delanceyplace.com 12/19/11 - if I save you, I owe you

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In today's excerpt - in our society, we assume that if someone saves another person's life, then the person saved owes the person who saved them. However, in some societies, the opposite is true, the person who is saved is owed by the person who saved them. In fact, in some societies, if someone saves another's life, he is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever. Perhaps that is the deeper truth:

"Nineteenth-century ... missionaries working in certain parts of Africa would often be astounded by the reactions they would receive when they administered medicines. Here's a typical example, from a British missionary in Congo:

"A day or two after we reached Vana we found one of the natives very ill with pneumonia. Comber treated him and kept him alive on strong fowl soup; a great deal of careful nursing and attention was visited on him, for his house was beside the camp. When we were ready to go on our way again, the man was well. To our astonishment he came and asked us for a present, and was as astonished and disgusted as he had made us to be, when we declined giving it. We suggested that it was his place to bring us a present and to show some gratitude. He said to us, 'Well indeed! You white men have no shame!'

"In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that 'natives' operated with an entirely different form of logic, compiled a list of similar stories: for instance, of a man saved from drowning who proceeded to ask his rescuer to give him some nice clothes to wear, or another who, on being nursed back to health after having been savaged by a tiger, demanded a knife. One French missionary working in Central Africa insisted that such things happened to him on a regular basis:

"You save a person's life, and you must expect to receive a visit from him before long; you are now under an obligation to him, and you will not get rid of him except by giving him presents.

"Now, certainly, there is almost always felt to be something extraordinary about saving a life. Anything surrounding birth and death almost cannot help but partake of the infinite, and, therefore, throw all everyday means of moral calculation askew. This is probably why stories like this had become something of a cliche in America when I was growing up. I remember as a child several times being told that among the Inuit (or sometimes it was among Buddhists, or Chinese, but curiously, never Africans) -- that if one saves someone else's life, one is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever. It defies our sense of reciprocity. But somehow, it also makes a weird kind of sense."