The peace corps is a hunter-gatherer society

Hear me out! I’m not saying we are primitive. But rather, what it comes down to is, we are small. Peace Corps in Armenia consists of very few people. And we’re rather isolated, in Armenia, for two years. This very much mirrors the kind of old, pre-urban societies thousands of years ago, in some ways.

The specific way I want to discuss is from the perspective of the religions that characterized these societies. Give me a break, I gotta use my religious studies degree for something! I promise it won’t be boring! Not technical at all. A lot of this comes from a book by Robert Wright, called the "Evolution of God" which details the historical views of God throughout history.

Basically the concept of religion in these cultures lacked what we might call a moral, thou shalt not steal, type of concept specifically in the message of their deities. If you’re living in a group of 50-150 people, there’s no need for such a thing. You can go ahead and steal your neighbors horse, but then what? You can’t exactly take it out of the stable. Everyone will know it’s not your horse! What kind of God needs to spell out that you can’t steal! Duh! What would be the point.

So how is the Peace Corps like this? I want to bring up a couple instances I have experienced. My first couple hours in DC as a Peace Corps pre-trainee(?) I met another volunteer for the first time who wanted to get something to eat but didn’t know where anything was. A group of us had just eaten so I offered to show her the place nearby we went to and I needed to go to the hallmark store and grab a birthday card for my mom. So I walked a more or less complete stranger to who knows where, and I didn’t even bat an eye, going and leaving all of my belongings for the next two years with the other Peace Corps people.

Another instance: My computer had a stroke and was going crazy in Vienna so one of the tech volunteers offered to take it with him to his PST village and fix it when he had time to get some software to help with the fix. I said no problem, effectively giving this guy I had only known for a few days my computer, again without thinking anything about trust or theft. I didn’t need to.

The Peace Corps is a pre-urban hunter-gatherer society. We’re a tribe with no anonymity in our host culture (we are the American!) and within our own community of Peace Corps volunteers. We are scattered in Armenia, but most of us our blessed with the internet and cell phones so word can travel just as fast as if we were living in the same village.

Now maybe it’s cynical to think this way, oh, so you only trust these people because you have to. Well no, that’s not exactly the case. We start off trusting one another whereas in other circumstances we might be hesitant or ambivalent at first when trusting someone. We don’t have that initial hesitance so we build our relationships much stronger and much faster than we would in normal circumstances in the United States.

So that’s what 2 months in the Peace Corps, and a week and a half as a volunteer gets ya. Enjoy.