Hunter-Gatherers

I

Introduction

Hunter-Gatherers, people practising subsistence techniques of hunting and gathering wild food, with little or no agriculture. In many parts of the world small groups of hunter-gatherers still exist. These are peoples with a known and acknowledged recent history of living largely by hunting wild animals and birds, by fishing, by gathering wild fruits, nuts, and mushrooms, by digging up edible roots and tubers, and by extracting honey from the nests of wild bees. In the rapidly changing world of today these activities rarely provide even as much as 50 per cent of the diet of the people concerned, but typically remain highly valued and a central focus for group identity.

II

Hunter-Gatherer Groups

Among the best-known of these groups are the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the Inuit (formerly known as Eskimo) peoples of Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and northern Siberia. Most of these groups today obtain the greater part of their subsistence from welfare payments and wage labour. The San (Bushmen) of Botswana, Namibia, and southern Angola have lost most of their land and now mostly live as low-status landless labourers among the people who have taken it. Many thousand Pygmies in the tropical rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Gabon are still active hunters but gather little vegetable produce, preferring, as they have throughout their known history, to obtain vegetable foods by trading meat with and working for their agricultural neighbours.

There are many less well-known hunter-gatherer or former hunter-gatherer groups in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi; in Canada, the United States, and a number of South American countries; in Russia; and in India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. All are today finding it difficult to continue to live what is in almost every case their preferred way of life by hunting and gathering, and are under great pressures from governments and from their various neighbours to surrender their lands, to hand over their children to school systems which alienate them from their own cultures, to accept a fully sedentary way of life, and to repudiate aspects of their own culture which those who have political power over them find distasteful. Indigenous peoples movements are struggling against these overwhelming predatory pressures, but have in most places so far made little headway. The ever-present danger is that groups dispossessed of their chosen way of life, of their land, of their sense of their own value and identity, may end up as impoverished and stigmatized welfare recipients or as beggars and prostitutes.

III

Research

In recent years much research has been carried out among these various hunter-gatherer and former hunter-gatherer groups. This research is important for three main reasons.

First, it is contributing to growing public awareness of the appalling history of human rights violations in the treatment of these groups. It is providing data which, in a small number of cases, has already helped such groups to secure legal title to at least part of their lands.

Secondly, such research has sought to provide possible clues to the varied ways of life of human societies during the later phases of the million or two million years of human existence before the first development of agriculture and pastoralism some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. For more than 99 per cent of human history, people lived exclusively by hunting and gathering. By the end of this vast period, people had developed all of the crucial capacities, physical and intellectual, which are shared by all the world's present-day human populations.

The relevance of modern hunter-gatherers for understanding the hunter-gatherers of the preagricultural period is a highly controversial issue. Human societies are consistently innovative, constantly generating changes in their living arrangements, cultures, and systems of values. Internally generated changes have been supplemented by changes induced by political and economic pressures, and opportunities deriving from ever-increasing contacts with politically and economically dominant outsiders.

The question is how far the effects of these changes have been limited by the commitment to the hunting and gathering way of life. The very striking resemblances in the types of social organization found among hunter-gatherers in different parts of the world with very different histories strongly suggest that the fact of living by hunting and gathering has certain implications for social organization which are not eroded by internally or externally generated social change. If this is correct, the organizational forms found among modern hunters may well have also existed in the preagricultural period, possibly supplemented by additional now-extinct forms of organization. Some researchers would accept and others would reject this suggestion.

The third reason why research among modern hunter-gatherers is important is a particularly interesting one. Everywhere in the world today politicians and ordinary people, whatever their political views, are concerned about the issues of equality and inequality. Some—not all—present day hunter-gatherers are the least socially differentiated societies in the world today and provide important data for those seeking to understand human social forms. Differences of power, wealth, and prestige between individuals are less than in any other societies. The evidence suggests that such equality is not a result of past or present food shortages or more generalized poverty. Instead it is linked with a political ideology which stresses the moral value of sharing property widely among all in the local community, and not accumulating it for the exclusive use of the owner and his or her family and other close associates. Among these societies is found the greatest known equality between men and women, between old and young, between parents and children, between leaders and followers, between religious experts and religious congregations, between the skilled and the unskilled, between the strong and the weak. Whatever their history, these cases provide a kind of baseline of fundamental human social forms. A detailed understanding of the operation of these social systems is directly relevant to the task of understanding and explaining the operation of the vast range of more differentiated societies in which the rest of the world's peoples live.