Handout 10 and 11: The Power of Comparison: on Hunters and Gatherers and
Beyond
1. Hunting and gathering: for more than 99% of the time humans have spent on
earth, people lived by hunting and gathering. And of that 1% of the time, after
the advent of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, only a small fraction has been
characterized by the advanced industrial society which produces things like
Amherst College, professors of anthropology, supermarkets where we buy meat
already wrapped up and well removed from the circumstances of death.
2.
When first encountered by anthropologists, contemporary hunters and gatherers,
like the Bushmen of the Kalahari, were, for the most part, remnant populations.
They were surviving in quite marginal circumstances. In the case of the
Bushmen, they had long been pushed from lusher, better watered lands by Bantu
agriculturalists and by white settlers. That they were managing at all under these
circumstances testifies to the viability of hunting and gathering under what had
been -- historically -- more normal, less marginal circumstances.
3. Also, although groups like the Bushmen (when still hunting and gathering) were
the last remnants of what had been a wide-spread -- universal -- mode of human
adaptation in the past, they must not to be viewed as "living fossils." They have
been caught up in history -- HISTORIES -- like everyone else -- and their history
has not been one of being untouched, being left behind -- but of having fought to
maintain a particular way of life, and a particular set of social values in the face
of considerable pressure to change.
4. This said, by learning about e.g. the Bushmen, we can get some PROVISIONAL
sense of what life might have been like among hunters and gatherers of the past - what sorts of kinship systems, what sorts of patterns of leadership, what sorts of
gender relationships. So, what about them:
a.
Hunters and gatherers live in small bands (of between 20-60 people) on large
territories.
b. They support themselves through foraging (generally by women) and hunting
(generally by men) – with foraging providing more that 80% of the calories
consumed.
c. They have no permanent settlements, but practice and value mobility.
d. They (often) practice exogamy (out-marriage) with women leaving their home
bands and joining those of their husbands.
e. They share food readily among all band members (including the animals they
kill) – indeed, among visiting members from other bands -- with no accounting of who gets what from whom (a practice known as generalized
reciprocity).
f. They value flexibility with group action determined by consensus (which is to
say, no one bosses anyone else).
g. They are non-hierarchical – with leadership earned (achieved), not
predetermined (ascribed).
5. But, what about change? This hunting and gathering adaptation arrangement
would seem very stable. If this is such a great life (as Sahlins has it), what
happened to it?
6.
Keep in mind that, as the film Nai shows, people in the Kalahari have developed
other lives and forms of technology: Now there are ranchers, game-keepers,
mission stations with deep wells, now living in the Kalahari. Presumably, it
would be technically possible for a Western financed corporation to irrigate the
Kalahari and install wet- rice terraces
7.
But why didn't the Bushmen develop the sophisticated technology that would
have supported different forms of social organization etc. in this environment -or would have allowed them to change the environment? Or, to turn the
question entirely around: what has happened so that hunters and gathers have
become remnant populations -- why only a miniscule fraction of living people
now follow the way of life that all humans followed for 99% of human history.
8.
First and foremost: It is an erroneous assumption of contemporary Western
peoples who have as one of their central ideas, the idea of progress (of
progressive change/ development over time) -- that the new, the changed, is
likely to be desired for its own sake.
9. On Romer’s Rule: The adaptive advantages of an innovation are conservative in
that they allow an organism (or, I would add here, a society) to maintain a
traditional way of life in the face of changed circumstances.
10. In the course of human cultural life, very few innovations are adopted because of
their potential for change. What happened to hunters and gatherers? What, to
sharpen the question, led to a more settled, less nomadic way of life. What led to
the advent of settled agricultural communities? It is not likely that hunters and
gatherers gavde up their way of life intentionally – especially since this would be
the transition from the original affluent society.
11. Agriculture in the Middle East.
12. On affluence and poverty (Sahlins and Lee). 13. To paraphrase anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano: ‘One of the missions of
anthropological descriptions is to produce “defamiliarization” or an “alienation
effect.” Anthropology (and sociology) possesses a critically creative potential
insofar as, through defamiliarization, alienation, or self-distancing, it leads us
(and no doubt in different fashions, the people with whom we work) to
overcome, or at least recognize, social construction and cultural blindness:
ultimately, to re-evaluate our respective cultural perspectives.’
Handout 10 and 11 The Power of Comparison on Hunters and Gatherers and Beyond
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