated with what an author hopes to prove. Another ingredient is the simplicity of the society under investigation because simplicity strips away confusing considerations to reveal elementary ones. A third ingredient may be a society that displays some extreme or unusual features. If either the physical environment or certain aspects of behavior, such as an apparent lack of aggression, are near one end of the currently known spectrum of human variability, the resulting emphasis can render visible unsuspected causal relationships.

To see how half a dozen people can get along together inside an igloo through a long arctic winter can, as I hope to show, tell us a good deal about human needs for privacy and autonomy as well as the psychic and social costs of politeness and cooperation. One last ingredient is an anthropologist who is a candid and accurate observer, able to communicate findings in lucid prose, not pseudoscientific mush.

All these qualities come together in a study by Jean L. Briggs of a remote Eskimo community of twenty to thirty-five people living at the mouth of the Back River in the Canadian Northwest Territories, northwest of Hudson Bay and well inside the Arctic Circle. These people call themselves the Utkuhikhalingmiut, which the author mercifully abbreviates to Utku.¹ Like other Eskimos they live in a physical setting that the extreme cold renders harsh and dangerous for anyone who is not an Eskimo and on occasion even for them. For this reason it is appropriate to regard their situation as extreme, despite their generally effective adaptation to it, an adaptation that, at least while food is plentiful, can produce expressions of contentment and preference for their own way of life over that of the nearest mission and trading settlement, several days away by dogsled. On the other hand, their recent history also includes famine.²

Toward the end of August 1963, a prospective member of this society, the RadclifFe graduate student in anthropology Jean L. Briggs stepped out of a small airplane with but a rudimentary knowledge of Eskimo and a great deal of trepidation. There was to be no more contact with civilization, not even by radio, until the winter months when the Eskimos made an occasional journey to the mission-trading center by dogsled. The only Eskimos who knew some English, two or three schoolchildren, were to leave on the plane's return trip. She would have to survive the arctic winter on the basis of Eskimo technology without Eskimo skills and barely knowing the language. And she was far from sure that she could.³

Immediately on her arrival she found herself in a trap of forced sociability, as visiting the white woman became a major diversion for the Eskimos. Her tent was never empty from the time she awoke in the morning, and sometimes before, until, frayed to exhaustion, she retreated to the warm protection of her sleeping bag, leaving departing visitors to tie the tent flaps shut as they went out. She felt wooden within and without, her face from smiling, her mind and tongue from struggling with unaccustomed and meaningless sounds. To be sure, she recognized her visitors as extraordinarily benign and considerate. They performed many little favors, such as noticing when her fish was all eaten and then bringing her more. If she was slow in attacking the slimy raw flesh, they assumed she did not know how to cut it. So they filleted it for her. They lit her lamp when her fingers were too stiff with cold, fixed the Primus stove when it clogged, sharpened her knife when it was dull—all without asking.

In a word, Briggs was not competent to participate in their society, at least not yet. But she had to take part. She felt their anticipation of her needs as immensely warming, as if she were being cared for like a three-year-old. She recognized the Eskimos' constant visits as a sign of friendly acceptance as well as hunger for the luxuries of tea and bannock, a native fried delicacy. But as she reports, "I could not help seeing them as an invasion of privacy. I felt trapped by my visitors." Nothing depressed her more than inactivity, she adds, and when the site of inactivity was a tent permeated with the dank chill of autumn, the situation rapidly became unbearable. The fact that the Eskimos when they felt cold could go out and do some warming work or chase each other around the tents while she had to attend the next relay of visitors aroused her resentment.

This entrapment and tremendous yearning for privacy lasted for six days. Only later did she learn that Eskimo etiquette did not impose the obligation of constant attendance on a visitor's wants.⁴ The essence of the entrapment was the imposition of a social obligation (1) from which there appeared to be no escape, (2) that she was not competent to carry out and which therefore (3) produced severe psychological and even physical pain. The privacy that she so dearly wanted would have amounted to escape from or protection against the obligations imposed by the surrounding society.

There is a fourth element in this situation: her sense of dependence or feeling "like a three-year-old." It was through an intensification of this sense of dependence and then a partial surrender to it that she was able to overcome or at least anaesthetize her longing for privacy and a degree of personal autonomy. As we shall see in due course, a competent adult Eskimo does not have to surrender so much. Adequate participation comes much more easily. But the conflict between the desire for independent and even "selfish" behavior and the objective need to depend on others remains a central aspect of Eskimo society—and in any human society with any painful obligations.

