Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research

Linda J. Ellanna, Ernest S. Burch, Linda J. Ellanna, Ernest S. Burch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780854963768
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hunter-gatherer research has experienced enormous expansion over the past three decades. In the late 1950s less than a score of anthropologists were actively engaged in issue-oriented studies of foraging populations. Since then, the number of active researchers has grown into the hundreds.This book offers the most up-to-date anthology of papers on hunter-gatherer research and contains possibly the most comprehensive bibliography on hunter-gatherers ever published. It will be essential reading for all students of hunter-gatherer societies.

1
Introduction

Ernest S. Burch, Jr., and Linda f. Ellanna

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134961-1

Societies with economies based entirely on hunting and gathering have existed ever since the evolution of the first humans.¹ How ever, it was only in the mid-twentieth century, when the last of such societies were about to disappear, that they began to attract widespread scholarly attention. It is true that hunter-gatherers have fascinated Westerners for a long time. It is even true, as Bettinger (1991: 1) has claimed, that, “hunter-gatherer research has traditionally been undertaken within explicit theoretical frameworks and all but the most recent and doctrinaire interpretations of hunter-gatherers … are constructed out of arguments and assumptions that are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old.” But the theoretical frameworks of which he writes belonged to political philosophy, not science, and the arguments and assumptions were based more on fantasy than fact. Typically they were framed in terms of such stereotypes as “the noble savage” or people living lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It rarely, if ever, occurred to their proponents to view such notions as hypotheses to be tested against empirical evidence. Field studies of hunting and gathering peoples were carried out, of course, but most of them were purely descriptive and they were read by relatively few people.

1. We thank Lois M. Myers for the extraordinary attention, care, and effort she put into helping us make this book a reality. We also thank Pam Odum, Cheryl Worthen and Deb Varner for their help, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for its support. Finally, we thank our colleague-contributors to this volume for their cooperation and patience.

Theoretical interest in hunter-gatherer societies was stimulated in North America primarily by the pioneering work of Julian Steward (1936, 1938, 1955). Steward’s contributions lay in his discussion of bands as the foundation of foraging societies and in his efforts to reinstate social evolution as a legitimate subject of academic inquiry. In other parts of the world interest in an empirically grounded theory of hunter-gatherer societies was stimulated primarily by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s (1930, 1931) models of Australian Aborigine societies. V. Gordon Childe’s (1925, 1951: 22) evolutionary distinction between “food gatherers” (i.e., hunter-gatherers) and “food producers” (i.e., societies with agriculture and/or husbandry) also created some interest, as did the early field studies of nonhuman primates (e.g., DeVore, ed. 1965) and the search by prehistorians for ethnographic models to help interpret archaeological assemblages (e.g., Kleindienst and Watson 1956). In the late 1950s and early 1960s these trends led to an unprecedented surge of theoretically oriented field research on hunter-gatherer societies.

The combination of serious theoretical concerns and the acquisition of large quantities of new field data led to a series of conferences. The first was the Conference on Band Organization in 1965 (Damas, ed. 1969a). The other two, held in 1966, were the Conference on Cultural Ecology, in which foraging societies held center stage (Damas, ed. 1969b), and the Man the Hunter Conference (Lee and DeVore, eds. 1968), in which such societies constituted the sole topic of discussion. Together, the three conferences and their published proceedings had the effect of moving hunter-gatherer research from the backwaters of anthropology into the mainstream.

In the quarter century since the proceedings of the three “founding” conferences appeared, hunter-gatherer research has expanded enormously, so much so that it is difficult to keep track of developments in the field. Thus, it is useful from time to time to pause and take stock, which is the purpose of this book.

The nineteen papers that comprise the core of this volume are grouped into several sections according to the general issue they address. The themes are gender, territories and territoriality, hunter affluence, social stratification, culture contact, government intervention, native perspectives, and the future of the field.²

2. A number of the more philosophical issues affecting hunter-gatherer studies were recently discussed in a paper by Richard Lee (1992).

Each is comprised of an editorial introduction followed by one or more chapters, each of which deals with a specific problem within the general category. Since most of our own points are made in the editorials, the balance of this general introduction is devoted to putting the volume as a whole into context.

