Hunter Gatherer Studies Flashcards
How are HGs usually defined
Using subsistence strategy as a starting/defining point:
- Majority of food derived from hunting, gathering or fishing.
- Do not practice cultivation on a sizeable scale (hard to draw a line)
How did Lee and Daly describing foraging
“Foraging refers to a subsistence based on hunting of wild animals, gathering wild plant foods, no domestication of plants, and no domesticated animals except the dog.” (Lee & Daly 1999)
Have HGs domesticated any animals
No domestication bar the dog
Dog was only animal domesticated before the neolithic
Image of dog mandible found in grave with 2 humans from 15kya in Germany
First material evidence of domestication
Genetics suggest up to 30kya
What are the typical characteristics of a HG society
Multi-family camps with multilocal (bilocal) residence.
- Mobile residence with fluid camp composition ~7 moves/year (Marlowe 2005).
- Tiered social organisation – camp, ritual level/residence pool, ethnolinguistic group.
• Egalitarian political organisation.
• Predominantly serially monogamous with ~10% of women married polygynously
(ibid.).
- Sexual DoL with male hunting and female gathering.
- This typical suite of characteristics describes the simple or immediate-return types…we will think more about complex/delayed-return later.
How common are typical HG societies
Extant HGs rarely fit into the definition of ‘pure’ HG, usually have access to some resources through trade or government provisions, who may have given them gardens etc to practice some cultivation
More of a spectrum
Marlow defined HGs as anyone who had less than 10% of calories from cultivated foods
Why do we care about HGs
• Humans developed agriculture ~10kya thus ~95% of our species’ and 99% of our genus’ history was spent as HGs.
• Maybe extant HGs can tell us about:
-the origins of our life-history and aspects of our
behaviour.
-offer a valuable comparison point when thinking
about human diversity.
-a current case for studying transition.
-mismatch and health.
What did Kelly say regarding HG studies in 2013
• Hunter-Gatherers are the quintessential topic of anthropology (Kelly 2013).
How were HGs viewed after the enlightenment
Emphasis on contrasting ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ human societies.
• Hobbes 1695 conceived of the primitive human state as:
“no Culture of the Earth … No navigation … no Knowledge of the face of
the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society …”
“…the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
Describe Spencer’s idea of social evolution
Herbert Spencer’s idea of social evolution:
- step-wise unilineal evolution of society progressing intellectually and morally.
- endpoint: monogamous, sedentary, patrilineal, monotheistic and white society.
- HGs developmentally retarded and relics of the past.
- HGs destined for extinction and lack technological complexity so devote time to food acquisition rather than intellectual pursuits.
Give 2 unilineal frameworks of human history
Lewis Morgan divided human history (and diversity) into three phases: -savagery [HGs] -barbarism -civilisation
• Fredrick Engels adds lower, middle and upper to the savagery (and barbarism) stage:
-lower (gathering of fruits and nuts; still arboreal and a
transitional stage from the animal kingdom)
-middle (use of fish and fire)
-upper (bow and arrow allows for hunting)
Used popular Darwinian ideas – saw lower savagery stage as when humans were still part human
Considered lower and middle stages to be extinct while only upper savages are represented in the extant HG populations
Who was Franz Boas
father of American anthropology.
• Originally a geographer/physicist during an
expedition became fascinated with Baffin Island Inuit culture.
• Rejected the unilineal view and idea of ranking societies, considered diversity as a result of history and diffusion.
• Emphasised cultural relativism + need for fieldwork and ethnography – cannot understand practices/beliefs of a society using an outside
perspective
How did cultural ecology develop
Steward tried to identify links between culture and environment rather than ethnographic descriptions of specific societies – cultural ecology.
• Advocated comparative method and identifying adaptation, arguing historical processes are untestable.
What is structural functionalism
(Radcliffe Brown): societies composed of interdependent units like organs of an organism.
Early functional thinking often followed group selectionist logic and considered societies as homeostatic systems e.g. infanticide as population regulation
How did the demonisation of HGs become idolisation
- In 60s and 70s societal dissatisfaction high.
- Movement away from unilineal social evolution and consideration of what we can learn from HGs who seem relatively peaceful and egalitarian.
• Some idealisation of the HGs as noble savages; and the original affluent society rather than people who had no time due to lack of technology (Sahlins 1968;1972):
- lack of material property avoided being tied down
- HGs already had everything they wanted
• Lee reports that !Kung San have a 12-19 hour work
week…many wonder where it had all gone wrong.
Is Lee’s stat of HGs only doing 12 hours work per week accurate?
Lee had focussed on foraging time, which was found to be much higher in other populations.