After six days the steady stream of visitors to Jean Briggs's tent stopped for a moment. She seized this break to flee from her tent to spend the day alone, wandering in the tundra, memorizing Eskimo vocabulary, and feeling homesick. Coming upon two women picking berries as she retraced her steps in the late afternoon, she wondered guiltily if they had sensed the rebuff underlying her flight that morning. But they welcomed her warmly, giving the impression that they had overlooked her hostile withdrawal. Not until a year later did she learn that Eskimos never overlook such behavior; they merely conceal their disapproval for a time. "At the time," she writes, "secure in my innocence, I felt the giddy hope of being . . . accepted. More, for the first time I really enjoyed the company of my new acquaintances. And it dawned on me how forlorn I would be in that wilderness if they forsook me. Far, far better to suffer loss of privacy."⁵ She had become aware for the first time how important her Eskimo neighbors were for her survival and how dependent she was on their favorable response and personal reassurance. The conflict between her need for privacy and for the material and psychological support from her hosts was to recur, though in a somewhat less intense form, as she developed more resources to cope with her situation.⁶

For the purpose of this inquiry it does not matter a great deal that Briggs, who describes herself as a middle-class American, may have had a stronger culturally induced need for privacy—in the quite specific sense of barriers against intrusion and ways to cut short undesired sociability—than did her Eskimo hosts. Since Eskimo culture has its own set of circuit breakers for shedding social overload,† it would be unwise to assume that middle-class Americans generally put a higher value on privacy.

So far the inquiry has focused on the conditions that intensify the desire to be left alone and those that extinguish this desire, to replace it with one for responsive human contact and social support. We can assume that both desires are part of the general repertoire of human responses to the social and physical environment, at least in a latent form, and that they are emphasized or deemphasized in a generalized fashion by different societies and cultural norms. To repeat what can be learned so far by generalizing from the Eskimo data, the need for privacy amounts to a desire for socially approved protection against painful social obligations. The desire for privacy can be extinguished by a need for dependence that comes from an awareness of helplessness and isolation.

In the hope of gaming further insights we may now explore the connections between obligations and dependence among the Utku themselves. To do that, it is necessary to understand how they lived.

For the adult males, getting food appears to be life's predominant concern. For the adult females it is taking care of the males, a division of labor that is felt as fair since the males are perceived to take the risks and do the hardest work.⁷ Fishing and hunting are the principal sources of livelihood. There is also some trapping of furs to exchange for those white man's goods such as Primus stoves that make Eskimo life easier

Both their winter economy of a compact settlement of igloos and their summer economy of widely scattered hunting camps and tents appear to be quite individualistic, or more accurately familistic, though Briggs does not provide a detailed account. Among these Eskimos at any rate I found no report of any economic activity that required the cooperation of all adults in the community.‡ Such activities do exist in other simple hunting bands, such as some African pygmies, and have far-reaching effects on social life. But among the Utku, decisions about where and how to fish and hunt are made by the head of the household. Where there is a cooperative group, it is likely to be a pair of males from the same kin group.

More generally, the "real family"—an elastic term that can stretch from the nuclear family to an extended one including genealogical or adoptive siblings—is the main social unit for both production and consumption. As Briggs writes: Whenever possible, it is with their "real family" that people live, work, travel, and share whatever they have. Moreover, it is only with their "real family" that they appear to feel completely comfortable and safe.⁸

In a manner that accords with their atomistic economy, the Utku cherish independence of thought and action as a natural prerogative and look askance at anyone who shows signs of wanting to tell them what to do. There are no formal chiefs whose authority transcends that of the separate householders.⁹ Briggs also found them a people reluctant to answer questions. They displayed "an extremely strong sense of privacy with regard to their thoughts, their feelings, and motivations; and I feared to offend it."¹⁰

Though Briggs reports no instance of an Utku unburdening his or her soul to her in the course of her seventeen-months' stay, that is quite understandable in the light of her circumstances. Living in very close quarters with an Eskimo family, there were few opportunities for a tête-à-tête. In this sense privacy was an almost unattainable commodity among the Utku. Furthermore, toward the end of her stay, when her command of the language might have been enough for more extensive and intimate talks, due to circumstances beyond her control her Utku hosts came to distrust her.

