Man the Hunter

Richard Borshay Lee, Irven DeVore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351507455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Brauchtum & Tradition

Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.

PART I
Introduction

I.
Problems in the Study of Hunters and Gatherers

RICHARD B. LEE AND IRVEN DEVORE

Cultural Man has been on earth for some 2,000,000 years; for over 99 per cent of this period he has lived as a hunter-gatherer. Only in the last 10,000 years has man begun to domesticate plants and animals, to use metals, and to harness energy sources other than the human body. Homo sapiens assumed an essentially modern form at least 50,000 years before he managed to do anything about improving his means of production. Of the estimated 150 billion men who have ever lived on earth, over 60 per cent have lived as hunters and gatherers; about 35 per cent have lived by agriculture and the remaining few per cent have lived in industrial societies.

To date, the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved. Nor does this evaluation exclude the present precarious existence under the threat of nuclear annihilation and the population explosion. It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created for himself. If he fails in this task, interplanetary archeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology and society leading rapidly to extinction. “Stratigraphically,” the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear as essentially simultaneous.

On the other hand, if we succeed in establishing a sane and workable world order, the long evolution of man as a hunter in the past and the (hopefully) much longer era of technical civilization in the future will bracket an incredibly brief transitional phase of human history—a phase which included the rise of agriculture, animal domestication, tribes, states, cities, empires, nations, and the industrial revolution. These transitional stages are what cultural and social anthropologists have chosen as their particular sphere of study. We devote almost all of our professional attention to organizational forms that have emerged within the last 10,000 years and that are rapidly disappearing in the face of modernization.

It is appropriate that anthropologists take stock of the much older way of life of the hunters. This is not simply a study of biological evolution, since zoologists have come to regard behavior as central to the adaptation and evolution of all species. The emergence of economic, social, and ideological forms are as much a part of human evolution as are the developments in human anatomy and physiology.

The time is rapidly approaching when there will be no hunters left to study. Our aim in convening the symposium on Man the Hunter was to bring together those who had recently done field work among the surviving hunters with other anthropologists, archeologists, and evolutionists who are interested in the results of these studies. But it was also clear that there were a series of issues among social anthropologists that required clarification before a dialogue with others could become meaningful. Therefore, the first half of this book is devoted to the presentation of new data on contemporary hunters, along with discussion and evaluation of current issues. The later chapters consider the relevance of these data to the reconstruction of life in the past.

A number of divergent viewpoints are represented in this volume and many of the issues to be raised remain unsolved. As both editors and partisans, it is our task to point out areas of general agreement while trying to avoid glossing over real differences where they occur. Considering the many points of view presented at the symposium, it would be impossible to touch on all of the interesting material. We make no apologies for our selection but offer it as a partial guide to the papers and discussions.

Defining Hunters

The symposium considered the definition of “hunters” but did not succeed in satisfying everyone. An evolutionary definition would have been ideal; this would confine hunters to those populations with strictly Pleistocene economies—no metal, firearms, dogs, or contact with non-hunting cultures. Unfortunately such a definition would effectively eliminate most, if not all, of the peoples reported at the symposium since, as Marshall Sahlins pointed out, nowhere today do we find hunters living in a world of hunters.

Murdock (Chapter 2, this volume) and others took an organizational view which equated hunting and gathering with the “band” level of social organization. However, not all hunters live in bands. Suttles, for example (Chapter 6), documents the quite substantial non-agricultural tribal societies of the Northwest coast of North America. Judging from recent archeological evidence from the Paleolithic of France and of European Russia, a number of ancient hunting societies may have operated on a similar scale.

A further consideration was introduced by Lathrap (Chapter 3) and others who cited a number of hunting peoples who were “failed” agriculturalists. This readaptation to hunting, or “devolution” as it has been called, characterized such classic “hunters” as the Siriono of South America and the Veddas of Ceylon.

It was clear that there was much to be learned even from the ambiguous cases of tribal hunters, “devolved” hunters, and reformed hunters. To throw out impure cases was to lose the chance of gaining any significant understanding of modes of adaptation, group structure, social control, and settlement patterns. The symposium agreed to consider as hunters all cases presented, at least in the first instance. It was also generally agreed to use the term “hunters” as a convenient shorthand, despite the fact that the majority of peoples considered subsisted primarily on sources other than meat—mainly wild plants and fish.

