Eavesdropping by John L. Locke Read Free Book Online

catch a glimpse of her, I’d look away quickly, wondering if she’d seen me.” 40
    When Alain-René Le Sage led his readers across the rooftops of Madrid three centuries ago he was on to something. We humans do have a strong and continuing desire to expose and experience private moments in the lives of others. When perceptual access to other people became more difficult to achieve, our ancestors became more strategic, and more stealthy, but they did not give up. For, if anything, walls only whetted the Asmodean appetite, intensified the allure of the closed door, the enigmatic smile, the inaudible whisper. How did other people’s business become our own?

CHAPTER THREE
Open-plan Living
    There are no recognised and respected ways in which the public gaze can be cut off, no ways of separating oneself out from others present. Any conversation between two may be freely invaded… Privacy can only be achieved by hiding from others.                  Frederik Barth
    E VERY night, just as it starts to grow dark, all the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in the jungle get ready to retire. They begin by making their beds, but they do this not by fluffing up the leaves and branches that were used the night before. Rather, they build an entirely new place to sleep, first by settling in, then by pulling branches over and around them. 1
    Lots of wild animals appropriate physical areas for their personal use. In doing so they convert spaces to places, and these places became the property of the animal. Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger called them “fix points,” zones of maximum security to which animals withdraw when threatened, or when they need to rest, sleep, give birth, or care for the young. 2
Wild humans
    Wild humans also make places out of spaces, and use them for their own specifically human needs. I refer here to human beings who
live in the wild
, naturally, as our distant ancestors did, without significant contact with individuals who live in any other way. There is nothing wild about the
behavior
of these individuals—many of them live in relative peace, and do an excellent job of rearing their children—but they live without walls. They share space with wild animals.
    Wild humans are interesting because they tell us something about the adaptive value of various behaviors, including ones that shaped habitual residential and communicative arrangements long before the influence of contemporary cultures. 3 I believe there are messages in their behavior for what it means to live a completely domesticated life, as we now do; and for what we and others must know, and should not be permitted to learn, about each other.
    Today small-scale societies are dwindling, but in the previous century a number of anthropologists studied the tiny, relatively unadulterated hunting and gathering bands that inhabited Africa, Australia, India, South America, and other places. Their detailed accounts tell us a great deal about the value placed on openness and privacy by wild-living humans.
    One thing we will look at is their huts, for the form, spacing, and orientation of these structures tell us things about the perceptual requirements of the builders. We will see what wild humans valued, and find that this was revealed less by what they created than what they kept the same. It is something that we care about very deeply today.
    In using the term “open plan” I am recalling a trend, beginning in the 1960s, toward open-plan offices. In these physical arrangements, office workers were distributed across large, open spaces—with few if any walls or partitions—in preference to small, enclosed, private offices. Predictably, when workers made the transition intothese new spaces, they said that they missed something to which they were accustomed: privacy. 4 Is this a basic human need?
The Kung
    If we look at the Kung, the answer would seem to be no. These hunter-gatherers inhabit the Kalahari Desert of Botswana and Southwest