FisherFolk

Castaway, the first British reality TV show nearly two decades ago, dropped a group of about thirty people on the remote Scottish island of Taransay and filmed them as they argued with each other and fell out brutally and in a psychologically damaging way over the following weeks.

I watched the opening episode, which had the whole group in a room in London before they set out discussing what they would do and how they thought things would work, and I predicted to anyone who would listen (i.e. my family and the cat) that the whole thing would be a social and emotional disaster for most of them.  And so it was.

The problem was that - in that London room - they were all talking with each other excitedly and at length in a friendly, convivial, and engaging way.

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Think of two island fishermen in their fifties who have known each other since childhood.  On a Monday their total day's conversation as they pass each other on the quayside might be:

  "Morning,"

  "Morning."

And similarly every day of the week, with - perhaps - on the Friday:

  "Morning,"

  "Morning.  Storm's coming."

  "Aye."

They, and the rest of their island community, have evolved a peaceful system of friendship and cooperation an essential component of which is not annoying each other with their personal views, history, random thoughts, and chatter.

Our two friends sit together all evening in the pub in silence, their pints of beer in front of them on the table, taking a sip every minute or two and thinking their own thoughts.  If something needs to be communicated (like a storm) they mention it, then shut up.  Occasionally the whole community all gets very drunk and sing and play the pub piano and talk nonsense for hours then, the following morning, their hangovers enforce a return to their normal reservation.

A lot of folk anthropology consists of just-so stories about how we are adapted to life in a hunter-gatherer village and how we carry that inheritance over to modern global civilised life.  Sometimes, it is claimed, conflict results; one obvious example is xenophobia.  But one thing we have certainly not carried over is the circumspect reservation that we can observe today in isolated small communities.  Every communications technology we have created - printing, the telephone, radio, television, the internet, social media - works against that reservation, and we embrace them all with delight.

And we wonder why we don't get on as well as the two fishermen.