JOURNAL of ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH (Formerly Southwesternjournal of Anthropology) VOLUME50 * NUMBER3 * FALL * 1994
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JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH (Formerly SouthwesternJournal of Anthropology) VOLUME50 * NUMBER3 * FALL * 1994 FORAGINGRETURNS OF !KUNGADULTS AND CHILDREN:WHY DIDN'T !KUNG CHILDRENFORAGE? NicholasBlurton Jones Departmentsof Education,Anthropology, and Psychiatry, University of California, LosAngeles, CA 90024 KristenHawkes Departmentof Anthropology,University of Utah,Salt Lake City, UT 84112 PatriciaDraper Departmentof HumanDevelopment, Pennsylvania State University, UniversityPark, PA 16802 Childrenof thehunting and gathering !Kung San seldomforaged, especially during the longdry season. In contrast,children of Hadza foragers in Tanzaniaoften forage, in both wet and dryseasons. Because we haveargued that the economicdependence of !Kung childrenhas importantconsequences, we musttry to understandwhy they did notforage. Experimentaldata on foragingby !Kungadults and childrenshow that children would havehad to walkfar from dryseason camps to acquiremuch food. Interviewssuggest that !Kungchildren risk getting lost if theywander unsupervised into the bush. Thus, foragingwithout adult companywas a poor optionfor !Kungchildren. Foraging with adultsmight have been a betterstrategy. We calculate the benefitsto a !Kungmother if heroldest child accompanied her to thenut groves.Because of thehigh processing costs, a child'swork time was mostprofitably spent at homecracking nuts. MANYSCHOOLS OF anthropology attach importance to the subsistence infra- structureof a population.While the subsistenceecology of the !Kungof north- western Botswanastood for two decadesas one of the best described(Lee 1968, 1969, 1979) andas a landmarkin quantitativeanthropology, it may still be possible,even thoughthe circumstancesof !Kunglives havechanged greatly, (Journalof Anthropological Research, vol. 50, 1994) 217 This content downloaded from 155.97.85.93 on Mon, 11 May 2015 20:24:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 218 JOURNALOF ANTHROPOLOGICALRESEARCH to supplementthis earlierdescriptive material. We present some figureson the rates at which!Kung women acquired food in 1988 in habitatsand plant communitiesdescribed by Lee in 1965 (Lee 1979). The datawere gathered with a specificquestion in mind.We hadargued that for the !Kung,the work involvedin feedingchildren constrained women's lives and indirectlylimited theirfertility (Blurton Jones and Sibly 1978; see alsoHarpending 1994; Blurton Jones 1994). But we had seen childrenforage successfully among the Hadza hunter-gatherersof the woodedsavanna of northernTanzania (Blurton Jones, Hawkes,and O'Connell1989). So it seemed essentialto findout why !Kung childrenwere not persuadedor permittedto forage and thus relieve their mothersof at least a partof theirburden. Somegeneral patterns in the cross-culturalvariation in childwork have been described,leading to the widelyheld view that while childrenin agricultural societies do muchuseful work, childrenin huntingand gatheringsocieties do little or none (Barry,Child, and Bacon 1959). Thus we tend to take it for grantedthat children of huntersand gatherers do no work,gratefully receiving the sustenance,care, and attentionoften lavishedon them by adults (see, e.g., Briggs1970; Konner 1976). But this orthodoxywas strikinglychallenged by the Hadza.This exception,even if only a single case, remindsus that explanationby categorizationcan never be satisfactory.What is it abouthunter- gathererlife that leaves childrenin some populationsdoing no work?What is it aboutother populations that results in children foraging? Why do somehunter- gathererchildren forage more andothers less? In fieldworkon the Hadza,we have approachedthe questionof children's workand its relationshipto fertility,child care, andthe relationsbetween the sexes from the perspectiveof behavioralecology. This perspective(though far removedfrom Western culture's commonsense concepts of causes of be- havior)has been highlyproductive in researchon hunter-gathererand other "traditional"societies (Smithand Winterhalder1992). From this perspective we expect parentsto allocateresources between care of offspringand the generationof more offspringso as to maximizethe numberof the parents' descendantsin subsequentgenerations (see, e.g., Lessels 1991; Smithand Fretwell1974). Thus we sharewith earlier perspectives the expectationthat if childrenwork, they are easier to feed and keep alive, and parentswill divert more of the availableresources away from child care andtoward bearing more children.Furthermore, we expectthat this potential advantage to the reproductive success of parentswould mean that wheneverchildren could feed themselves safely,they wouldbe encouragedto do