Introduction

Introduction ELEANOR LEACOCK and RICHARD LEE This book deals with a set of questions that are vital to our understand- ing of ourselves as human beings: what was human social life like when people lived directly from the fruits of the earth? How do people relate to each other under such circumstances? How do they make decisions about group activities? How do they handle disagreements and con- flicts? How does 'human nature' in band societies differ from 'human nature' as we know it in urban industrial society? During most of human history everyone helped, according to their age and sex and to the resources of their environment, in acquiring food, in making tools and utensils, in building shelters, and in obtain- ing and working materials for clothing in climates where it was needed. People foraged for wild fruits and vegetables, for roots and nults, and for small animals and insects. They collected shell-fish, or caught fish with hook and line or in nets. They built stockades into which they drove large animals, used ingenious traps and snares to catch game, or hunted with bows and arrows or spears. People shared food; there were no rich and poor. They made decisions collectively; some people were more influential than others, but there were no powerful chiefs. Foraging peoples worked hard, but, con- trary to popular stereotypes, life was not a grim battle for survival. Inistead, foragers had a great deal of leisure, and they made the most of it. They painted and carved and decorated their tools and utensils, their clothes, their bodies, and their sacred objects. They composed stories and songs and developed rituals to commemorate birth, puberty, marriage, and death. They had time to enjoy talking and joking and, after periods of strenuous work, had time to rest and laze about. This much anthropologists know from living among people distant from urban industrial centers who still live close to the land and depend in good part on its wild products, and from studying reports on the 2 Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee gathering-hunting peoples first encountered by European missionaries and explorers. However, beyond these generalizations are topics on which data are sparse, contradictory, or difficult to interpret. Early accounts by explorers and missionaries are few and threaded through with Western biases, while the lives of contemporary gathering-hunting peoples that anthropologists study have changed greatly over the past centuries to meet new circumstances. Therefore such questions as how social groups among foragers are composed; how decisions are made and serious disputes settled; and how relations between the sexes are structured are subjects for lively debate. Such issues are important, for answers yield information on the boundaries of human nature and social forms. Anthropologists have always challenged the ethnocentric assumption so characteristic of Western attitudes - that the behaviour patterns of Western culture reflect basic 'human nature'. Anthropologists point out that Western behaviour reflects the developments of a particular place and time and a spe- cific set of circumstances. Anthropologists have been particularly inter- ested in knowing more about the behaviour of peoples in societies that are structured along cooperative lines, by contrast with the competitive structure of capitalism. That people have lived and therefore can live cooperatively contradicts a common assertion that humans are innately too aggressive and competitive to be capable of socialism. Today the query about cooperative ways of life has been joined with another question, one urgent both to gatherer-hunters as peoples, and to humanity as a whole. What is the future of peoples who have maintained a direct and intimate connection with the earth in the period when industrial capitalism has become the dominant world system? Their future is part of an issue basic to modern times: how to achieve a peaceful world society designed for people, rather than for profits. It may well be the ultimate question for human survival, for if there is no place left in the world for foraging peoples, is there to be a future for humanity as a whole? The first section of this book deals with ways in which a number of gathering-hunting peoples structure their lives and solve their daily problems. The second section places gatherer-hunters in h7istory, as they have related to agricultural neighbours in times past and present. The last section deals with the struggles of foraging peoples to maintain their lands and their right to make their own decisions about their futures. Introdulction 3 Background to the book This book had its genesis at the Conference on Hunters and Gatherers, held in Paris on 27-30 June 1978. The conference was initiated by Mau- rice Godelier of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and was spon- sored by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Some fifty people, in four close-packed days, presented their thinking on the organization of local groups and relations to land, on kinship and relations between the sexes, and on religion, values, and symibol systems among gatherer- hunters, as well as on their economic, political, and cultural relations with dominant nation-states. The Paris conference followed up two earlier conferences on the cultural and social lives of foraging peoples. The first was organized by David Damas, then of the National Museum of Canada. It was held in Ottawa 30 August to 2 September 1965, and the proceedings were pub- lished in the National MuItseulmç cf Canada Bullletin 228, 1969. Some four- teen ethnologists compared the nature of the band among foraging peoples of North America, Africa, and India and discussed similarities and differences among these. A major subject of interest was the flexibility of band structure, and the variability of seasonal patterns according to which groups either fragmented into smaller units or came together in larger units. Discussion made it clear that behind the great variability found in different areas lay the common principle of adaptive fission and fusion in order to take advantage both of changing animal and plant resources and of opportunities for socializing. 'Man, the Hunter', the second conference on foraging peoples, was initiated by Sol Tax of the University of Chicago and organized by Rich- ard Lee of the University of Toronto and Irven DeVore of Harvard. Some seventy-five people came together from 6 to 9 April 1966, in Chicago, to hear and debate twenty-eight papers. Central issues included the nature of the foraging subsistence base, demography, marriage, and the composition of social units, and the interface between archaeological and ethnographic data. The conference's main findings were that gathering and fishing, not hunting, were often the mainstays of foraging subsistence, and that, in most non-arctic foraging societies, women's work provided a share of the food equal to or greater than that of men. The resulting book, Man the hulnter, was therefore a misnomer and could have been titled with equal justice Woman the gatherer. These two conferences from the mid-1960s in effect established the 4 Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee terms of reference for the study of foraging peoples in the decade following. Since then, field and historical studies have accumulated (e.g. Bicchieri 1972), and the problems of group structure and composition, and nature of ecological adaptation have been clarified and refined. The present volume, however, adopts a different starting point. It focuses on a set of issues that were barely raised in the 1960s but were brought to the fore by research in the decade following and by the struggles and demands of foraging peoples themselves. The first is the question of the internal dynamics of social relations in foraging societies. What common structural features underlie the great variability found in different ecological and historical settings? The papers in Part I show how the central elements of sharing, communal ownership of land and resources, and egalitarian political relations serve to structure the cultural consciousness of foragers in settings as diverse as Australia, Africa, and North America. The second issue raised in this book concerns the longstanding rela- tionships that some foraging peoples have maintained with neighbou~r- ing agricultural peoples. In the case of the Southern San of Botswana such ties go back 300-500 years, and for the Mal-pantaram of South India links can be traced back over 1,000 years. In these cases foraging peoples provided crucial forest products for the market economy of farmers. The papers in Part n1 explore ways in which these and other peoples have maintained themselves as gatherer-hunters in a world of non-foragers. The third and most crucial issue for the future sunrival of modern foragers concerns their political struggles against encompassing and encroaching state systems. The Dene of northern Canada (Asch), the James Bay Cree (Feit), and the Pitjantjatjara of South Australia (Vachon) all share a common predicament: how to preserve their land base and way of life in the face of expanding industrial capitalism. The papers in Part nI1 explore the political mobilization of these people and document the skill and resilience with which they adapt to the world of courts, land claims, and lobbying in the struggle for their rights. Before considering the issues underlying the three divisions of this book - foragers among themselves, foragers and farmers, and foragers versus capitalism - a few words are in order on the role of foraging peoples in contemporary anthropological theory. Introduction 5 Foragers and anthropological theory Foragingpeoples have played an important role in human history. They represent the original condition of humankind, the system of produc- tion that prevailed during virtually 99 per cent of human history.

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