Conceptual Distinctions

There has been much greater variation among hunter-gatherer societies than is realized by many, or admitted by most, hunter-gatherer specialists. At one extreme within the historical/ethno-graphic record are the Calusa of southern Florida, who had substantial material wealth and a fully developed class system. At the other extreme are peoples such as the Basarwa of Botswana,³ the Hadza of Tanzania, and various African Pygmy groups, all of whom had almost nothing in the way of material possessions and minimal social stratification.

3. The people referred to here and in the several editorials as Basarwa were labelled Bushmen in the earlier anthropological literature, and as San or khoisan in more recent writings. All of these terms are unsatisfactory for one or a combination of the following reasons: (a) they are considered insulting by the people to whom they are applied; (b) the boundaries of the group being referred to are vague; (c) it is not clear whether biological, linguistic, or other criteria are used to delimit the population(s) concerned. Efforts to replace those terms with alternatives have not been satisfactory, either because they are beset by the same problems, or because they involve native designations that are so specific that they have no meaning to people who are not specialists in the area. Our choice of Basarwa is based on the fact that it is the term used officially by the government of Botswana to designate the several relevant groups. For discussions of this issue, see Lee (1979: 29 ff.), Silberbauer (1981: 3 ff., 1991), and Wilmsen (1989a: 27). We thank George Silberbauer for clarifying the relevant issues for us in a personal communication.

Most specialists on hunter-gatherer societies have dealt with this variation by ignoring it. A few have attempted to deal with it by dividing the general class of hunter-gatherers into subcategories according to various criteria. Since these distinctions are referred to in some of the chapters and in most of the editorials, it is appropriate to introduce them here.

Hunter-Gatherer Versus Gatherer-Hunter

Historically, “hunter” took precedence over “gatherer” in referring to this class of societies, because it was assumed that hunting was more important to people’s livelihood than gathering. As is made clear in the section on gender, recent evidence demonstrates otherwise. In fact, in many societies, gathering has contributed more to the food supply than hunting. On the basis of this finding, it has been suggested that the components of the label be reversed, so that the class would be referred to as gatherer-hunter; or, that the class be divided into two subclasses depending on whether hunting or gathering are more important: hunter-gatherer and gatherer-hunter. Both types are represented in this volume.

To some authors this is important; to us it is not an issue. Whenever the reference is to the class as a whole, we think the two labels should be considered complete equivalents; when applied to specific cases, we think that an author should be free to follow his or her own inclinations (or the evidence) regarding which label to use. As it happens, all of the contributors to the present volume chose to use the phrase hunter-gatherer, but there was no requirement or suggestion that they do so.

A supposedly neutral alternative is the term “forager,” which is said to refer without prejudice to either gatherers or hunters, or to both. But even this term is not altogether free of sentiment, since it often has been used to refer to the raping and pillage that medieval (and many other) armies inflicted on local populaces as they traversed the countryside.

Again, we do not consider this to be a problem. For the purposes of this volume, the designations hunter-gatherer, gatherer-hunter, and forager are absolute equivalents. In addition, because the peoples among whom the two of us have done most of our research do a great deal of fishing, we wish to emphasize that all three labels encompass that activity as well.

A more fundamental question is whether the hunter-gatherer class of societies, regardless of the label by which it is known, is fruitfully differentiated from all other types of society. This is an issue, one that is addressed in the final section of this book.

Immediate-Return Versus Delayed-Return Societies

The distinction between immediate- and delayed-return societies was developed in somewhat different ways by James Woodburn (1980, 1982) and Alain Testart (1982).⁴ As summarized by Barnard and Woodburn (1988: 11), immediate-return societies are those “with economies in which people usually obtain an immediate yield for their labor, use this yield with minimal delay and place minimal emphasis on property rights.” (Examples of immediate return societies discussed in the present volume are the !Kung and the Hadza, particularly as portrayed in the paper by Blurton Jones, Hawkes, and Draper.) Delayed return societies are all others, hence most of the societies known to science. This distinction has not been widely used except by its original proponents, although it has come more into vogue in recent years.

4. Testart’s scheme f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication Page
• List of Figures
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1 Gender
• Part 2 Territories and Territoriality
• Part 3 Hunter Affluence?
• Part 4 Social Stratification
• Part 5 Culture Contact
• Part 6 Government Intervention
• Part 7 Native Perspectives
• Part 8 New Problems in Hunter-Gatherer Research
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index