so. Thuswhen they do not workand are activelydiscouraged from trying, we must expect there to be some practical reason.Seen fromthe view of the child,in a contextwhere even the leisurely !Kungare described as showing"some mild undernutrition" (Truswell and Hansen 1976:171) and where the fieldworkernever sees a childrefuse an offer of food, it would not be surprisingif childrenhelped themselves to any food that was availablewithout too much effort or danger. On these groundsagain, we should as well ask, Why don't they forage?as Why do they forage? This content downloaded from 155.97.85.93 on Mon, 11 May 2015 20:24:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FORAGINGRETURNS OF !KUNGADULTS AND CHILDREN 219 Manyauthors have claimedthat where childrencan do usefulwork, fertility is higher,and where they cannot,it is lower (e.g., Caldwell1982). Blurton Joneset al. (1992)and Blurton Jones, Hawkes,and Draper (1994) claimed that several reporteddifferences in the reproductionand behaviorof !Kungand Hadzaadults can be predictedfrom the differencein apparentcosts of diverting resourcesfrom feeding children toward bearing more children. If we are claim- ing to explainso muchfrom children's foraging opportunities, we are obliged to show why Hadzachildren forage so frequentlyand why !Kungchildren forageso seldom.Until we do this, our particularbehavioral ecological edifice for explainingdifferences between the Hadzaand the !Kungis builton sand. In this paperwe reportdata gathered in mid dry season 1988 to examine the benefitsthat might arise from !Kung children foraging, first, unaccompanied by adults,and, second, in the companyof adults.We aimed at a simpledisproof of the hypothesisthat the differencebetween the time!Kung and Hadza children spendforaging can be explainedby the costs andbenefits of foragingin their respectivehabitats. If we foundthat !Kungchildren could have obtainedmuch foodnear camp, suffered minimal risks fromthe quest for food, or couldhave increasedtheir food intake by accompanyingmother on foragingtrips, yet still did not forage, our hypothesiswould have falleninto immediatetrouble. We will show that it survivesthese initialtests. Lee (1979:71)proposes a completelydifferent view of !Kungchildren's foraging,which we discussin some detailin BlurtonJones,Hawkes, and Draper (1994). He suggests that childrenforage when the producer:dependentratio is low and that most of the time, in most camps, childrenrepresent an "un- utilizedreserve of laborpower." BACKGROUND:THE !KUNGAND THE HADZA The !Kung,living in northwesternBotswana, have been the subjects of manycultural, archaeological, biological, and demographicstudies (e.g., Lee 1979; Shostak1981; Yellen1977; Howell1979). The Hadzaof northernTan- zaniahave been describedby Obst (1912); Woodburn(e.g., 1968a, 1968b, 1988); O'Connell,Hawkes, and BlurtonJones (1988, 1991, 1992); Hawkes, O'Connell,and BlurtonJones (1989, 1991);BlurtonJones, Hawkes, and O'Con- nell (1989);and Blurton Jones et al. (1992). The !Kungand Hadza live 2,500 km apartand are culturallydistinct. Claimsof links between Hadzaneand Khoisanlanguages by Bleek (1931) andothers are not uniformlyaccepted by modernlinguists and are the subjectof ongoinginvestigation (Sands, Maddie- son, andLadefoged 1993); Hadzane remains one of the few languageswhose affinitiesare unknown.Nevertheless, there are manysimilarities between the two populations.People in both populationslive, or until recently lived, in small,mobile bands composed of aboutfifty people, most relatedby kinship or marriage.Neither group kept domesticstock or raisedcrops; men hunted with bow andpoison arrows, and women gathered, with occasional help from men. Manyof the same plantand animal genera or species were exploitedby This content downloaded from 155.97.85.93 on Mon, 11 May 2015 20:24:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 220 JOURNALOF ANTHROPOLOGICALRESEARCH eachpopulation. Both groups lived in dry savannah and made frequent moves, eitherin searchof foodand water or to resolvedisputes. Both groups live at a verylow population density (!Kung, 0.042-0.08/km2; Hadza, 0.24-0.3/km2 [BlurtonJones et al. 1992])with usually a substantialdistance between neigh- boringcamps. In both,infants are carriedby mothermost of the dayand suckledfrequently. Diarrhea is a commoncause of deathof youngchildren in bothsocieties, and many adults and children contract malaria. Children interact withchildren of a widerange of ages, havingrather few exactage mates in a camp.In both cases, the samespecies of predatorsare quite abundant in the bush,making foraging by childrena potentiallyrisky enterprise. The Hadza and!Kung (while they were living as mobileforagers) each depended on stand- ing surfacewater in the rainyseason, and both faced reduced numbers of wateringplaces in the dryseason. Whilesimilar in the aboverespects, important differences also