Against what danger then is this strong desire for privacy directed? As becomes increasingly clear in the course of Briggs's account, both the capacity and desire to control feelings, especially hostile feelings, are part of a desire to maintain an atmosphere of social harmony. It would be misleading to label this air of smiling politeness and consideration for others as a façade, with the implication that it is a decoration without structural function. In a society with no formal institutions for the exercise of authority and with an individualistic or familistic economy, and where all members are exposed intermittently to risks of drowning, freezing, and running short of food or other supplies crucial for survival—not to mention comfort by Eskimo standards—it makes excellent adaptive sense to create and sustain an ethos of social harmony and considerateness alongside one of sturdy self-reliance.

Utku society was also one without specialized crafts or occupations and the forms of cooperation and hierarchy that such specialization frequently produces. The division of labor followed the lines of age and sex, and manifested itself within the kin group and household. Nevertheless, living as they do in a potentially dangerous environment where individuals are liable to run short of specific supplies, the Utku like other Eskimos soften their individualism with a strong emphasis on reciprocity and responsiveness to the needs of others. In practice this emphasis takes the form of a strong obligation to share, especially to share food, and to lend a helping hand or do small favors.¹¹This sharing and mutual assistance was in large measure a safeguard against inconveniences and more serious misfortunes to which all were liable. Hence adult Utku were quite dependent on each other.

Dependence can be a very attractive situation, especially in a social group with an ethic and etiquette of warm, friendly concern. It is a pleasure to be able to relax from time to time, secure in the awareness that someone will be smilingly helpful. But for the adult there are costs. There is an obligation to share and to help, an obligation that is liable to be inconvenient if not burdensome on occasion. Then comes the temptation to stint one's own performance of an obligation, to avert one's attention from the existence of the obligation. When that happens, if not sooner, the neighbors begin to talk. The air will become poisoned with gossip and recrimination; the easy friendly politeness that seems so natural and attractive will turn out to be a mask that covers and but partly controls a slowly churning cauldron of resentment.

This was the situation among the Utku as Briggs came to see it on learning the language and getting to know her hosts. The attitude was clearest in connection with one deviant couple, Nilak and his wife Niqui, a woman of apparently subnormal intelligence. For reasons that are not altogether clear, this couple seemed rather less effective than others in providing for its own needs and a bit negligent about obligations to share. It lived somewhat apart from the others. The family with which Briggs lived, and into which she accepted adoption as a daughter, always maintained superficially cordial relations with Nilak and his spouse. But in private they were very critical and hostile. Nilak's warm Eskimo smile, which his wife somehow could not manage to produce, concealed bad temper, stinginess, and unhelpfulness, Briggs was told. These are three of the most damning traits one Eskimo can ascribe to another.¹² His unhelpfulness took the form of Failure to offer food or assistance. Nevertheless he shared meals on occasion with the family in which Briggs lived without any overt penalty for his failure to contribute.¹³

If Nilak's behavior was extreme it was not unique: the same reluctance to carry out obligations occurred at times within the kin group. So of course did the gossip and verbal aggression. They were widespread enough to lead Briggs in time to comment on the Eskimos' "malicious tendency to cast others' behavior in the worst possible terms."¹⁴ Fear of hostility and other people's moodiness, she remarks elsewhere, is endemic. A moody person may be planning to knife you in the back when out fishing, to claim on return that you had drowned.¹⁵ These observations shed a revealing light on the famous Eskimo smile whose absence is evidently rather ominous.

Thus these Eskimos display their full share of the normal human hostility toward individuals unwilling or unable to perform obligations defined as socially necessary. What does distinguish the Eskimos is the extent to which they denied this hostility through their code of politeness. † The strength of the denial may be a consequence of the rather strong fear of personal hostilities. Such fear seems quite realistic. Seve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
• CHAPTER 2 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN CLASSICAL ATHENS
• CHAPTER 3 PRIVACY, PROPHECY, AND POLITICS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
• CHAPTER 4 ANCIENT CHINESE CONCEPTIONS OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
• CHAPTER 5 SOME IMPLICATIONS AND INQUIRIES
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX