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."