Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology

Alan Barnard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859738207
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of hunter-gatherers has had a profound impact on thinking about human nature and about the nature of society. The subject has especially influenced ideas on social evolution and on the development of human culture. Anthropologists and archaeologists continue to investigate living hunter-gatherers and the remains of past hunter-gatherer societies in the hope of unearthing the secrets of our ancestors and learning something of the natural existence of humankind. Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology provides a definitive overview of hunter-gatherer historiography, from the earliest anthropological writings through to the present day. What can early visions of the hunter-gatherer tell us about the societies that generated them? How do diverse national traditions, such as American, Russian and Japanese, manifest themselves in hunter-gatherer research? What is the most up-to-date thinking on the subject and how does it reflect current trends within the social sciences? This book provides a much-needed overview of the history of thought on one of science's most intriguing subjects. It will serve as a landmark text for anthropologists, archaeologists and students researching anthropological theory or the history of social anthropology and related disciplines.

– 1 –
Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology: Introductory Essay

Alan Barnard

Until 12,000 years ago, all humanity were hunter-gatherers. Only a tiny fraction any longer subsist entirely or primarily by these means. Yet thousands of people today do remember their hunter-gatherer past. Millions live in cultures with a collective memory of their hunter-gatherer ancestors, and millions more probably believe, as Richard Lee and Irven DeVore wrote in their preface to Man the Hunter that 'the human condition [is] likely to be more clearly drawn here than among other kinds of societies' (Lee and DeVore 1968a: ix). Lee and DeVore's statement entails a supposition that hunter-gatherers are, in a sense, more 'natural' or even more 'human' than people who live in agrarian or industrialized societies.

In the early twentieth century, scholars had quite different views. For example, Sigmund Freud (1960 [1913]: 1-2) saw hunter-gatherers, Australian Aborigines in particular, as 'the most backward and miserable of savages' who did not build permanent houses, kept only the dog as a domesticated animal, could not make pottery, had no chiefs, nor beliefs in or worship of higher beings. The Social Darwinists W.G. Sumner and A.G. Keller (1927) cited the social organization of Australian Aborigines and African Bushmen or San as examples of what they called 'primitive atomism'. These hunter-gatherers, they said, 'are full of hostility, suspicion, and other anti-social feelings and habits' (1927: 16). Even Richard Lee, in pessimistic tone some two decades after his famous statement, said that he had been wrong: the 'human condition' is about 'poverty, injustice, exploitation, war, suffering'; anthropologists looking at hunter-gatherers, he added, are looking for 'a vision of human life and human possibilities without the pomp and glory, but also without the misery and inequality of state and class society' (Lee 1992: 43).

These examples illustrate the diversity of views and the changing ideas on hunter-gatherers through time. Over the last century the field of hunter-gatherer studies has had a profound influence on anthropological and archaeological thinking throughout the world and this book offers a series of diverse perspectives in a wide variety of the world's major anthropological traditions.

Reflections on the Idea of the 'Hunter-Gatherer'

In order to understand contemporary issues, reflections on the history of the idea of the 'hunter-gatherer' are essential. The problem begins in the seventeenth century, and there is no doubt that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century concerns with 'human nature' form a central part of hunter-gatherer studies, even though hunter-gatherer studies emerged as a subdiscipline only around the 1960s. Those early, especially seventeenth-century concerns, have recently been described by one of our contributors (Pluciennik 2002) and debated by others.

Margaret Hodgen (1964) argued that the basic concepts of modern anthropology, including ideas on culture change and social evolution, were developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, early concern with peoples we would now call 'hunter-gatherers' was largely hypothetical. Seventeenth-century writers tended to be interested not with ethnographically attested peoples but rather with an imagined state of nature. In the words of Anthony Pagden, 'The painstaking description, and the recognition of the "otherness" of the "other", which is the declared ambition of the modern ethnologist would have been unthinkable to most of the writers [of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries]' (Pagden 1982: 6). It was only in the eighteenth century that subsistence and its relation to society became truly meaningful topics of intellectual discussion (cf. Duchet 1971; Berry 1997). Adam Smith began his Lectures on Jurisprudence with a consideration of what he called 'the Age of Hunters'. Smith's idea of hunter-gatherer society was of twenty to thirty families per village, with a general assembly of several villages, government without leaders but by consensus of the whole (Smith 1896 [1763]: 14—15, 20). Property existed in only a limited sense: in one of his examples, a man chasing a hare gradually acquired the exclusive privilege of killing (1896: 7).¹