• HG work goes far beyond searching for food…what about tool manufacture, water collection, food
processing, firewood etc.
• Nor does less work imply sufficiency…harsh conditions and malnutritional can restrict opportunity for labour.
eg 4/5 hours a day cracking nuts
Describe the levels in HG societies (4)
Lowest level is household with ‘nuclear family’ usually
Camp with multiple households where not necessarily relatedness between everyone – NOT one big extended family
(~30 residents in a camp)
150 individuals in a residence pool/ ritual level (made up of lots of camps) – Dunbar’s number
Ethnolinguistic level has many residence pools from 100s to 10s of 1000s
How often do HG move between camps
Move often
Members of a household may frequently move between camps
Over weeks/ months people there at the beginning are different to the people there at the end
Fluid membership
What is the ritual level of a HG society
residence pool (~150 people where people are usually familiar with and will at some point live with every other person in their residence pool )
Also called ritual level as everyone in residence pool will gather for a ritual
How many HGs to a camp usually
30 members
Describe the inequality and marriage system of HGs simply
Lots of autonomy and egalitarian
Between sexes and between ages (even children)
Serially monogamous with low polygyny rates
How much of human existence is thought to be in HG lifestyle
Thought to be how humans lived for the majority of our existence as a species (95% of existence of Homo sapiens, never mind older hominin species)
How many HG societies are there
Marlowe’s map of 50+ HG societies but work has focussed on 10-15 societies where researchers have lived there for ages and extrapolated results (eg Richard Lee with !Kung San)
What HG group did Nik stay with
Mbendjele BaYaka
Who are the Mbendjele BaYaka
Mbendjele is the ethnolinguistic group
Reside in northern congo
BaYaka refers to many pygmy populations who live in central and west Africa
Not to be confused with Aka who are a different ethnolinguistic group but still BaYaka – in central African republic
Why are the Agta so useful for testing ecological hypotheses
Northern Philippines
Some very costal, some in mountains, some in forests
Who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’
Spencer
How did unilineal evolution view HG societies
What was the beginning and end stages of cultural evolution in Morgan’s eyes
Considered HGs as residue of a less advanced time just waiting to go extinct, without any intelligence to develop technology or humanities etc
Movement from being controlled by the environment to having control over the environment
Are HGs homogenous?
Why is it important to recognise this
No: Even if we restrict our analyses to simple warm-climate (>13C) HGs: -infant mortality (10-46%) -fertility rate (0.81-8.5) -polygyny (0-90%)
Presumably this variation was more pronounced in the past, so does it make sense to reconstruct one ‘ancestral’ lifestyle?
How does division of labour differ between HG groups
In some HGs women are involved in hunting e.g. net-hunting
among Aka. Whether men or women fish also varies by population.
• Ache men provide 87% (Hill & Hurtado 1996) of Kcal, Efe men
provide 40% (Morelli 1987).
How can HG studies be criticised
• Critics of HG studies state extant HGs have been pushed into low productivity
environments and marginalised by more successful farming societies.
• Thus extant HGs have much more nutritional stress and occupy a limited
range of habitats compared to our ancestors, which has knock on effects for
all aspects of social organisation (Barker 1999).
Why is Baker’s 1999 criticism of HG studies not necessarily always true (4)
-Land can be bad for agriculture but good for foraging.
-Australian HGs living in low primary biomass areas weren’t forced there.
-When cold-climate foragers are excluded, forager habitats aren’t less
productive.
• Alternatively, due to technological advances resulting from ongoing cultural accumulation, productivity likely to be higher than in past (Marlowe 2005).
What is the Traditionalist view of HGs
- HG are relatively autonomous
- Increases in contact have had little impact
- HGs are egalitarian and nomadic with a longstanding distinct culture
What is the Revisionists and the Interdependent Model of HG
Give examples
- Wilmsen challenged Lee’s interpretation of the San as model for human evolutionary history…biased by preconceptions.
- HGs have had long standing interactions and trade relationships with neighbouring non-HGs for millennia.
- Some argue rainforest HGs cannot live independently without trade with farmers due to low availability of carbohydrates (Bailey 1989).
Bofi Pygmies trade 35% of their meat with local
horticulturalists (Lupo & Schmitt 2002).
- Commercial foraging is part of a larger economic system (Grinker 1992)…we can only understand extant HGs in the context of modernity….professional primitives.
- In recent times tourism and wage labour opportunities have become more common.
What is the Kalahari Debate
a series of back and forth arguments that began in the 1980s amongst anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians about how the San people and hunter-gatherer societies in southern Africa have lived in the past. On one side of the debate were scholars led by Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore, considered traditionalists or “isolationists.” On the other side of the debate were scholars led by Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, considered revisionists or “integrationists.”
