Embers of Society: Firelight Talk among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen
An anthropologist's answer to a question the psychological safety literature keeps arriving at from the other direction: whether the setting decides what can be said in it. Wiessner compares 174 day and night conversations among the Ju/'hoan (!Kung) of Botswana and Namibia, recorded in July and August and again in November 1974, each involving five or more adults and running beyond twenty or thirty minutes, coded for topic, setting, time of day, participants, initiators, praise and criticism. A second body of material, 68 firelight stories recorded between 2011 and 2013, was transcribed by a Ju/'hoan team trained by Megan Biesele. The split between daylight and firelight is stark and statistically clear (chi-square 43.15, p below .0001).
Day talk is practical and regulatory: 31 per cent economic, 34 per cent complaint, criticism or conflict, with envy the motive about a third of the time, and 16 per cent joking. Night is a different institution. Eighty-one per cent of lengthy evening conversation goes to stories, largely about known people, and the storytellers do not moralise, do not praise heroes, and avoid both self-promotion and the demotion of others. The abstract puts the contrast as day talk regulating social relations while night talk evokes higher orders of theory of mind through the imagination.
Three findings make it load-bearing for a map about voice rather than merely charming. Sanctioning concentrates in daylight and by topic: Table 1 shows 67 per cent or more of conversations about egalitarian relations, kinship dues, food sharing, xaro exchange and land tenure involved verbal sanctioning, and all ten daytime conversations about equality and levelling carried complaint, criticism or conflict, against none at night. Levelling the big ones is described as everybody's sport and jealousy as the keeper of equality, which is peer monitoring and graduated sanctioning observed in a working commons rather than modelled, and sets it directly beside Ostrom. Then exit and voice, in the field: complaint, criticism and conflict are the spice of Ju/'hoan life that made group living viable, and where talk could not settle a matter people voted with their feet and departed, with about 95 per cent of cases handled between the parties directly affected rather than through third parties, which Wiessner contrasts with larger-scale societies. Third, repair has its own time and place. Night talk steers away from the tensions of the day, minor daytime disputes wane as the evening goes on, and trance dances, performed on six of thirty-six observed evenings, close social rifts. The paper ends on the modern implication: artificial light and digital communication turn the hours of darkness into economically productive time, so the day ends with the flip of a switch, without the interval in which things were revisited, pondered and repaired, or allowed to fade with the embers.
Wiessner states her own limits unusually plainly and they should travel with the findings. This is not a representative sample of Ju/'hoan talk. Larger groups invite gossip and reward good storytellers, and she sought out larger groups rather than the intimate family talk at the hearth. The field season fell in an unusually long dry and hungry spell, when people converged on permanent water and foraged less. Conversations of women with small children were excluded as too fragmented to code. She notes that she sometimes fell asleep before the talk had ended. The day and night coding is one observer, one field season, fifty years ago, and the firelight stories come from a different decade and a different method. What survives all that is the shape of the contrast rather than the precision of any single percentage.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →
Neighbours (8)
- Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
- Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
- Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
- Eye-Contact, Distance and Affiliation
- Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World
- The Case for Less Eye Contact
- Types of Silence