Today, property has returned as a central focus in hunter-gatherer studies. It has been a major interest of James Woodburn in his Hadza ethnography and his comparative studies (e.g. Woodburn 1980; 1982). Indeed, a conference on Woodburn's contribution to the study of property in hunting-and-gathering society was held just a few years ago (in June 2001) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, From the late 1970s, Woodburn began to talk of two types of economic system: 'immediate return' and 'delayed return'. Economies based on an immediate-return principle reject the accumulation of surplus; people either consume or share. Those based on a delayed-return principle allow for planning ahead. Only some hunter-gatherers fit the immediate-return category; those who invest time in keeping bees, raising horses, or making boats or large traps, are, like non-hunter-gatherers, consigned to the residual, delayed-return category. In his paper for the London hunter-gatherers conference of 1986, Woodburn (1988) argued that delayed-return economies are adapted to pastoralism and agriculture, whereas immediate-return ones are not. It is not that people in immediate-return systems have any technical difficulty with food production; what keeps them from doing so are their social organization and value systems, which are based on egalitarianism and sharing. Rousseau said much the same thing in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1973 [1755]). Moreover, delayed-return economies depend on the acquisition and maintenance of assets, and the loss of these can result in delayed-return economies becoming immediate-return. There is ethnographic evidence for this in central Africa, for example, where hunter-gatherers have yielded control over both material and ritual aspects of life to their agricultural neighbours (Grinker 1994). Thus, evolution is not a simple, one-way process, and ecological relations are bound up with social relations - both within and beyond the community. That represents a challenge to the viewpoint within hunter-gatherer studies that sees the subdiscipline as essentially evolutionist.

Marshall Sahlins (e.g. 1972: 1-39) represents another modern viewpoint, with his emphasis on the notion of the 'original affluent society'. Also echoing Rousseau, he suggests that if affluence is measured in free time, hunters and gatherers are often more affluent than their agricultural neighbours. Except in times of scarcity, hunter-gatherer populations need spend only a few hours per day in subsistence-related activities, and they survive times of general severity, such as drought, better than neighbouring agricultural peoples. He articulated the theoretical position that really lay beneath the hard data being uncovered in the 1960s: if hunter-gatherers maximize, they maximize their free time, not their wealth. This realization, which became apparent in the Chicago 'Man the Hunter' conference of 1966 (Lee and DeVore 1968c), was to transform hunter-gatherer studies into perhaps the most theoretically challenging branch of anthropology of that time.

Strangely though, it was twelve years before another major hunter-gatherer symposium came to be held. That was the Paris symposium of 1978, first in a series now numbering nine. After Paris came Quebec (in 1980), Bad Homberg, Germany (in 1983), London (in 1986), Darwin, Australia (in 1988), Fairbanks (in 1990), Moscow (in 1993), Osaka (in 1998), and the one on which this volume is based, Edinburgh (in 2002). The tenth is planned for Bhubaneswar, in the state of Orissa, India, in the near future. Since the fifth, Darwin, conference, the series has carried the convenient acronym CHAGS ('conference on hunting-and-gathering societies'). While the first six were dominated by Western models (and to some extent indigenous ones, especially in the case of Darwin), from the seventh (Moscow) broader and more diverse anthropological traditions came to be represented.

