CULTURAL EXAMPLES O F PRIVACY REGULATION
Cultures of Apparently Minimal Privacy
The Mehinacu culture. Gregor and Roberts (Gregor, 1970,1974; Roberts & Gregor, 1971) provided an excellent exampleof a dialectic, multimechanism analysis of privacy in the Mehinacu Indians, a tribal group who reside in central Brazil. On the face of it, the Mehinacu have little privacy. In one village, five communal houses were located around a small circular plaza, so that everyone could be seen as they moved about. Furthermore, paths leading into the plaza were long and straight so that people could be observed at great distances. Villagers also recognized one another’s footprints in the sandy paths around the village, and agricultural fields were adjacent, so that everyone knew a great deal about others’ whereabouts. Also, living arrangements were nonprivate because housing was communal, people entered their dwellings
without announcing themselves, and the thatched walls of the structures had little sound reducing quality.