ANG 6930 – Hunter-Gatherers
K. E. Sassaman
Fall 2003
Class 1 – Conceptualizing Hunter-Gatherers
Hunter-gatherers have always been a foil for complex societies, for us….

 

In development of western social science, sociologist devoted efforts to understanding complex, western society, while anthropologists set about investigating everyone else
 

H-G farthest removed from western society, so thought both representative of humanity stripped of the trappings of complexity, and, if the trappings of complexity accumulated through time (evolution), then H-G must be representative of the most ancient way of life (UNIFORMITARIANISM)
 

“An understanding of the hunter-gatherer lifeway… is essential to any critique of anthropological theory” (Kelly 1995:2)
 

as Barnard (1999) piece shows, we can say the same about development of western thought in general;  and, we can see that some of the same issues keep resurfacing over the centuries:

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Two basics ways study of H-G inform on US, as much as the other:
Maurice Bloch:  Conceptions of the past, or the other (in this case the same) used in either historical, or rhetorical sense:
 Historical:  to make things appear inevitable
 Rhetorical: to serve as contrast, hence critique, of way things are
***Hunter-gatherers have thus been actively drawn upon to define ourselves… (ontological quality)
in return, what we know about them is so much a product of our agendas
***At the same time, there has long been a tradition of trying to get at the essential qualities of hunter-gatherers (i.e., to objectify in scientific, essentialist terms) – be they from the viewpoint of subsistence adaptation, or structural sociopolitical qualities, or some other dimension

 
 

Model of the various intellectual/political conceptions of hunter-gatherers over last 150 years.
 
Evolution
History
SAVAGES/PRIMITIVE VICTIMS
Negative Hobbesian (evolution/social darwinism) rural proletariate (world system/globalization)
transformed (revisionist)
H-G AS PRODUCT OF NATURE
H-G AS PRODUCT OF CULTURE
NOBLE SAVAGE PRIMITIVE COMMUNISTS (marxist)
Positive Original Affluent Society (ecological) resistance/empowerment (indigenist/agency)
professional primitives (symbiosis) professional primitives (political economy)

 

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When anthropologists began to seriously consider H-G societies, they first were the “living fossils of early humans,” in 19th century unilineal evolutionism (COMPARATIVE METHOD - take diversity in the modern world and turn it into an evolutionary sequence from simple to advanced – while idea that societies at the lower end of the scale were less capable mentally of advanced culture has been rejected, the unilineal underpinnings persist in some circles)
 

 
 Andamanese and Australian Aborigines studies as basis for structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown (1920s-30s)
 
 Shoshone and Paiute studies basis for cultural ecology of Julian Steward (1930s-40s)

 And in 1950s-early 60s, cross-cultural generalizations basis for social typologies of neoevolutionism ala Elmen Service (Primitive Social Organization 1962)
 
 

now explicitly Darwinian, the very persistence of traits must mean they are ADAPTIVE;  so, for instance, mobility, rather than being the relentless pursuit of food out of necessity, was a successful, sustainable strategy.
 
 as Kelly points out, efforts at this stage and thereafter, tended toward generalization – downplaying the differences for sake of typological conherence

 He notes that this can be traced to 19th-c “progressive” evolutionism in that societies in early stages of evolution had little time to diversify
 

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Generalized notions of H-Gs have included the following:
Patrilneal/Patrilocal band (R-B’s work with Australian Aborigine social organization)  - the patrilineal horde, a land-holding unit with exclusive rights sometimes a clan

 J. Steward expanded on this with concept of BAND – included patrilineal, matrilineal, and composite bands, with patrilineal most common (which, for Stewart, meant they were the most primitive)
 

    Attributed essential quality of patrilineal band to male dominance, and need for brothers to stay together in natal territories
Later Elman Service revised by emphasizing postmarital residence even more than Steward (patrilocal bands)

 

Generalized Forager Model (Man the Hunter Conference 1966)

Ecological model
 

    Egalitarianism (lack of private property; no accumulation; constraint of mobility)
    Low population density
    Lack of territoriality
    Minimum of food storage
    Flux in band composition (bilateral and bilocal organization; fission-fusion)
        Original Affluent Society stemmed from this formulation (wanting little, H-Gs have everything they want) (Kelly provides nice discussion of the problems with this perspective)
    Primitive Communists (goes back to Morgan, Engles, more recently Lee, Leacock)

 

Forager Mode of Production (who owns the means of production?)

    Collective ownership of means of production (land and its resources)
 

    Right to reciprocal access
    Little emphasis on accumulation (ethos opposing hoarding)
    Total sharing throughout camp
    Equal access to tools necessary to acquire food
    Individual ownership of tools
KELLY SIDEBAR (p. 32): Structural marxist (e.g., Godelier) seek to understand forager mode of production in terms of capitalist or class societies.  Hence, they emphasize the contradictions between social relations and ideology, and so tend to emphasize delayed return systems
They tend to see social relations as determinant of subsistence, etc.
(e.g., social demands on labor for accumulating prestige necessary to extract social surplus for purposes of social reproduction – feasting, for one).

