The Category of Hunter and Gatherer
In the early works on such societies, the term 'hunters and gatherers' seldom appears but after the publication of Man the Hunter the use of the category is widespread. It is not possible to fully inventory all the works before and after 1968, but a number of issues can be set forth. In most cases after 1968, the differences and complexities of different societies are virtually lost and even denied within the categorical rubric which is used. Forde 1934 places the Semang, Bushmen and Paiute...
HunterGatherers in History Archaeology and Anthropology Introductory Essay
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...
Anna A Sirina
I commenced my studies in the 1980s when ethnography was still wearing the mantle of Sovietism. I remember at the time disliking the dry scientific text, devoid of life that, in keeping with established canons, did not allow authors to show their positions or attitudes to the phenomena, events or facts they described. Such a style has not always been characteristic of ethnographic writings. Rather, it was a reflection of a society where demonstration of individuality was not encouraged. As...
Morality and emotion
Although Westermarck sets himself apart from philosophical inquiry, his outlook has evident affinities with the empiricist Scottish tradition exemplified by Hutcheson, Hume and Smith.1 Like them, he traces moral ideas to feeling and his stated priority, as theirs, is to analyse rather than prescribe. Behaviour is neither inherently good nor bad but is deemed to be so depending upon whether it is conventionally approved or disapproved. Moral judgments may, and do, differ from one culture to...
The Work of AN Maksimov
The majority of Russian ethnologists enthusiastically accepted the concepts of British and American evolutionism. On the other hand, as in the West, in Russia, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, quite sceptical attitudes to evolutionistic speculations had developed. These attitudes were most obvious in the works of A.N. Maksimov. It was precisely due to his efforts that on the eve of the Revolution the avant-garde approaches to the investigation of...
Julian Steward and the Question of Culture
Earlier, it was noted that the change from culture to society to population was in part due to the work of Julian Steward 1955a . It should be made clear that the directions in terms of population analysis is not found in Steward's work. The impact of Steward's approach takes another form which is necessary to explicate for understanding the kinds of changes that have taken place in hunting and gathering studies and also to explain why the idea of culture was marginalized by Steward. In his...
Edward Westermarck and the Origin of Moral Ideas
Man A species of ape who believes in the gods and who imitates them without ceasing to be an animal. From the World War I prison memoirs of Andr Lorulot, French pacifist Despite his formal classification as a sociologist, Westermarck's two major works The History of Human Marriage, 1891 The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 1906 are in the best traditions of evolutionary anthropology. As an empiricist, he based his speculations about origins and early human history on massive digests...
Notes 1
1. For example, there is a widespread notion in 'traditional' Africa of hunter-gatherers as the original peoples in lands they now share with pastoralists and cultivators. Indeed this notion sometimes features in the symbolism and rituals of non-hunter-gatherers see e.g. Woodburn 2001 3-5 . 2. This example was suggested by Kazuyoshi Sugawara Kyoto University in discussion of related issues in another paper of mine. 3. I am grateful to Yasushi Uchiyamada University of Tsukuba for discussion of...
HuntingandGathering Society in the Scottish Enlightenment
The Scottish tradition was certainly built upon a foundation of economic concerns. These related to early eighteenth-century periods of economic as well as social instability in Scotland, and to a time in the middle and late eighteenth century An eighteenth-century Scottish invention 35 when Scottish farming practices, as well as other economic concerns, were undergoing great change. Several of the key protagonists, such as Lord Kames and Adam Smith, were active in their advocacy of specific...
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...
Peter P Schweitzer
Until recently, the genealogy of debates about the structural properties of hunter-gatherer societies was supposed to be rather shallow. Due to the Anglophone bias of much contemporary anthropology, the 1966 conference 'Man the Hunter' has often been viewed as the starting point of the modern hunter-gatherer discourse. More historically oriented overviews, on the other hand, traced the beginnings to the works of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Julian Steward. Thus, it is a positive development that...
Seventeenth and Eighteenthcentury Precursors
Before the middle of the eighteenth century there was virtually no notion of a kind of society comparable to what we call 'hunting-and-gathering society'. Instead, the concern was with the dichotomy 'natural man' versus either the state or civil society or with individualism versus sociality or with the influence of climate on temperament and culture. What scholars sought was an explanation of the innate, natural human existence, whether it was 'original' or simply embedded deep in the human...
Ethnology in the Early Soviet Era
Maksimov had but few followers maybe only one S.A. Tokarev , at best two Tokarev and A.M. Zolotarev , though both did work in the post-revolutionary period. After the Revolution the task of elabouration of the new 'Marxist' ethnological methods had been announced by 'the ideologists' of the country. Paradoxically, this task was realized especially industriously in the field of 'primeval history', which meant, in fact, studies on stateless societies. The subject had provoked special interest...
