Immediate Return Hunter-Gathering Societies

Discussion

(in a critical and rather negative review of Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything)

Daniel Bitton:

"Why do we think that humans started out as specifically egalitarian hunter gatherers?

Most hunter gatherers that we know about are more egalitarian than we are, but many still have various forms of inequality like gender inequality or gerontocracy, and some positions of limited authority, while some historical hunter gatherers even have had much more elaborate hierarchies with chiefs, nobility and slaves.

Meanwhile one subset of hunter gatherer societies that we know of are extremely egalitarian and deliberately so. They have all sorts of institutions and practices to make sure to make sure that no one ever accumulates much more property or authority than anyone else. Men and women form gendered organizations to defend their interests and to make sure that the other gender never gets an upper hand, they have no chiefs or authority figures and even adults don’t have much authority over older children.

As anthropologist Camilla Power articulated it recently, they’re not just communists, but anarcho communists. They have a strong sense of individuality and autonomy coexisting with an equality strong social pressure to cooperate and share all their property.

Now these are a minority of the hunter gatherers that we know of. There are only about 6 groups of cultures who fall into that category historically and comprising maybe a couple of dozen ethnic groups in total.

• The Hadza in the savannah in eastern Tanzania,
• various Kalahari desert hunter gatherer cultures,
• various Central African Rainforest Pygmy groups like the Mbuti, the Aka and the Mbendjele,
• various South Indian Mountain Forest groups like the Nayaka, Paliyan and Hill Pandaram
• various Malaysian rainforest groups like the Batek and Penan and
• the historical Montagnais-Naskapi people in the coniferous forests of quebec and Labrador who were hunter gatherers at the time of the Jesuit Relations writings in the 1600s.

So why do we think that most of our early ancestors were like this specific subset of hunter gatherers rather than all like all of the other less egalitarian hunter gatherers that we know of?

We think this, because despite the fact that these egalitarian foragers live in all sorts of geographic areas on different continents, every single one of these cultures practices or practice-d the same type of hunting and gathering economy, which happens to be the type of economy that we believe that most – but not all – of our ancestors practiced until the holocene era, and which maybe all of our earliest ancestors practiced.

And that type of economy is what anthropologist james woodburn called an “immediate return” economy where you hunt and gather and then consume what you collected within a few days without processing it in any elaborate way.

Why do we think our ancestors were mostly immediate return foragers? Again, most animals are basically immediate return foragers, and our closest relatives, bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas certainly are, so it’s pretty safe to assume that the first homo sapiens were also immediate return foragers as well. And the further back in time we go, the less evidence we have, but most of the evidence that we do have shows that people in the middle palaeolithic, which is where we become humans – seem to have been mostly doing nomadic big game hunting, much like those recent egalitarian hunter-gatherers do. We do have occasional sites that look like some people in particular pockets may have been doing other kinds of hunting and gathering as well here and there. So we would assume that those exceptional societies might look like some of the other kinds of hunter gatherer societies that we know about from recent times, who aren’t always so egalitarian, and some of whom are decidedly hierarchical.

To be fair, the record is sparse – there is definitely room for alternative scenarios – the problem is that graeber and wengrow aren’t just throwing out the standard scenario, they’re also throwing out the analytical tools that people – like Singh and Glowacki for example – need in order explain any kind scenario at all. It’s like when doctors disagree about what causes this or that illness, they still agree on the basics of biology and science – well what graeber and wengrow are doing is like if a doctor decides to reject medicine and science altogether because he believes the current standard explanation for the cause of a particular illness is wrong."

(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/)

The End of Immediate Return

Daniel Bitton:

"When immediate return nomadic big game hunting and gathering – which is one of the most efficient forms of subsistence – is no longer viable, people start focusing on other types of hunting and gathering practices – so-called “intensification” strategies, that are more work – things like focusing on shellfish, smoking and storing meat or fish, living in semi sedentary or sedentary camps, and raiding and stealing from and killing other groups of people. And these changes in economic activities resulted in changes of the circumstances of peoples lives, which either caused new problems that needed new solutions, or that gave some people bargaining power advantages over others, which is where hierarchy comes from.