 

Professional Primitives/Interdependency/Revisionism

    H-G do not exist apart from more complex societies

    Include examples of ecological “symbiosis” (tropical rain forest; Bailey and Headland model); and rural proletariat of the political economic (world system) model; and the “freedom fighters” of indigenist perspectives
 

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Lee and Daly 1999:

Undercurrent to their chapter is that H-Gs do indeed represent longstanding modes of human organization
 

    Problem:  subsistence-wise, no question; in terms of sociality and ethos, who knows, especially if we have to decouple the former from the latter
    What constitutes category hunter-gatherer?
Three dimensions:

 
    1. subsistence (minimal definition and their starting point) – economic/ecological/neoevolutionary
    2. social organization – structural
    3. cosmology and world-view – ideational/symbolic
 
 
Subsistence: wild foods
     Three forms:
        1. groups with traditional subsistence (Australians, NW North America; Ju/’hoansi, Cree, etc)
        2. groups with long contact with food producers and who have over time engaged food production occasionally (SE and south Asian groups, Pygmies, Okiek)
        3. groups that have emerged recently as “secondary adaptations” (South American groups, Mikea)
 
Social organization
     Lee and Daly still subscribe to the BAND model (small nomadic group of 15-50 related by kinship), but expand to include some of the marxist elements:
    Share the following:
        Egalitarian, with situational leadership
        Mobility (social aspect of resolving conflict – vote with your feet)
        Concentration and dispersion (fission-fusion)
        Common property regime (CPR) – land held collectively; movable items held individually
 
Ethos and World-View
        Sharing

 
        Giving environment (nature is source of good things)
        Cosmology – nature as animated with moral and mystical forces
        Trickster – symbolizes the humaness of gods (divine but flawed)
        Shamanism – mediate between supernatural and natural; community-based


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Importance of History
 

Lee and Daly recognize the importance of history, but warn of not taking it to the extreme of seeing foraging as simply a consequence of modernity;  the dynamic of the forager way of life is worthy of study in itself (here we have defense of the original Man the Hunter agenda):
 

When historical circumstances are taken into account, ethnographic analogy is still an important tool
 
 

Emphasis in Kelly (and others) is to explain variation in behaviors (e.g., sharing) relative to sets of causal variables (e.g., environmental fluctuations)
Can we do the same with a historical perspective?

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Work since the 1960s has both emphasized generalities and variation, with more specific emphases reflecting particular historical, social, and political circumstances of investigations
 

The series of conferences on H-Gs embody these changes nicely:
 

Hunter-Gatherer Conferences

Conference on Band Organization – Damas 1969
 

Chicago 1966 – Man the Hunter – Lee and DeVore 1968
 

     Defining themes:
        - rescuing H-G studies from historical particularism and placing them squarely in purview of neoevolutionary & ecological studies
        - development of “generalized forager” model, with bilateral descent replacing patrilineal model
        - emphasis on plant gathering
        - data to show life was rather “affluent”
 
International Conferences on Hunter and Gatherer Societies (CHAGS)

 Paris – 1978 – Leacock and Lee 1982
 

        - organized by structural marxists (mode of production types with social relations dominant)
        - laid to rest notion that ethnographic H-Gs were “pristine”
        - showcased articles on political action by H-Gs in modern world
        - Bender and Morris note that continued emphasis on so-called “forager mode of production” (aka primitive communism: lack of property, no leadership, gender equality) created evolutionary impasse:
        - No place for change, except from external sources (Leacock’s own work with Montagnais emphasized effect of contact on concepts of property and gender relations)

 Quebec – 1980 – no publication
 

 Bad Homburg, Germany – 1983 – Schrire 1984
 

        - emphasized histories of contact, but with tendency to view change as something inflicted from outside
 
 London – 1986 – Ingold et al. 1988 (2 vols)
          - hunter-gatherers make their own history; diverse approaches
 
Darwin, Australia – 1988 – Altman 1989; Meehan and White 1990

Fairbanks, Alaska – 1990 – no proceedings, but see Burch and Ellanna 1994 and Smith 1991
 

Moscow – 1993 – Biesle et al. 1999 – Conflict, resistance, and self-determination – humanistic emphasis
 

Osaka, Japan – 1998
 

Scotland – 2002

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MODELS Lately

    Generalized foragers – dominant model;  widely conscripted by archaeologists;  consistent with ecofunctionalism

    Primitive communists – (forager mode of production):  emphasizes social relations

    Professional primitives (interdependent model) – consistent with so-called revisionist ethnography

    Problems with each is tendency to overgeneralize

Dichotomous models:  emphasize variation, but continua they describe too often conscripted as dichotomous types:

     Hunter-gatherer vs. gatherer-hunter

     Collector v. forager

     Immediate v. delayed return economies (including storage)

     Simple v. complex

     Egalitarian v. nonegalitarian