Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology

286 Pages·2004·3.09 MB·English

by  Alan Barnard

Hunter-Gatherers
in History, Archaeology and Anthropology
edited by Alan Barnard
Oxford • New York
First published in 2004 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
© Alan Barnard 2004
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Hunter-gatherers in history, archaeology, and anthropology / edited by Alan Barnard.
p. cm.
"The book has its origins in the Ninth International Conference on Hunting and
Gathering Societies (CHAGS 9 for short), which was held at Heriot-Watt University,
Edinburgh, in September 2003"--P.
Includes some papers commissioned specifically for this volume.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-85973-820-6 (cloth) -- ISBN 1-85973-825-7 (pbk.)
1. Hunting and gathering societies. I. Barnard, Alan (Alan J.) II. International
Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (9th : 2003 : Heriot-Watt University)
GN388.H866 2004
306.3'64--dc22 2004008969
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 85973 820 6 (Cloth)
1 85973 825 7 (Paper)
Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
www.bergpublishers.com
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Preface ix
1 Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology: 1
Introductory Essay
Alan Barnard
I Early Visions of Hunter-Gatherer Society and Their Influence 15
2 The Meaning of ‘Hunter-Gatherers’and Modes of Subsistence: a 17
Comparative Historical Perspective
Mark Pluciennik
3 Hunting-and-Gathering Society: an Eighteenth-Century 31
Scottish Invention
Alan Barnard
4 Edward Westermarck and the Origin of Moral Ideas 45
L.R. Hiatt
5 Anthropological History and the Study of Hunters and Gatherers: 57
Cultural and Non-cultural
Aram A. Yengoyan
II Local Traditions in Hunter-Gatherer Research 67
6 No Escape From Being Theoretically Important: Hunter-Gatherers 69
in German-Language Debates of the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries
Peter P. Schweitzer
7 Hunter-Gatherer Studies in Russia and the Soviet Union 77
O.Yu. Artemova
8 Soviet Traditions in the Study of Siberian Hunter-Gatherer Society 89
Anna A. Sirina
vi • Contents
9 The Japanese Tradition in Central African Hunter-Gatherer Studies, 103
with Comparative Observations on the French and American
Traditions
Mitsuo Ichikawa
10 The Modern History of Japanese Studies on the San Hunter- 115
Gatherers
Kazuyoshi Sugawara
11 Down Ancient Trails: Hunter-Gatherers in Indian Archaeology 129
Shanti Pappu
III Reinterpretations in Archaeology,Anthropology and the 143
History of the Disciplines
12 The Many Ages of Star Carr: Do ‘Cites’Make the ‘Site’? 145
P.J. Lane and R.T. Schadla-Hall
13 Ethnographic Models, Archaeological Data, and the Applicability 163
of Modern Foraging Theory
Michael S. Sheehan
14 Subtle Shifts and Radical Transformations in Hunter-Gatherer 175
Research in American Anthropology: Julian Steward’s
Contributions and Achievements
L. Daniel Myers
15 Anthropology and Indigenous Rights in Canada and the 187
United States: Implications in Steward’s Theoretical Project
Marc Pinkoski and Michael Asch
16 Hunting for Histories: Rethinking Historicity in the Western 201
Kalahari
James Suzman
17 (Re-)current Doubts on Hunter-Gatherer Studies as Contemporary 217
History
Thomas Widlok
References 227
Notes on Contributors 267
Index 271
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
12.1 Changing intensity of research activity concerning Star Carr 157
and its environs, 1949–2003
12.2 Trends in research on Star Carr and its environs, by decade, 158
1949–2003
Tables
12.1 The academic impact of Clark’s excavation and interpretation 148
of Star Carr
12.2 Major research themes with reference to Star Carr: analysis of 153
publications by decade, 1949–2003
Preface
Hunters and gatherers have always been important in social and cultural anthro-
pology and in archaeology. Many of the great figures in these disciplines, such as
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Julian Steward and Grahame Clark, and even founders of
the social sciences more broadly, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Emile
Durkheim, developed their ideas through the examination of hunters and gath-
erers. Images of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle as humankind’s natural existence, as the
earliest stage of social evolution, or as the antithesis of modernity, have had a
profound impact (for better or worse) on the development of countless theoretical
ideas on society and culture.
This book is the first to examine in depth the idea of the ‘hunter-gatherer’
through history. It is important to recognize that this is not (to borrow a metaphor
from Steward) a unilinear history, but a multilinear or yet more complex one with
differences of emphasis, a diversity of problems and opposing points of view.
Equally, it is important to recognize diversity in world anthropology. In this book
not only North American and British, but also Japanese, French, German and
Austrian, Russian and Soviet, and Indian ethnological and archaeological tradi-
tions (as well as perspectives in the ancient scholarly traditions of Arabia, India
and China) are scrutinized. And not only old debates, but also those of recent
decades and of today, are treated in ways that should be enlightening for
academics, students and a wider public alike. The result, I believe, is a unique
contribution to understanding the many ways in which anthropologists, archaeol-
ogists and other scholars have approached and do approach the study of hunting-
and-gathering societies.
