Security by K.L. Kivi

What is the difference between having security and feeling secure? Or is any security nothing more than a feeling? And who do we become, how do we behave, in the face of this presence or lack of security or a feeling of security?

I was recently talking with my brother and sister-in-law about anthropologist Barry Hewlett’s work on hunter-gatherer childhoods (Hewlett et al, 200, Internal Working Models, Current Anthropology, 41:287-297), about Hewlett’s findings that forager peoples tend to have very secure sense of themselves within their environment. Unlike traditional agriculturalists, people from industrialized cultures and everyone in between, hunter-gatherers are much more likely to view their environment as a giving place, trusting that it will provide them with the essentials of living.

Hewlett calls this sense of self an “internal working model” and posits that these models are formed in early infancy based on the responsiveness of caregivers. Since forager peoples tend to hold their infants more than any other human cultural groups, he argues that their sense of security is rooted in the child rearing practices of their community. Among people like the Ake of the African rainforest, infants are held, both while awake and while sleeping, upward of 90% of the time. They are passed from hands to hands, the community taking collective responsibility for the holding of babies. Among the nearby agriculturalists he studied as well as North American families, babies were held far, far less, especially when asleep. And they were held by fewer people. Correspondingly, people from those communities had a less benign notion of the natural world. Overall, they were more fearful of the environment and other people.

My brother was challenged by the notion that security was a feeling and not an objective fact. That foragers, who do not store food but eat only what they find on a day to day basis, should feel secure. And, correspondingly, that those of us who live in abundance and the security of stored food, stored wealth and luxuries, should feel so insecure. “No, no, this is backwards,” he argued. “The foragers don’t have any security. They are not secure.”

“Why then,” I asked, “do they feel so secure and we, who have so much, do not?” And still he struggled to understand everyone’s wrong thinking.

“It doesn’t matter what they feel,” he argued, “what matters is if they are secure.”

But is does matter. If you look around us here in North America, you can see that the feeling matters as much or more than sums in the bankbook or the food in the fridge or the size of the house. In fact, this vast accumulation of stuff beyond what can be used by the possessors might be precisely the outcome of a sense of insecurity. It’s always amazed me how some of the richest people of Earth can feel so fearful of lack, whole industries forming around retirement, insurance, investment and other hoarding behaviours. As Hewlett notes, “internal working models and consequent styles of social relations can generate a diversity of cultural institutions, kinship structures, social roles and sharing patterns.”

Where am I going with this? What does this have to do with sense of place and the environment? Those are my questions precisely. How do these insecure working models of our culture play out? Is greed an outgrowth of the quest for security? If so, our desperate insecurity has a huge impact on the environment. We often wonder how we can halt, change, redirect all the ecologically damaging activities of our fellow humans. If Hewlett is right, that it’s all rooted in the simple act of being held as infants, then we should start, right now, by holding our children all the time and finding others to hold them when we cannot.

But it can’t be so simple. Holding a child. Perhaps the complexity comes into the equation when we start thinking about finding others to hold our children when we cannot. The rich are the only ones who can pay for such a service and often do, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Could it be more about the quality with which we hold our children and that quality is something that must be cultivated instead of bought. And in the cultivation of a community of child rearing, what else do we cultivate amongst ourselves? Trust, obviously. A community of trust. And does that trust extend out, once established, beyond the cluster of people? Or is the place an integral part of that community of child rearing?

Perhaps this is the point that Hewlett misses in his research: that for foragers, the specific land where they live, is part of their known and loved world. To use a word of Luanne Armstrong’s, they have “agency” within it, ie. the ability to interact with it in a very profound way that it based on skills and knowledge that are generations deep. So the trust is not just from your own lifetime of being held and cared for but from generations of being held and being in relationship to the land. Their trust is not random, but specific, based on the community of land and people they know, and know well. And once you trust someone or some place, how do you treat it?

Hewlett’s premise turns environmental destruction and healing into a psychological issue, with a psychological answer, along the lines of “love is the answer,” and “it takes a village to raise a (healthy) child.” But does that get us anywhere even if we believe it’s true? You can’t make anyone love something. Can you even teach people to love things that they fear? Or make love more important than fear? And even if you could, how would you go about unravelling the insecurity that binds our culture to its collective fears about the natural world?

I’ve long believed that knowledge and agency are key to this question, that we must re-establish our dependent relationship to the land in order to find our way back into the community of land and people which, in turn, will foster the sense of security we so desperately yearn for. And if the process of passing our sense of community onto future generations is better grounded by holding children more, why not begin now? Given our current ecological crises, it’s an experiment worth trying.