Hunter-Gatherer Studies

History

HISTORY OF HUNTER GATHERER STUDIES, by Daniel Bitton:

Now until the 1960s, there were all sorts of assumptions about hunter gathers among anthropologists which were based on a mix of common popular misconceptions, and also on the work of some famous anthropologists like Alfred Radcliffe Browne and Claude Levi Strauss both of whom had worked among Australian Aborigines in the early 20th century.

Like a lot of people think that if someone is running around in a grass skirt with a spear that this is a hunter gatherer or close enough – and even many anthropologists have assumed that we can infer things about our palaeolithic ancestors based on anyone that looks “primitive” but most people with grass skirts and spears in recent times are actually horticulturalists – small plot farmers. Something which didn’t exist in the palaeolithic era and which has completely different incentives and social structure and belief systems than hunting and gathering usually does.

So, based on all this stuff, it was often assumed that hunter gatherers were male dominated societies where women were basically slaves and babymakers.

It was assumed that hunter gatherers were made up of bands of closely related males, with unrelated females marrying into the group, and that cooperation was based on advancing the interests of the people genetically closest to you.

It was assumed that hunter gatherers were fiercely territorial and competed and warred frequently with neighbouring groups.

It was assumed that most of their food came from male hunting and that female gathering and hunting were relatively unimportant.

It was assumed that existing hunter gatherer life was a nasty brutish and short, eternal hungry search for food, and that the worlds remaining hunter gatherers were the ones who were too stupid to figure out awesome efficient agriculture, or who were unlucky enough to be stuck in territories unsuited for agriculture.

And particularly in the popular imagination it was assumed that there were chiefs and priests telling everyone what to do and what to think and to be afraid of powerful vengeful gods.

MAN THE HUNTER

But then in 1966 there was the first big conference of hunter gatherer specialists from cultural anthropology and archaeology, called the Man the Hunter conference. And that conference, which established the modern field of huntergather studies, and the research that came after it, completely upended all of these assumptions.

While there was a variety of different kinds of hunter gather societies, living in all sorts of different circumstances, it turned out that hunter gathers are usually better nourished and healthier than their farmer neighbours. They usually work less hours and less intensively than farmers do, and the work they do is usually more diverse and more enjoyable.

Meanwhile archaeological finds showed that prehistoric peoples’ health almost invariably got much worse once they switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture. And in many places the health of the general population never matches or surpasses hunter gatherer health until the 19th century, except among small urban elites.

And hunter gatherers weren’t hunter gatherers because they were too stupid to invent or adopt agriculture, or because they lived in conditions that were too harsh for agriculture. Most of them are well aware of agricultural techniques, but purposefully avoid agriculture as an unpleasant and undignified way to live.

So for example, archaeology showed that huge parts of north america were perfect for agriculture, yet people stuck with hunting and gathering for 10,000 years.

In terms of gender relations, far from being male dominated, women in most hunter gather societies tended to have a much higher degree of autonomy and freedom than their farmer or pastoralist counterparts – and several hunter gatherer societies turned out to be the most gender egalitarian societies that we’ve ever known, which we’ll get back to in a bit.

Surprisingly it turns out that many hunter gatherers are not organized into bands of closely related members, but rather into bands of largely unrelated members that are always coming and going, kind of like a modern urban neighbourhood.

It was also remarked that many hunter gathers societies are not territorial at all, and that they seem to engage in very little if any intergroup warfare.

Many hunter gatherer societies turned out to have no chiefs, no big men, no religious or patriarchical authorities nor any authorities of any kind.

And most hunter gatherers don’t worship their ancestors, they aren’t too concerned with their lineage, and and they often have very loose religious beliefs, again kind of like urban people.

And it turned out that many hunter gatherer societies strictly enforced economic equality via all sorts of interesting methods and institutions. From social pressure to gambling to sharing on demand to explicit sharing rules. Competition, grandstanding and status seeking are extreme social taboos in many of these societies, with the best hunters often ritually prevented from gaining status, wealth or power for their skills.

In these societies, Men, women, and children alike enjoyed a life of material equality and personal freedom that had been considered impossible according to the prevailing cold war era ideology, where freedom and equality were presented as mutually exclusive propositions.

In particular the kalahari bushmen cultures and the central african rainforest pygmy cultures and the Hadza in Tanzania were described as examples of the type of libertarian communism that socialists had been dreaming of since the early 19th century.

And in terms of political implications of this research, to paraphrase anthropologist Robert Kelly, these societies were seen not just seen as a model of what our ancestors were like, but also as a model to emulate for our future.

• “Increasingly dissatisfied, many rejected the materialism of Western society and searched for an alternative way of life in which material possessions meant little, people lived in harmony with nature, and there were no national boundaries to contest. It was the context for John Lennon’s song, Imagine, and for the numerous hippie communes. Hunting and gathering had kept humanity alive for 99 percent of its history; what could we learn from it?”

In the late 1970s and early 80s James Woodburn, who did his field work among the Hadza people in Tanzania, noticed that there was one category of hunter gatherer societies which stood out not only from other hunter gatherers, but from all other known human societies.

These were the super egalitarian societies that I mentioned earlier, where there’s no political or religious authority, where men and women are as equal as anywhere on earth, and where personal liberty coexists with strictly enforced economic equality.

