Living in an unglobal world

In the 15th century and soon after, Europeans reached the Americas and Australia. Then they went into the interior of Africa and Asia. Many parts of the world became European colonies. Later many of these colonies became independent. But for the people living in these places, the world was no longer the same, it had become global.
What does this mean? Because you are reading Jantar Mantar, you know English. If you are male, it is likely that you wear shirts and trousers. Maybe that is the uniform that you wear to school. You may like drinking tea or coffee, or soft drinks like Coca cola, or eating chocolate. Your meals may be based on wheat and/or rice, and you may be eating vegetables like potatoes or tomatoes. You watch television, go to movies. The surprising thing is that all over the world, whether you go to America or Russia, Brazil or Australia, you will find people there have these same habits.
Film director Jamie Uys made a funny movie in 1980 called "The gods must be crazy". In this movie a man in the Kalahari desert (his name is N!xau, and I did not make a mistake writing it) comes across a bottle of Coca cola. The humour in the film comes about because neither he nor his tribespeople know what this strange bottle is. You as a globalized watcher of the film, find it strange how people lead unglobal lives.

The New Guinea highlanders
It is not so long ago, only in the 1930s, that some white Australian miners went to the interior of the island of Papua New Guinea, and found people who did not know of the existence of white people. The first photograph shows the first meeting of a Dani highlander tribe of New Guinea with Europeans. The second photograph shows a terrified highlander running away and crying. Both photographs come from the miner Michael Leahy who filmed the incident and wrote a book called First contact. He made it into a documentary film in 1983.
The highlanders are wearing a kind of grass lungi. They have bags made of netting on their shoulders. Their heads are dressed with bird feathers.
There were other differences. These people led a hunter-gatherer life. They used parts of the forest, they hunted animals, and they had vegetable gardens, for which they made ditches for irrigation. Sweet potatoes, banana and cassava were grown. They did not have crop-based agriculture which is known in Asia from around 9000 BCE.
As the white Australians went from hill to hill of the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s, they found that different tribes lived in each valley, knowing only of tribes in the neighbouring valleys. Of the world beyond about 40 or 50 kilometres, the tribespeople had no idea. They had not seen or even heard of the sea, which was about 100 to 200 kilometres away. White men had been settled there for four centuries before 1930, but they had never seen any. Even the languages spoken by the tribes were different. The world has around 7000 languages. Papua New Guinea has about 1000 of them.

Territory
The different tribes have exclusive territories which means that they do not overlap. The photograph shows a watchtower between two tribes. People who moved from one territory to the other were killed without any explanation, unless they were related to the territory they were trespassing (there were weddings across tribes), or if they were from a tribe which was in alliance.
Thus tribesmen thought of people as "friends", those from their village and neighbouring villages who were presently in alliance, or as "enemies", those from neighbouring villages which were currently hostile. Both kinds of people were known by name, face or description. Perhaps around a thousand "friends" and "enemies" were identifiable.
The rest, "strangers", why would they come? To steal, or to kill your group. So the best way to deal with strangers, the Dani thought, was to kill them. You may be wondering why the Dani cried on seeing the white strangers? It was their belief that when a person died his skin changed to white. So they thought the Australians were dead people (ghosts) who had come back to life.
For some time the only outside people who visited the New Guinea highlanders were anthropologists who study human life and behaviour in different communities. In India this is still true for some of the Andaman and Nicobar islanders. Our government does not allow people to visit some of the islands so that their peoples' way of life is not threatened. The picture shows a Jarawa tribal boy.

War
In 1966 some anthropologists who were living with a Dani highlander tribe got to see a war between two tribal alliances. The war started because three people from one side, who had gone for a pig feast to their relatives' village, were killed because on the way they trespassed on the land of the opposite side. There were many battles, because if one side took revenge, then the other side had to retaliate and again take revenge.
The picture was taken by anthropologist Karl Heider during one of the battles, with about 400 people on each side, fighting each other with spears. At the end of the day, one alliance (the northern Dani) had killed 125 of the other (the southern Dani). The entire population of each alliance was about 5000, so a significant percentage were wiped out.

Learning without school
How do highlander children grow up?
You must have realized they have no schools. They mostly learn by playing and a lot of their play is imitation. For example they play "war" with small bows and arrows tipped with grass. They hunt small birds. They build imitation huts and gardens with ditches. They drag a flower (or a beetle) attached to a string and shout "pig-pig". They make figures of string, designs of knotted grass.
Because there is no radio or television to watch, they talk a lot to each other and to adults. Adults tell them stories. Many are about accidents and deaths, from these they learn dangers to watch out for. Older children, about 10 years old, might go and stay with an adult who needs their help for some work. In general girls and very young children stay with their mother and with other women, boys stay with their father and with other men.

Asterix and the Gauls
You might have read Asterix comic books. They are about "a small Gaulish village", surrounded by camps of the Roman army. You will laugh at all the jokes, chuckle at their liking for the meat of wild pigs, and enjoy the comic heroes' fights with Romans and other Europeans. But think about it. If you lived in a small village, you might keep living there without going anywhere very far. How different would the life in Gaul have been from the Dani highlanders?

With inputs from
The world until yesterday
by
Jared Diamond