Hunter-Gatherers in History, Archaeology and Anthropology

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 anthropology 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 gatherers. 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 traditions (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 anthropology, including ideas on culture change and social evolution, were developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Load more