Conclusion
I have been looking at the notion of hunting-and-gathering society through examples of early modern Western discourse. This may seem ethnocentric, and in a sense it is. But it is with good reason anthropology as an academic discipline is in theoretical continuity with eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy, through Smith's disciple Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh, and to his students James Cowles Prichard and Thomas Hodgkin, the founders of organizational anthropology in Great Britain in the...
HunterGatherers and GermanLanguage Anthropology
German-language anthropology during the final decades of the nineteenth century was largely characterized by opposition to British and American treatises of social and cultural evolution. Even Adolf Bastian 1826-1905 - who laid the institutional foundations for modern German anthropology and later became the evolutionist scapegoat for his diffusionist critics - could hardly be called an evolutionist, either in terms of biology or of sociology. At the same time, at the turn from the nineteenth...
Reflections on the Idea of the HunterGatherer
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...
Studies of Traditional Life of the Gwi and Gana
The Japanese studies of the San were initiated by Jiro Tanaka. His host groups are the G wi and G ana, closely related dialect groups of the Khoe-speaking Bushmen peoples Barnard 1992c . I will use an abbreviated notation, G wi-G ana, to refer to both dialect groups. Approximately 1,000 G wi - Gana were making a living by hunting and gathering in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve CKGR which was demarcated in 1961. Among them, the population living in the Xade Area, in the mid-western part of...
Ibn Khaldun and Islamic History
A third brief comparison highlights the contingency of the perceived significance of anthropological categories. Medieval Islamic scholars and those of Judaeo-Christian tradition, had ancient and Classical texts, a personified Creator, and environmental and other experiences in common. They might thus be expected to demonstrate other commonalities regarding the form of cosmologies, time and hence history. But the example of Ibn Khaldun - one of the few pre-modern Islamic scholars to write...
The Meaning of HunterGatherers and Modes of Subsistence a Comparative
Our preference for using anthropological categories such as hunters, pastoralists and farmers can be traced back to mid-eighteenth century northern Europe, when social evolution or 'progress' was first widely expressed and systematized as universal histories, and stadial schemes of human development defined by subsistence categories Meek 1976, Trigger 1998, Barnard 1999, Rudebeck 2000, Pluciennik 2001 . The most recent phase of hunter-gatherer studies dates from the 1960s Bender and Morris 1988...
Kazuyoshi Sugawara
In Japan the discipline of anthropology originated more than 100 years ago the first volume of the Japanese journal of physical anthropology was published in 1886. However, it was almost half a century later, in 1934, that the formal society of cultural anthropology the Japanese Society of Ethnology was founded Yamashita 1998 . Soon after the the Second World War, the University of Tokyo became the prominent centre for Japanese cultural anthropology. In particular, Hitoshi Watanabe's 1968 study...
Shanti Pappu
Place him on the earth before he dies, He must stay close to where his four walls grew - And where his copper coin and silver thread and arrowhead lie hidden, He must remember when his home was new. Bhil song from Khare, The Singing Bow South Asian archaeologists invariably work within an atmosphere influenced by a diversity of socio-economic and cultural forces, the outcome of the coexistence of varied religious, caste and tribal groups. Within this context, the image of the 'hunter-gatherer'...
Early Research on the Pygmies
The central African hunter-gatherers generally called Pygmies live mostly in rainforest zones of the Congo Basin, in such countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo DRC, formerly Zaire , Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon. They also inhabit forest margins and montane forests, but are not found in savannahs or woodland. When some years ago I investigated the distribution of Efe Pygmies in the north-eastern part of the Congo Basin, the Efe were found only in forest patches, even in the areas with...
Plan of the Book
Each of the three parts of this volume represents an interdisciplinary theme within the history of hunter-gatherer studies. The chapters may, of course, be read individually, but taken together they form less a bunch of historical threads and more an interwoven set of histories from different anthropological and archaeological traditions. Throughout the volume there is an element of debate for example, two papers on Steward, each giving a very different portrayal from the other complementary...
Egalitarian Society Undergoing Change
The primary interest that motivated Tanaka s studies was to clarify the way of life of humans who are thoroughly dependent on the blessing of nature . Thus, while recognizing that the ancestors of the modern hunter-gatherers must certainly have undergone some social change themselves during the last 10,000 years , Tanaka confidently stated that there is no doubt that the ethnographic facts relating to the present-day hunter-gatherers hold many important keys for us as we try to reconstruct man...