“Unlike almost all other human societies, people – men, women and older children alike – are entitled to direct and immediate access to the un-garnered food and other resources of their country. These rights of access are not formally allocated to them and cannot be withdrawn from them. Neither parents nor other kin provide, control or direct access. … These open rights of access to material resources are matched by open access to secular knowledge and skills

For members of these societies one might almost say that the notion of property as theft is not a novel revolutionary ideology but an implicit everyday view of the world”

Woodburn noticed that without exception, all of the societies who had all of these remarkable egalitarian characterstics all practiced the same type of hunting and gathering economy – which also happens to be the simplest type of economy – which means that it also happens to be the economy that was practiced by our first ancestors – where people are nomadic following animals around, and more or less less acquiring food and then eating in within the next few days without processing it or storing it in any elaborate way.

Woodburn called this an “immediate return” economy, where you produce and the consume right away, as opposed to the “delayed return” economies practiced by every other culture in the world, where you produce now and consume later.

Starting with his 1982 article, Egalitarian Societies, Woodburn hypothesized about why it is that every single society that’s so egalitarian and autonomous happens to practice an immediate return economy? And he points out that inherent in the practical realities of that type of nomadic hunting and gathering, is the fact that there’s just no real way to dominate anyone.

No one can control any particular territory or important resources, so there’s no way to force people into the dependence relationships that political hierarchies are mostly based on. If anyone tries to bully you, you can just go off an join another camp. If any one tries to monopolize some resources, you can just go somewhere else and get similar resources yourself.

And importantly, since everyone has access to projectile weapons and poisons, if anyone really gets out of line with domineering or anti social behaviour, they can just be killed or exiled, which is a big disincentive to even try.

In 1999 Christopher Boehm in his important book Hierarchy in the Forest called this “reverse dominance” where the majority of people together to prevent anyone from becoming dominant. And according to Boehm this has all sorts of evolutionary implications, because our ancestors killed off all the aggressive alpha male types which led to all sorts of physical and dispositional changes over tome.

In other words the balance of power is relatively equal between all members of society. Any person or coalition who tries to dominate others will inevitably fail. All they can do is cause chaos and then get killed. And that’s why you develop cultural values to prevent that chaos, to stabilize the system. That’s not Woordburn talking that’s my original contribution to this body of work, which I’ll elaborate on another episode.

Note that this is not a utopian argument. No one is saying that immediate return foragers are magical unicorn people who don’t have competitiveness or dominance instincts. And no one is saying that they’re innocent children who don’t know the sins of civilization. It’s just that the conditions that they live in and institutions they have developed in order to adapt to those conditions, prevent a lot of the social ills that we take granted from from happening very frequently.

Interestingly, game theory studies have shown that immediate return hunter gatherers, actually behave more selfishly when their actions are anonymous and their identities are secret than people from other cultures do! And that’s because they have such strict obligations to share everything on demand."

(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/10-1xcript/)

Discussion

Daniel Bitton on the Evolution of the Concept of Egalitarianism

"EVOLUTION OF THE WORD EGALITARIAN

Now before the Woodburn articles and before Man the Hunter and the subsequent focus on these hyper egalitarian immediate return societies, the term “egalitarian society” was often used to describe societies that still had significant elements of hierarchy.

For example, the Nuer who are a traditionally pastoralist people of southern sudan were usually described as an egalitarian society because they have no chiefs, and they are egalitarian in terms of there being equal political authority between men. But at the same time, they also have clear gender hierarchy and some wealth inequality.

Or else people would talk about the nations of the Haudenosaunee confederation in north america as being egalitarian because they had a lot of economic equality and gender equality, even though they also had a significant degree of political inequality and gerontocracy.

But, since the 1980’s, when anthropologists talk about an “Egalitarian society” or “egalitarian hunter gathers”, they’re usually talking about those hyper egalitarian immediate return hunter gatherer societies that i’ve been talking about. Because even if you accept the arguments made by critics about how their egalitarianism is exaggerated, those are still the most egalitarian societies known to exist in just about every respect."

(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/10-1xcript/)

HUNTER GATHERERS AND THE LEFT

Daniel Bitton:

Needless to say, these developments in hunter gatherer studies have had an important impact on leftist politics, at least among people who know about them. And of course, not enough people know about them, because we wouldn’t expect our elite educational or media institutions to really publicize too strongly that free and equal societies are actually possible or actually exist!

Most anthropologists who study immediate return societies have left wing commitments of one sort or another. Richard Lee, maybe the most famous hunter gatherer anthropologist who wrote about the Kalahari bush people is a marxist anthropologist and political socialist, and he was explicitly writing about the implications of hunter gatherer egalitarianism on the prospects for egaltarianism in industrial civilization. Most other people working in that field are also very interested in human equality even if they’re not as explicitly political about it.

And there’s a whole anarcho primitivist movement that spring up in the 1990s based on this anthropology – which honestly is a pretty ridiculous, because you’d need 95% of the world’s population to die in order to live as immediate return hunter gatherers.

More recently there’s a Radical Anthropology Group in the UK that’s been around since the early 2000s made up of people liek Jerome Lewis, Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Chris Knight who are communists who have been doing a lot of amazing work about immediate return foragers – about the dynamics of their egalitarian ideology and how gender equality is maintained, and their religious beliefs – I strongly suggest you check out their work – I’ll put some links in the bio – and as I was writing this I was contacted by Camilla Power and Chris Knight and they will be appearing on my show very soon, so look out for that, very excited about it!

And it’s worth noting that in almost all of the debates that have happened about egalitarian hunter gatherers over the last 50 years, it’s almost always people who haven’t lived with these societies who argue that their egalitarianism is an exaggeration or that it’s not real, or that it’s the result of extreme poverty and circumscription, and it’s always the people who know them the best who argue that yes they are really egalitarian and by choice.

But ironically, one place on the left of anthropology where you won’t find anything at all about these perfectly functional anarcho communist societies is the one place you would most expect to find something about them – and that is in the works of the anarchist anthropologist and activist David Graeber!"

(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/10-1xcript/)