From the time of the Paris conference (retrospectively, CHAGS 1), a new generation of fieldworkers began to focus on changes in social structure in emerging nation states; new interests included rapid acculturation, ethnic pluralism, and class relations. Among questions raised: if hunter-gatherers are affluent, do they lose their affluence as they adapt to the modern world? Resolutions to the controversy have begun to appear, following synthetic approaches like that of Nurit Bird David. in her paper 'The giving environment', Bird-David (1990) emphasizes hunter-gatherers' perceptions of their environments as rich and kind to their inhabitants. She also emphasizes sharing between people, rather than environmental exploitation or the work effort exploitation requires. This is the way hunter-gatherers themselves often see the world: the environment contains the necessities of life in sufficient amounts, provided that one's lifestyle remains based on the principles of mutual aid and communal good will. In another paper, Bird-David (1992b) has gone on to reformulate Sahlins' notion of 'original affluence' to correct some of its inherent flaws. Sahlins, she argues, confused ecological and cultural perspectives. The key distinctions he drew were insightful, but he remained too much a formalist in his emphasis on labour time. What Sahlins failed to realize is that, to hunter-gatherers, what matters most is one's relationship to other people and to the environment.

While these theoretical foundations were being moulded, ethnographic (and to some extent archaeological) studies throughout the world served both to bolster theoretical speculation and to build up pictures of regionally specific forms of hunter-gatherer society. In addition, regionally specific themes emerged: for example, kinship in Australia, band organization in the Subarctic, shamanism in the Arctic and South America, the hunter-gatherer/cultivator divide in South America and Southeast Asia, forager/cultivator relations in central and southern Africa, and so on. Of course regions have much to teach each other: for example, current debates in southern Africa over the acquisition and loss of non-hunting-and-gathering means of subsistence reflect long-standing concerns with that issue in South America (see e.g. Rival 1999).

While diversity in hunter-gatherer ways of life is now commonplace in anthropological discourse, and even in the titles of anthropological monographs (e.g. Kelly 1995; Kent 1996), there remains nevertheless a recognition that hunter-gatherer societies have enough in common to make them a category to go on discussing. Or at the very least, there remains a consensus that such an invented category has produced sufficient insights for CHAGS conferences to continue! Themes such as 'original affluence' have an enduring presence and could not have existed without the notion of hunting-and-gathering society as a specific type. In both 'noble savage' and evolutionist frameworks, the idea of the hunter-gatherer as ultimate alien other has been strong. It has gained and regained prominence at various points in the history of anthropology (especially but not exclusively in evolutionist periods such as the 1870s, 1930s, and 1950s and 1960s). Interestingly, debates of the 1980s (perhaps especially at the 1986 London conference) about the salience of the category have now subsided. Hunter-gatherer studies had long been the last vestige of anthropology's quest for natural man (cf. Barnard 1994). Whereas once anthropologists expected a greater cultural purity (in the sense of the absence of non-hunter-gatherer means of subsistence), it seems now that the acquisition of a few goats or the occasional planting of vegetables need not exclude a people from the category 'hunter-gatherer'. (Barnard 1989). Were this not to be the case, no doubt there would be few peoples left for hunter-gatherer specialists to study.

Recent Developments

In a paper presented at CHAGS 6 (Fairbanks, 1990), Richard Lee mentioned in passing six key issues in (mainly Western) hunter-gatherer studies since the 1960s: evolutionism, optimal foraging strategies, woman the gatherer, world-view and symbolic analysis, hunter-gatherers in prehistory, and hunter-gatherers in history (Lee 1992: 32-3). I would add a seventh and an eighth: relations with outsiders and indigenous voices. Let me touch on each, both in broad terms and in light of developments since 1990.²

Evolutionism was the prevailing anthropological perspective in the nineteenth century, but it rose to prominence again in the 1950s and 1960s, partly as a result of Julian Steward's Theory of Culture Change (1955a). Lee's own work with the Ju/'hoansi was inspired by Steward. In the 1980s some, such as Tim Ingold (e.g. 1986: 79-129), looked to the boundary between human 'hunter-gatherers' and animal 'predators-foragers'. Among archaeologists, this boundary took on new meaning as models derived from evolutionary ecology and ultimately from economic theory, came to be applied to human foraging strategies. In the 1990s, new trends in evolutionary theory led to great interest in the search for the origins of language, ritual and symbolic culture. Previous gradualist approaches are being challenged by new models, based loosely on recent hunter-gatherer ethnography. Among these models is that of Chris Knight and his followers (e.g. Knight, Power and Watts 1995) which has overturned the post-Enlightenment concern with families and clans as the basis of society, with a seventeenth and eighteenth-century 'social contract' view. According to this view, all symbolic culture emerged as a result of a social contract among females of a primeval band perhaps 60,000 or 70,000 years ago. Collectively, the theory goes, they denied men sex and forced them to hunt between new and full moon, and then enjoyed an orgy of sex and food from the full to the new moon. Although only a small number of anthropologists accept Knight's theory, nevertheless it has sparked a surprising amount of debate and even interdisciplinary research among anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists over the last decade.

