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A hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, using foraging and hunting, without significant recourse to the domestication of either. The demarcation between hunter-gatherers and other societies which rely more upon domestication (see agriculture and pastoralism) is not a clean one, as many contemporary societies use a combination of both strategies to obtain the foodstuffs required to sustain themselves.

Historical context

Hunting and gathering was the only economy employed by human societies for more than a million years, until the end of the Palaeolithic period. The transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture originated and spread in several different areas including the Middle East, Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes beginning as early as 12,000 years ago. Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have perpetually declined as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Areas which were formerly unrestricted to hunter-gatherers were encroached upon by the settlements of early agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas.

As the number and size of agricultural communities increased and expansion became necessary to sustain increasing populations, genocide became an effective strategy for colonizers to gain possession of lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers and communities practicing small scale agriculture (for examples, see European Colonization of Africa, European colonization of the Americas, European Colonization of Australia). As a result of the now global reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary cultures who practice hunting and gathering usually live in areas seen as undesirable for agricultural use.

Methods of study

Archaeological evidence must be used to learn about prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and ethnographic studies, as well as historical information, provide information about living or historic hunter-gatherers. Interdisciplinary fields such as ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, human behavioral ecology, and paleoethnobotany have also arisen to provide more insight into the hunter-gatherer past.

Common characteristics

Habitat and population

Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively mobile or "nomadic", given their reliance upon the ability of a given natural environment to provide sufficient Natural resource in order to sustain their population and the variable availability of these resources owing to local climatic and seasonal conditions. Their population densities tend to be lower than those of agriculturalists, since cultivated land is capable of sustaining population densities 60–100 times greater than land left uncultivated. Individual bands tend to be small in number (10-30 individuals), but these may gather together seasonally to temporarily form a larger group (100 or more) when resources are abundant. In a few places where the environment is especially productive, such as that of the Pacific Northwest coast, hunter-gatherers are able to settle permanently.

Hunter-gatherer settlements may be either permanent, temporary, or some combination of the two, depending upon the mobility of the community. Mobile communities typically construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available, while more settled communities build more durable structures.

Social structure

Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures. However, this is usually only the case in the more mobile societies, which generally are not able to store surplus food. Thus, full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies. Others, such as the Haida of present-day British Columbia, lived in such a rich environment that they could remain sedentary, like many other Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest coast. These groups demonstrate more hierarchical social organization.

A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an extremely common phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide, but exceptional examples are known. It would, therefore, be an over-generalization to say that men always hunt and women always gather.

At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition. At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society," in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.

One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food (Kelly, 31). Some Marxists have theorised that hunter-gatherers would have used primitive communism and anarcho-primitivists elaborate the mechanics further by asserting it would have been a gift economy, although this would not have applied for all hunter-gatherer societies.

Problems with generalizing

The line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies is not clear cut. Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesirable plants while encouraging desirable ones, some even going to the extent of slash-and-burn to create habitat for game animals. Some agriculturalists also hunt and gather (e.g. farming during the frost-free season and hunting during the winter). Still today many in developed countries will go hunting, primarily for leisure.

Modern context

It has recently been claimed that, in most cases, these groups do not have a continuous history of hunting and gathering, and that in many cases their ancestors were agriculturalists who were pushed into marginal areas as a result of migrations and wars. These theories imply that, because the "pure hunter-gatherer" disappeared not long after colonial contact began, nothing can be learned about prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of modern ones (Kelly, 24-29); however, specialists who study hunter-gatherer ecology (see Cultural ecology) vehemently disagree.

There are contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples whose contact with external societies, and whose way of life continues with very little external influence. One such group are the Pila Nguru or the Spinifex People of Western Australia, whose habitat in the Great Victoria Desert has proved unsuitable for European agriculture (and even pastoralism). Another are the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, who live on North Sentinel Island and to date have maintained their independent existence, repelling attempts to engage with and contact them.

Social movements

There are some modern social movements related to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle:
  • freeganism involves gathering of discarded food (and sometimes other materials) in the context of an urban or suburban environment
  • gleaning involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields
  • anarcho-primitivism, which strives for the abolishment of civilization and the return to a life in the wild
  • paleolithic diet, which strives to achieve a diet similar to that of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.

References

Further reading

See also

External links

Anthropological categories of peoples | Economies | Stone Age

Caçador-recol·lector | Jäger und Sammler | Caza-recolección | Chasseur-cueilleur | חברת לקט-צייד | Jager-verzamelaar | 狩猟採集社会 | Lovci-sakupljači | Metsästäjä-keräilijät

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Hunter-gatherer".

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