The book has its origins in the Ninth International Conference on Hunting and
Gathering Societies (CHAGS 9 for short), which was held at Heriot-Watt
University, Edinburgh, in September 2003. The majority of the papers here were
presented in draft form in one of that conference’s thirty-nine sessions, ‘Hunting
and Gathering as a Theme in the History of Anthropology’, while some were
presented in other sessions and some commissioned specifically for this volume.
This series of conferences is itself testimony to the enduring significance of
hunter-gatherers, both to science and scholarship and to the enrichment of human
understanding which has come through anthropology’s engagement with their
living representatives.
x • Preface
I would like to express my gratitude to Tim Ingold, my co-convenor in CHAGS
9, and to the organizing committee, especially David Anderson and Nancy
Wachowich, who worked so hard to make that conference such a success. Acknow-
ledgement is also due to the sponsors, especially the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research who funded the travel and conference fees of some of
those whose papers appear in this volume. I am also grateful to Kostas Retsikas
and Peter Schweitzer for their editorial help, especially with the bibliography.
Alan Barnard
–1–
Hunter-Gatherers in History,Archaeology
and Anthropology: Introductory Essay
Alan Barnard
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 col-
lective 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 societies’(Lee and DeVore 1968a: ix). Lee and DeVore’s statement
entails a supposition that hunter-gatherers are, in a sense, more ‘natural’or even
more ‘human’than people who live in agrarian or industrialized societies.
In the early twentieth century, scholars had quite different views. For example,
Sigmund Freud (1960 [1913]: 1–2) saw hunter-gatherers, Australian Aborigines in
particular, as ‘the most backward and miserable of savages’ who did not build
permanent houses, kept only the dog as a domesticated animal, could not make
pottery, had no chiefs, nor beliefs in or worship of higher beings. The Social
Darwinists W.G. Sumner and A.G. Keller (1927) cited the social organization of
Australian Aborigines and African Bushmen or San as examples of what they
called ‘primitive atomism’. These hunter-gatherers, they said, ‘are full of hostility,
suspicion, and other anti-social feelings and habits’(1927: 16). Even Richard Lee,
in pessimistic tone some two decades after his famous statement, said that he had
been wrong: the ‘human condition’is about ‘poverty, injustice, exploitation, war,
suffering’; anthropologists looking at hunter-gatherers, he added, are looking for
‘a vision of human life and human possibilities without the pomp and glory, but
also without the misery and inequality of state and class society’(Lee 1992: 43).
These examples illustrate the diversity of views and the changing ideas on
hunter-gatherers through time. Over the last century the field of hunter-gatherer
studies has had a profound influence on anthropological and archaeological
1
2 • Alan Barnard
thinking throughout the world, and this book offers a series of diverse perspectives
in a wide variety of the world’s major anthropological traditions.
Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Hunter-Gatherer’
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 contributors (Pluciennik 2002) and debated by others.
Margaret Hodgen (1964) argued that the basic concepts of modern anthro-
pology, including ideas on culture change and social evolution, were developed in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, early concern with peoples we
would now call ‘hunter-gatherers’was largely hypothetical. Seventeenth-century
writers tended to be interested not with ethnographically attested peoples but
rather with an imagined state of nature. In the words of Anthony Pagden, ‘The
painstaking description, and the recognition of the “otherness” of the “other”,
which is the declared ambition of the modern ethnologist would have been
unthinkable to most of the writers [of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries]’
(Pagden 1982: 6). It was only in the eighteenth century that subsistence and its
relation to society became truly meaningful topics of intellectual discussion (cf.
Duchet 1971; Berry 1997). Adam Smith began his Lectures on Jurisprudencewith
a consideration of what he called ‘the Age of Hunters’. Smith’s idea of hunter-
gatherer society was of twenty to thirty families per village, with a general
assembly of several villages, government without leaders but by consensus of the
whole (Smith 1896 [1763]: 14–15, 20). Property existed in only a limited sense: in
one of his examples, a man chasing a hare graduallyacquired the exclusive privi-
lege of killing (1896: 7).1
Today, property has returned as a central focus in hunter-gatherer studies. It has
been a major interest of James Woodburn in his Hadza ethnography and his com-
parative studies (e.g. Woodburn 1980; 1982). Indeed, a conference on Woodburn’s
contribution to the study of property in hunting-and-gathering society was held
just a few years ago (in June 2001) at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology in Halle, Germany. From the late 1970s, Woodburn began to talk of
two types of economic system: ‘immediate return’ and ‘delayed return’.
Economies based on an immediate-return principle reject the accumulation of
surplus; people either consume or share. Those based on a delayed-return principle
allow for planning ahead. Only somehunter-gatherers fit the immediate-return cat-
egory; those who invest time in keeping bees, raising horses, or making boats or