The Representativeness of our Sample of Hunters

There has been a burst of field research on hunting peoples in the last ten years, and this symposium was the first opportunity to bring together this diverse group of field workers.

The Australian contingent included L. R. Hiatt (Arnhem Land), M. J. Meggitt (Walbiri), Arnold Pilling (Tiwi), and Aram Yengoyan, all of whom have done field work in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as well as Birdsell, Rose, and Sharp whose field work dates to the i93o’s and 1940’s. Workers from Africa included Bicchieri, Turnbull (Mbuti), Wood-burn (Hadza), and Marshall, Lee, and De-Vore on the !Kung Bushmen. Field work in Asia was reported by Dunn, Gardner, Sinha, Watanabe, and Williams. Lathrap and Crocker presented data on the part-time hunters of tropical South America. The largest group had done field work in North America: Balikci, Damas, and Laughlin on the Eskimos; Helm, Rogers, and Slobodin on subarctic Indians; and Owen and Suttles on Indians of the Pacific coast. Julian H. Steward, in many ways the founder of modern hunter-gatherer studies, submitted a paper, but was prevented by illness from attending the conference itself.

One of the first questions considered at the symposium was whether the sample currently available to ethnographers is representative of the range of habitats which hunters occupied in the past. Ever since the origin of agriculture, Neolithic peoples have been steadily expanding at the expense of the hunters. Today the latter are often found in unattractive environments, in lands which are of no use to their neighbors and which pose difficult and dramatic problems of survival. The more favorable habitats have long ago been appropriated by peoples with stronger, more aggressive social systems.

Taking hunters as they are found, anthropologists have naturally been led to the conclusion that their life (and by implication the life of our ancestors) was a constant struggle for survival. The three maps presented in the frontispiece show a radioally different picture. In 10,000 B.C., on the eve of agriculture, hunters covered most of the habitable globe, and appeared to be generally most successful in those areas which later supported the densest populations of agricultural peoples. By A.D. 1500 the area left to hunters had shrunk drastically and their distribution fell largely at the peripheries of the continents and in the in-accessible interiors. However, even at this late date, hunting peoples occupied all of Australia, most of western and northern North America, and large portions of South America and Africa. This situation rapidly changed with the era of colonial expansion, and by 1900, when serious ethnographic research got under way, much of this way of life had been destroyed. As a result, our notion of unacculturated hunter-gatherer life has been largely drawn from peoples no longer living in the optimum portion of their traditional range.

To mention a few examples, the Netsilik Eskimos, the Arunta, and the !Kung Bushmen are now classic cases in ethnography. However, the majority of the precontact Eskimos, Australian aborigines, and Bushmen lived in much better environments. Two-thirds of the Eskimos, according to Laughlin, lived south of the Arctic circle, and the populations in the Australian and Kalahari deserts were but a fraction of the populations living in the well-watered regions of southeast Australia and the Cape Province of Africa. Thus, within a given region the “classic cases” may, in fact, be precisely the opposite: namely, the most isolated peoples who managed to avoid contact until the arrival of the ethnographers. In order to understand hunters better it may be more profitable to consider the few hunters in rich environments, since it is likely that these peoples will be more representative of the ecological conditions under which man evolved than are the dramatic and unusual cases that illustrate extreme environmental pressure. Such a perspective may better help us to understand the extraordinary persistence and success of the human adaptation.

Ethnographic Reconstruction

Many of the best-known studies of hunter-gatherers have relied on ethnographic reconstructions of situations that were no longer intact. In the early years of field anthropology, Kroeber in California, Boas on the Northwest coast, and Radcliffe-Brown in the Andaman islands and Australia compiled the recollections of older informants to produce a picture of the culture and society. The “facts” of the case were thought to include the verbalized cultural tradition—language, myths, folktales, and kin terms—and concrete expressions— rituals, house types, tools, dress, and religious objects. As anthropology developed, however, a different view emerged about what constituted the ethnographic facts. More attention was paid to the study of individuals and groups in ongoing social systems. The interest in ideology was retained, but this was tempered by the task of comparing stated norms with observed behavior. When discrepancies between “real” and “ideal” came to light, the ethnographer could then make further inquiries and observations and attempt to explain “how the system really works.”