Give a summary of the intro to HG studies
- HG populations are those whose subsistence predominantly relies on foraging wild foods.
- Often implicitly referring to simple HGs who are nomadic, egalitarian & do not store food or accumulate resources.
- Perception of HGs has varied from one extreme (unilineal evolution) to the other (noble savages + original affluent society)
- Extant HGs may offer insight into our evolutionary history but:
- there is lots of variability now and was even more in the past
- many have a long history of interaction and trade with non-foragers
- they represent a fascinating part of humanity regardless
Why establish rank
Instead of fighting each time, risking injury/ death, they arrange into dominance hierarchy where you know your position
Can think of dominance as the imposed deference of subordinate individuals over contested resources (Ritualised fight or honest signal etc
Coalitions becoming important – between kin or between non kin )
How is rank determined in most primate species
In most primates, rank is determined by resource holding potential & sometimes coalitionary support.
Is hierarchy common to humans as a species
- Recognised hierarchical positions and social classes throughout most of human history: big men, chiefs, emperors etc.
- Can’t assume uninterrupted trend since CHLCA…
How did Boehm describe the egalitarian syndrome
“They are politically egalitarian to the degree that named leadership roles are
lacking or devoid of authority, status differences among politically autonomous
household heads are muted, and individuals who try to influence group decisions
must do so very circumspectly. The guidance mechanism for this deliberate
behaviour is an egalitarian ethos (Cashdan 1980) that involves a set of indigenous
attitudes that make for strong valuation of personal autonomy of adults (Gardner
1991). These values help generate group hostility toward any individual who even
attempts to assume a serious role of authority in the band, let alone baldly tries to
coerce other adults.” (Boehm 1997).
What are the core tenants of the egalitarian syndrome
- Consensus decision making
- Leadership/ranks absent or ‘weak’ i.e. no ultimate authority
- Rejection of dominant behaviour + emphasis on autonomy
- Obligation to behave cooperatively and generously
How did Lee use
an ethnographic description to explain the maintenance of egalitarianism in HGs
Bizarre self-deprecating traditions and obligatory modesty.
Keeping individuals in che - bully/ insult hunters etc to ‘keep him gentle’ (Lee 1969)
• Concepts of ownership and property are weak > reports of individuals taking things as they please – demand sharing.
• ritualised practices facilitating:
-voicing of opinions (for consensus decision making)
-ridicule of others behaviour (authoritative/self-aggrandizing)
Give 2 events described by Bombjakova
What do they promote
Mòsámbò
Mòádʒò
aims for the members to grow into wisdom
What is Mòádʒò
- ritualised mockery
- often involves mimicking or re-enactment
- ridicule often centred around selfishness/boastfulness
How are individual sexes initiated in the BaYaka?
How do the sexes establish and maintain sexual equality ?
BaYaka men and women go through a series of sex-specific initiation rites, each associated with a specific mokondi and resulting in the acquisition of secret knowledge.
During massana dances, often one sex emphasises their value, collective solidarity and mock the other – fierce egalitarianism
What are the Mokondi
spirits of the forest in BaYaka culture
Give examples of massana in the BaYaka
• In women’s Ngoku massana they may sing lyrics:
-penis stop sleeping
-their testicles are broken
• During Sho, men run around the camp, arms linked, chasing women into their huts.
What is the point of massana
each sex demonstrates that they cannot be dominated by the other sex via rituals where the coalitions of each sex demonstrate the weaknesses of the other sex
Describe the male initiation in the BaYaka
Starts with isolation, only visited by already initiated men (no contact with women eg mother) who taunt you
Scared, drunk, tired
Not allowed to smile - modesty
Painted in pigment and oils and made to sit in the sun
You may have your ‘mother’ wipe your eyes or a friend look up at the sun for you
Hit etc etc
Forced to do a serious of secret trials that are scary, embarrassing, difficult
Lose any sense of superiority; learn that power lies with the collective and you yourself are no better than anyone else
Severe punishment for divulging secrets
Levelling mechanism
What is reverse hierarchy
Because humans can plan group-wide synchronised activities/ behvaiours to rebuttal individuals – hierachry turned on its head so collective always at the top
Any time an individual try to exert power, the collective suppress the selfish behaviour
What did Boehm say regarding reverse hierarchy?
What does this mean?
Egalitarianism does not just happen, it is made to happen.
(Boehm 1997)
Humans have cognitive ability to form group-wide coalitions allowing for reverse hierarchy - the usual primate pyramid of dominance and power turned upside down
(Boehm 1997; Gavrielets 2008).