The second key issue involves the study of optimal foraging strategies. These are in fact theoretical models of behaviour, based on the premise that humans (and animals) seek to maximize their chances of finding food with the least effort. The volume Hunter-Gatherer Foraging Strategies, edited by Bruce Winterhalder and Eric Alden Smith (1981), led the way in this trend. Their model is based on the idea that both hunter-gatherers and animals exhibit a kind of economic 'rationality' in their subsistence strategies, and that that 'rationality' is a product of evolutionary adaptation. For this very reason, the model has become interesting to those who cannot accept it. For example, Ingold (1996) has argued that optimal foraging theory is misplaced because it confuses adaptation with rationality. It proposes abstract models of behaviour as though they were explanations for behaviour. In other words, it goes too far towards biology in seeking explanations for cultural behaviour. That said interdisciplinary efforts over the last few years have led to renewed interest in relations between the biological and the cultural or social, perhaps epitomized by the volume Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Panter-Brick, Layton and Rowley-Conwy 2001) to which Winterhalder was a contributor.

Thirdly, 'woman the gatherer' was a catch-phrase of feminist anthropology, within hunter-gatherer studies (or gatherer-hunter studies), even before the Paris conference of 1978. It originated in an article by Sally Siocum (1975) and gained currency in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when women's food-gathering activities, and women's status and political power in hunter-gatherer communities, became popular themes. Today, with the general acceptance of the fact that women produce more than men in so-called 'hunting societies', interest in such themes has waned although interest in gender relations remains strong.

Fourthly, world-view and symbolic analysis have become, and remain, a very significant area of interest. As Lee himself suggests, this may in part be as an implicit critique of previously dominant interests in ecology and evolution. Within this broad area of interest, however, are two very different sorts of work. On the one hand there is empirical, ethnographic research on hunter-gatherer world-views, symbolic culture and ritual. The monographs on Bushman or San religion by Lorna Marshall (1999) and Mathias Guentber (1999) are splendid examples. On the other hand, this interest in symbolic analysis has led to grand theories like Knight's, with their piecing together of ethnographic information from around the world.

Fifthly, hunter-gatherers in prehistory has been a dominant theme since the rise of 'processual archaeology' in the 1960s, and it remains prominent in archaeology wherever the concept of hunter-gatherers is a focal interest (see e.g. Trigger 1989: 289-328). One difficulty is that contemporary foragers, who are largely confined to deserts and jungles and in continual contact with non-foraging peoples, may be quite different from the ancient hunter-gatherers who inhabited the archaeological sites of Europe and temperate North America. Lewis Binford and John Yellen are well-known examples of archaeologists who have succeeded in useful ethnographic analogy. This is because some of their work has included a combination of ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in the same places, Binford (e.g. 1978) among the Nuniamiut and Yellen (e.g. 1977a) among the Ju/'hoansi or!Kung Bushmen. Related issues are described in this volume, notably in the papers by Shanti Pappu, Paul Lane and Tim Schadla-Hall, and Michael Sheehan.

Sixthly, hunter-gatherers in history poses quite a different question for archaeologists. Let me expound on it with the example of the 'Kalahari Debate' (see also Widlok, this volume). The debate is between those who see Bushmen or San as exponents of a hunting-and-gathering culture and essentially isolated until recent times (the traditionalists), and those who see them as an underclass and part of a larger social system (the revisionists). Although it had been simmering for some time before, the Kalahari Debate proper erupted with the publication of Edwin Wilmsen's Land Filled with Flies in 1989. Arguab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• 1 Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology: Introductory Essay
• I Early Visions of Hunter-Gatherer Society and Their Influence
• II Local Traditions in Hunter-Gatherer Research
• III Reinterpretations in Archaeology, Anthropology and the History of the Disciplines
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index