The shortcoming of the reconstructive method is that there is no means of testing and rechecking hypotheses. After the socioeconomic system ceases to function, the only check available is the test of internal consistency, and the early ethnographers were more or less successful in constructing models of social systems that were self-consistent.

The controversy on this question is very much alive in current social anthropology and the issue forms a central theme in this volume (Chapters 10, 17a, 17c, 17b, 18, 19, 22b, and 22c). The relevance for methodology hinges on the question of how much of an ongoing system can be reconstructed 25-50 years after the event, solely on the basis of informants’ accounts. Birdsell and others take the pessimistic view that such important features as group structure and territorial relations vanish with contact (Chapter 17a). Williams, in the same vein, reports that he was unable to reconstruct the residence arrangements of a Birhor group whose campsite had been mapped in detail by another anthropologist only six years previously. Woodburn notes that the Hadza present themselves as having a matrilineal descent system, when in fact the kinship and the group structure are bilateral; the fiction is used by the Hadza to emulate their agricultural, matrilineal neighbors. This fact is significant in itself, but more important, it would make impossible an accurate reconstruction of Hadza social organization at a later date, if one had to rely solely on the memory of informants.

On the other hand, several participants were more sanguine about the persistence of cultural traditions into the postcontact period. Lévi-Strauss cited the example of the retention of marriage ideology by Australian aborigines in the face of acculturation and demographic reverses (Chapter 17b, 17c). In addition, careful reconstructions of precontact ecological situations were presented by Watanabe, for the Ainu of the 1880’s (Chapter 7), and by Balikci, for the Netsilik Eskimos in 1919-20 (Chapter 8).

Finally, June Helm pointed out that the group structure of such diverse peoples as the Dogrib Indians, the !Kung Bushmen, and the Nambikwara showed striking similarities in spite of widely differing social ideologies (Chapter 13). This suggests that small-scale societies may arrive independently at similar solutions to similar demographic and ecological problems. Without the opportunity of observing behavior, however, such an important point would be impossible to establish. This problem is discussed further by Anderson (Chapter 17c).

The Subsistence Base

Strictly speaking, hunting and gathering refers to a mode of subsistence, and many of the conference papers discussed problems of ecology and economic organization. Several field workers pointed out that the subsistence base of hunters was much more substantial than had been previously supposed. It came as a surprise to some that even the “marginar ‘ hunters studied by ethnographers actually work short hours and exploit abundant food sources. Several hunting peoples lived well on two to four hours of subsistence effort per day and were not observed to undergo the periodic crises that have been commonly attributed to hunters in general (Chapters 4, 5, and 9b). Other peoples for whom detailed activity data were unavailable were nevertheless reported to show a “lack of concern” about the problem of finding food. This led the conference participants to speculate whether lack of “future orientation” brought happiness to the members of hunting societies, an idyllic attitude that faded when changing subsistence patterns forced men to amass food surpluses to bank against future shortages (Chapter 9c).

Dissenting views were reported. Balikci spoke of a “constant ecological pressure” which caused real hardship and anxiety among the Netsilik Eskimos (Chapter 8). Williams (Chapter 9c) found that the Birhor of India not only worked hard for their food but often went hungry. It was clear that Sahlins’ characterization of the hunters (Chapter 9b) as the “original affluent society” would not apply in all cases. However Sahlins’ argument served to underline the point that anthropologists have tended to view the hunters from the vantage point of the economics of scarcity. Viewed on their own terms, the hunters appear to know the fbocftresources of their habitats and are quite capable of taking the necessary steps to feed themselves. It is unlikely that hunters would have deliberately chosen the catch-as-catch-can existence that has been ascribed to them. Since a routine and reliable food base appears to be a common feature among modern hunter-gatherers, we suspect that the ancient hunters living in much better environments would have enjoyed an even more substantial food supply.

Hunting vs. Gathering

The huntin...