What is the mechanism behind reverse hierarchy
Levelling mechanisms prevent dominant/self-aggrandizing behaviour from flourishing e.g. ridicule, ostracism and execution (Boehm 1993).
If humans all have the same cognitive ability to form coalitions why is egalitarianism not ubiquitous
Because HGs have no food storage + reliance on unpredictable resources, HGs are highly interdependent…
Ache HGs would have less than 1000kcal/person on ~30% days, but with food sharing only 3% of days.
Self sufficiency is impossible, especially given complimentary roles of males and females (fats and proteins vs micronutrients and carbs)
After Neolithic, when food could be stored and complete interdependence disappears, allowing dominance to emerge
What are the different ways to classify HGs
- immediate vs delayed return - when resources are consumed(Woodburn 1982)
- simple vs complex (Price 1985)#
Utility and defining features highly debated. Is complexity about social
organisation/ economic activities + labour relations/ technology/
demography etc.
Describe egalitarianism in complex HGs
Evidence for non-egalitarian ‘complex’ foragers:
- ethnographic descriptions of non-egalitarian foragers, particularly in North America at contact (NW coast + southern California)
- archaeological record (burials, monuments) provides more widespread evidence for status differentials among foragers, particularly over last 15kya.
Describe the hierarchies, mobility, settlement size, and type of technology in simple HGs
egalitarian
highly mobile
small camps
low investment, portable technology
Describe the hierarchies, mobility, settlement size, and type of technology in complex HGs
elites and social classes (wealth/descent)
sedentary/low mobility
large settlements
elaborate technology
Describe the population density, territory, storage, and specialisation in simple HGs
low population density
no defined territory
no storage
little specialisation (exc. sex-based)
Describe the population density, territory, storage, and specialisation in complex HGs
high population density
territorial defense + warfare
reliance on storage
substantial specialisation
Is there a cause of complexity in HGs?
complicated:
• what is a cause of complexity in one model becomes a precondition of
complexity in another and a consequence of complexity in yet another
(Arnold, 1996, p. 95)
Are there any ecological correlates with complex HGs
• Strong bias towards coastal populations – classic case is the societies on
NW Pacific Coast.
• Heavy reliance on aquatic resources, esp. salmon:
Why may coastal locations lead to complex HG societies
• Heavy reliance on aquatic resources, esp. salmon:
- predictable in location
- extremely abundant
- seasonal
cf. Terrestrial resources unpredictable and thinly dispersed thus require high
mobility over larger areas
How do costal HGs become complex?
Give study
Seasonally abundant predictable fish -> large settlements by resource-rich sites -> storage + intensification allowing independence(Roscoe 2006).
What is the surplus feasting model
• Resource rich environments + storage:
-private ownership
-possibility for surplus production
>unlocks potential for hierarchy…
• Aggrandizers use surplus to enhance political and economic self-interest…create dependencies and debts –> gain power.
• Principal means is via hosting of feasts…competitive feasting extremely common in complex HGs (Hayden
2009).
What is population pressure
population density relative to resource availability
What is the importance of population pressure in HG studies
Give a study
When population pressure is high, mobility is reduced as available space is limited and people want to settle near rivers etc where resource can be acquired esp if seasonally available
High PP associated with increased sedentism and reliance on food storage among sample of 94 HG societies (Keeley 1988).
Why does high population pressure lead to complex HG societies
When population pressure is high, mobility is reduced as available space is limited and people want to settle near rivers etc where resource can be acquired esp if seasonally available
Intensification and storage become only option but require considerable labour and coordination…particularly for seasonal resources.
Inter-group conflict for control of productive defensible
resource + stored surplus + slaves for labour.
>opportunities for leaders to emerge to increase efficiency and prevent free-riding
cultural group selection
Give a summary of the lecture on egalitarianism
- Simple hunter-gatherers are egalitarian and reject dominance via levelling mechanisms/reverse dominance.
- High variability in food acquisition > mutual dependence > dominance isn’t viable
- Complex hunter-gatherers are more sedentary, have more elaborate technology, store food, live in larger groups, are hierarchical and territorial.
• Little consensus around mechanics underlying emergence of complexity but
association with reliance on seasonally abundant fish:
-facilitates sedentism > increased tech + storage > ownership + surpluses >
economic + political competition
-population pressure > reduced mobility > intensification and storage > increased need for coordination in production and warfare > emergence of leaders and slavery
How predictable is HG subsistence (3)
risky subsistence - Large amount of luck involved
Hunting success rate rarely approach 50%
‘success’ is very loose term (something brought back if only a rat etc)
Only 3% of Hadza return with big game
