How Big Is Your Family?

In the spring of 1987, I stooped over the desk in my shared student office in Cambridge, England, running my finger across a map of Papua New Guinea and squinting at the tiny typescript. I was trying to establish the location of a cluster of tribes in the rainforest known as the Baining. Only one of those tribes was known to anthropology; the others were a mystery. As a young Ph.D. researcher, my ambition was to make friends with people as culturally different from me as it would be possible to find anywhere on the face of the Earth and to ask if I could live with them for two years.

After a very long series of flights and an arduous trek through the rainforest, I finally came face-to-face with the Mali—one of those elusive Baining groups I had been dreaming about. To my surprise, the Mali were much more like me than I could possibly have imagined. It wasn’t just that they had the same basic material needs and wants, but they also shared with me—and my compatriots back in England—fundamentally similar moral concerns, supernatural inclinations, loyalties and rivalries, as well as a deep appreciation of music, dance, and other artforms. Nevertheless, the Mali also had a great deal of knowledge and wisdom that was new to me. For one, they knew how to build very large families.

By large.