From the Book - Regular Print
List of tables and figures -- Prologue: At the airport: -- Airport scene -- Why study traditional societies? -- States -- Types of traditional societies -- Approaches, causes, and sources -- Small book about a big subject -- Plan of the book -- Part 1: Setting The Stage By Dividing Space: -- Chapter 1: Friends, enemies, strangers, and traders: -- Boundary -- Mutually exclusive territories -- Non-exclusive land use -- Friends, enemies, and strangers -- First contacts -- Trade and traders -- Market economies -- Traditional forms of trade -- Traditional trade items -- Who trades what? -- Tiny nations -- Part 2: Peace And War: -- Chapter 2: Compensation for the death of a child: -- Accident -- Ceremony -- What if? -- What the state did -- New Guinea compensation -- Life-long relationships -- Other non-state societies -- State authority -- State civil justice -- Defects in state civil justice -- State criminal justice -- Restorative justice -- Advantages and their price -- Chapter 3: Shorter chapter, about a tiny war: -- Dani war -- War's time-line -- War's death toll -- Chapter 4: Longer chapter, about many wars: -- Definitions of war -- Sources of information -- Forms of traditional warfare -- Mortality rates -- Similarities and differences -- Ending warfare -- Effects of European contact -- Warlike animals, peaceful peoples -- Motives for traditional war -- Ultimate reasons - Whom do people fight? -- Forgetting Pearl Harbor -- Part 3: Young And Old: -- Chapter 5: Bringing up children: -- Comparisons of child-rearing -- Childbirth -- Infanticide -- Weaning and birth interval -- On-demand nursing -- Infant-adult contact -- Fathers and allo-parents -- Responses to crying infants -- Physical punishment -- Child autonomy -- Multi-age playgroups -- Child play and education -- Their kids and our kids -- Chapter 6: Treatment of old people: cherish, abandon, or kill?: -- Elderly -- Expectations about eldercare -- Why abandon or kill? -- Usefulness of old people -- Society's values -- Society's rules -- Better or worse today? -- What to do with older people? --
Part 4: Danger And Response:
Chapter 7: Constructive paranoia:
Just a stick in the ground
Chapter 8: Lions and other dangers:
Dangers of traditional life
Unpredictable food shortages
Seasonality and food storage
Aggregation and dispersal
Part 5: Religion, Language, And Health:
Chapter 9: What electric eels tell us about the evolution of religion:
Functions and electric eels
Search for causal explanations
Religion's function of explanation
Organization and obedience
Codes of behavior towards strangers
Measures of religious success
Changes in religion's functions
Chapter 10: Speaking in many tongues:
Geography of language diversity
Traditional multilingualism
Are minority languages harmful?
How can we protect languages?
Chapter 11: Salt, sugar, fat, and sloth:
Non-communicable diseases
Genes, environment, and diabetes
Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders
Benefits of genes for diabetes
Why is diabetes low in Europeans?
Future of non-communicable diseases
Epilogue: At another airport:
From the jungle to the 405
Advantages of the modern world
Advantages of the traditional world