All that is central to the dynamic process in human society is evident in the study of hunter-gatherers - peoples whose subsistence way of life reflects the original form of human adaptation. This is the thesis of these wide-ranging volumes in which internationally leading scholars consider hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia and North America and reflect theoretically on the hunter-gatherer condition.Volume 1: Hunters and Gatherers - History, Evolution and Social ChangeVolume II: Hunters and Gatherers - Property, Power and Ideology
One of two volumes based on communications to the Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies held in London in September 1986, in the week following the Southampton World Archaeological Conference.
Challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity.
In an age of heightened awareness of the threat that western industrialized societies pose to the environment, hunters and gatherers attract particularly strong interest because they occupy the ecological niches that are constantly eroded. Despite the denial of sovereignty, the world's more than 350 million indigenous peoples continue to assert aboriginal title to significant portions of the world's remaining bio-diversity. As a result, conflicts between tribal peoples and nation states are on the increase. Today, many of the societies that gave the field of anthropology its empirical foundations and unique global vision of a diverse and evolving humanity are being destroyed as a result of national economic, political, and military policies. Although quite a sizable body of literature exists on the living conditions of the hunters and gatherers, this volume is unique in that it represents the first extensive east-west scholarly exchange in anthropology since the demise of the USSR. Moreover, it also offers new perspectives from indigenous communities and scholars in an exchange that be termed "south-north" as opposed to " north-north," denoting the predominance of northern Europe and North America in scholarly debate. The main focus of this volume is on the internal dynamics and political strategies of hunting and gathering societies in areas of self-determination and self-representation. More specifically, it examines areas such as warfare and conflict resolution, resistance, identity and the state, demography and ecology, gender and representation, and world view and religion. It raises a large number of major issues of common concerns and therefore makes important reading for all those interested in human rights issues, ethnic conflict, grassroots development and community organization, and environmental topics.
In the vast anthropological literature devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the place of hunter-gatherer children. Children often represent 40 percent of hunter-gatherer populations, thus nearly half the population is omitted from most hunter-gatherer ethnographies and research. This volume is designed to bridge the gap in our understanding of the daily lives, knowledge, and development of hunter-gatherer children. The twenty-six contributors to Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods use three general but complementary theoretical approaches--evolutionary, developmental, cultural--in their presentations of new and insightful ethnographic data. For instance, the authors employ these theoretical orientations to provide the first systematic studies of hunter-gatherer children's hunting, play, infant care by children, weaning and expressions of grief. The chapters focus on understanding the daily life experiences of children, and their views and feelings about their lives and cultural change. Chapters address some of the following questions: why does childhood exist, who cares for hunter-gatherer children, what are the characteristic features of hunter-gatherer children's development and what are the impacts of culture change on hunter-gatherer child care? The book is divided into five parts. The first section provides historical, theoretical and conceptual framework for the volume; the second section examines data to test competing hypotheses regarding why childhood is particularly long in humans; the third section expands on the second section by looking at who cares for hunter-gatherer children; the fourth section explores several developmental issues such as weaning, play and loss of loved ones; and, the final section examines the impact of sedentism and schools on hunter-gatherer children. This pioneering volume will help to stimulate further research and scholarship on hunter-gatherer childhoods, thereby advancing our understanding of the way of life that characterized most of human history and of the processes that may have shaped both human development and human evolution. Barry S. Hewlett is professor of anthropology at Washington State University, Vancouver. Michael E. Lamb is professor of psychology in the social sciences, Cambridge University.
A collection of papers given at a conference in London to mark the 20th anniversary of the Man the Hunter Symposium. The two volumes resulting from this conference present new information on the structure and evolution of hunter-gatherer societies.
Based on detailed excavation data, the author reconstructs the paleography of the Santa Barbara coast ca. 8500 years ago, makes comparisons to other early California sites, and applies his findings to current theories of hunter-gatherers and coastal environments. With an emphasis on paleographic reconstructions, site formation processes, chronological studies, and integrated faunal analyses, the work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working in shell middens, hunter-gatherer ecology, geoarchaeology, and coatal or aquatic adaptations.
The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.
How did warfare originate? Was it human genetics? Social competition? The rise of complexity? Intensive study of the long-term hunter-gatherer past brings us closer to an answer. The original chapters in this volume examine cultural areas on five continents where there is archaeological, ethnographic, and historical evidence for hunter-gatherer conflict despite high degrees of mobility, small populations, and relatively egalitarian social structures. Their controversial conclusions will elicit interest among anthropologists, archaeologists, and those in conflict studies.
"The book spells out the great human achievements that have been brought about by humans who hunt and gather - across the millennia. It also shows that these achievements go beyond hunting and gathering alone. They depend on particular ways of understanding the human environment and the world at large. Barnard points out that there is a lot to be learned for our own lives when getting to know a life based on hunting and gathering. This also has to do with the fact that their mode of living in many ways continues to be deeply enshrined in what we are and what we do. At the same time, learning from hunter-gatherers helps to unsettle us in a positive way. Maybe your and my way of doing things is not without alternative after all. And getting to know alternative ways of life that have been successfully put into practice by the people described in this book are a better start than fantasy and science fiction. However, the biggest lesson of all is to understand how things are connected and how people are connected. This also means that it would be naive to think that one could simply import isolated practices from elsewhere without there being effects that reach far into all domains of life. The living hunter-gatherers that Alan Barnard introduces us to in this book are often prevented to continue their way of life because of what the rest of us do: the amount of resources that we use and waste, the grabbing of land that serves a world economy banking on unsustainable growth, the power that we abuse when dealing with indigenous minorities and a false sense of superiority towards hunter-gatherers." Thomas Widlok, University of Cologne Alan Barnard FBA is Emeritus Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa in the University of Edinburgh. He studied in the United States, Canada and England and has taught at the University of Cape Town, University College London and the University of Edinburgh. Since 1974, he has conducted field research with Bushmen or San in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. He served as an Honorary Consul of Namibia for eleven years, and in 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his many books are Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (co-authored, 1984), A Nharo Wordlist with Notes on Grammar (1985), Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples (1992), Kalahari Bushmen (children's book, 1993), History and Theory in Anthropology (2000), Social Anthropology (2006), Anthropology and the Bushman (2007), Social Anthropology and Human Origins (2011), Genesis of Symbolic Thought (2012), Language in Prehistory (2016) and Bushmen: Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers and Their Descendants (2019). His works were all written in English, but have been translated into 18 other languages.
