The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [79]
AS IT SETS the boundaries, culture codifies the price system that operates inside them. The Mursi, nomadic herders in southern Ethiopia, disfigure the lower lips of fifteen-year-old girls, cutting them and inserting progressively larger clay plates that stretch out the lip. Anthropologists describe the plates as markers of adulthood and reproductive potential. This provides no clue as to why such a painful marker was chosen. Economics suggests disfigurement may have arisen as a strategy to make Mursi women less attractive to slave traders. The practice persisted after the slave trade died out because parents tend to pass what they are taught on to their children, providing norms with momentum. But it was originally viewed as a trade-off: big lips were the price of freedom.
The supposedly universal human propensity to fairness has different modalities around the world—depending on individual societies’ calculations of costs and benefits. They can be measured using an experiment called the Ultimatum Game.
In this game, player A is given money and instructed to share it however she wants with player B. If B refuses, they both walk away empty-handed. If A behaved according to the dicta of economics, she would offer as little as possible and B would accept, on the grounds that it’s better than nothing. Both would end up better off. But people rarely exhibit this kind of behavior. In a series of experiments performed around the world, a group of social scientists encountered a wide array of strategies, reflecting different cultural attributes that seemed shaped to mesh with their specific societies.
In the tropical forests of southern Perú, Machiguenga villagers playing the Ultimatum Game offered only 26 percent of their money, on average. But the Paraguayan Aché sometimes went to the extreme of offering all their money. And the vast majority of Lamalera whalers from Indonesia offered at least half. The researchers suggested that specific strategies used by each group fit each group’s social dynamics. In groups that trade little outside the family unit, like the Machiguenga, people are likely to feel little social pressure to share—so it’s cheaper to be selfish. The Lamalera in Indonesia, by contrast, hunt collectively. They have elaborate rules to share entire whales. Social stigma is more costly.
Culture not only sets collective prices, it surrounds them in a ritual, narrative envelope. In the winter of 1984-1985, very few caribou returned to the hunting grounds of the Chisasibi Cree of James Bay in northern Quebec. The hunt had been heavy the year before. Many caribou had been killed. The village elders told the young hunters a tale: in the 1910s, there was a gruesome hunt. Indians newly armed with repeating rifles butchered thousands of caribou. Food was wasted. The river was polluted with rotten carcasses. For many years after that, the caribou stayed away.
The point of the story was that the caribou would return to the Chisasibi’s hunting grounds only if hunters behaved responsibly. It was effective. In the winter of 1985-1986 each of the approximately four hundred Chisasibi families took only about two caribou apiece. The imperative of resource management—the price of overhunting—was conveyed by invoking the caribou’s presumed will.
The different beliefs that we take to be markers of deep cultural distinctions arise as adaptations to different environments. Nigerians and Ugandans are much more likely to agree on values than Nigerians and Japanese. Egyptians and Jordanians agree more readily than Danes and Pakistanis. A Dane disagrees with a Swede 33.8 percent of the time but disagrees with a Tanzanian 56.3 percent of the time. This is not merely