Europe in the upper palaeolithic, was a particularly difficult place to live as this was the last glacial maximum, a time where ice sheets were extending deep into northern europe down to modern germany. There were only about 70,000 people on the whole continent, because means of subsistence were sparse. And at the same time, climate in the Pleistocene was fluctuating very wildly and rapidly compared to today in the holocene, so at certain times things got warmer and more territories opened up and there were more animals to hunt and plants to live from and populations grew – but then within a generation or two things would quickly freeze up again, and you’d have the same or larger amount of people living in less plentiful environments, meaning that people had to adopt “intensification” strategies to survive.

Now some anthropologists from the beginning have argued that you can’t extrapolate social structure in the palaeolithic based on what hunter gatherers living today are like because the conditions in the palaeolithic were very different from what they are today or what they were even at the time that father LeJeune wrote about the Montagnais Naskapi in 1630s. So for example, today’s foragers are surrounded by non foragers and they’re only limited to territories that farmers and pastoralists and civilizations don’t want – or at least that they didn’t want until recently, which is why most foragers are being wiped off the map and forced into wage labour and agriculture as we speak. Singh and Glowacki make these arguments in 2021, just like other have made since the late 1960s.

But even though the world was a very different place in the palaeolithic, other anthropologists argue that those specific conditions that promote egalitarian social structure, things like nomadism, the ability to leave and go off to another band if someone is bothering you, and universal availability of lethal weapons – that those conditions also existed in the palaeolithic for most societies. Not only that, but middle palaeolithic conditions in particular may have been even more favourable to egalitarianism than today, given that there was less population density and more available uninhabited territories to forage in, more places to immigrate to, less need for conflict or to resign yourself to intensification strategies to survive."

(https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/)

More information

Bibliography

Provided by Daniel Bitton :

Robert Kelly 1995/2014 – The Foraging Spectrum

James Woodburn 1982 – Egalitarian Societies [1]

James Woodburn 2005 – Egalitarian Societies Revisited, in Widlock & Gossa (eds) – Property and equality, Volume 1: ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism

Richard Lee 2004 – Power and Property in Twenty-first Century Foragers: A Critical Examination [2]

Richard Lee & Irving Devore (Eds.) 1968 – Man the Hunter

Richard Lee & Eleanor Leacock (eds) 1983 – Politics and History in Band Societies

CENTRAL AFRICAN FORAGERS

Jerome Lewis 2017 – Bayaka Elephant Hunting in the Congo

Lewis, J., 2014. Egalitarian Social Organization: The Case of the Mbendjele BaYaka

Morna Finnegan 2013 – The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies

Hewlett 2017 ed – Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin

Colin Turnbull 1961 – The Forest People

KALAHARI BUSH PEOPLE

Richard Lee 1969 – Eating Christmas in the Kalahari [“Shaming the meat”]

Richard Lee 1979 – The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society

Richard Lee 1982 – Politics, Sexual and Non-Sexual, in an Egalitarian Society

Richard Lee 1984/2013 – The Dobe Ju/Hoansi

Helga Vierich 2021 – ‘Hunting is boring and unreliable. Let the men do it!’ (video)

HADZA

Frank Marlowe 2010 – The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

Frank Marlowe 2004 – Dictators and ultimatums in an egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers, the Hadza

Fearless & Far 2021 – Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions (video)

Coren Lee Apicella 2018 – High levels of rule-bending in a minimally religious and largely egalitarian forager population

NAYAKA

Nurit Bird-David 1990 – The Giving Environment, Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters

Nurit Bird-David 1999 – “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology

BATEK

Kirk & Karen Endicott 2008 – The Headman Was a Woman: The Gender Egalitarian Batek of Malaysia

MONTAGNAIS-NASKAPI

Eleanor Leacock 1981 – Myths of Male Dominance

CRITIQUES/DEBATES ON FORAGER EGALITARIANISM

Alan Barnard 1992 – The Kalahari Debate, a Bibliographical Essay [3]

Edwin Wilmsen 1989 – Land Filled With Flies

Roy Richard Grinkger 1991 – Houses in the Rainforest

Richard Lee & Mathias Guenther 1991 – Oxen or Onions? The Search for Trade (and Truth) in the Kalahari [4]

Ted Kaczynski 2008 – The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarchoprimitivism [5]