Hunters and gatherers, gatherer-hunters and foragers are all more or less synonymous terms, and are usually applied to those populations who live entirely by these two means of subsistence. Sometimes the terms are used more loosely to refer to populations who obtain most of their subsistence by hunting and gathering, who until recently subsisted entirely by hunting and gathering, or who subsist by hunting, gathering and fishing.
In 10,000 BC, the world’s population consisted solely of hunters, gatherers and fishermen. By AD 1500, with the spread of pastoralism and agriculture, this total was down to 1 per cent. By AD 1900 it was a mere 0.001 per cent (Lee and DeVore 1968). In the 1990s hunter-gatherers include small, scattered groups on several continents, and they usually live encapsulated by and in contact with non-hunter-gatherers. Well-known examples include the Australian Aborigines, the African Bushmen and Pygmies, and the Inuit or Eskimo of northern North America. In all these cases full-time hunting and gathering is dying out, though many modern members of these groups, as well as South American horticulturists and African pastoralists, engage in part-time hunting and gathering and retain a foraging ethos which governs their economic activities. Throughout the world the basic sexual division of labour is the same: the men do the hunting and the women do the gathering.
In spite of their small numbers, ‘pure’ hunter-gatherers have been of great significance in social theory. Evolutionary anthropologists and human ethologists have emphasized that the overwhelming part of cultural humankind’s 2 million-year existence has been spent in hunting and gathering societies. Some argue that humans’ ‘natural’ biological make-up is best exemplified in these societies, rather than in agricultural or industrialized ones. The counter-argument is that present-day foragers are both biologically modern and fully ‘cultural’, and therefore the means of subsistence bear no necessary relation to any primeval human mentality.
Prehistoric archaeologists also use studies of present-day foragers, in this case as aids to interpreting the archaeological record. Yet the difficulty is that contemporary foragers, who are largely confined to deserts and jungles and in continual contact with non-foraging peoples, may be quite different from the ancient hunter-gatherers who inhabited the archaeological sites of Europe and temperate North America.
Another area of theoretical interest has been in economic anthropology. According to Sahlins (1974), hunters and gatherers represent ‘the original affluent society’. If affluence is measured in free time rather than in accumulated wealth, hunters and gatherers are often far more affluent than their agricultural neighbours. Except in times of scarcity, hunter-gatherer populations need spend only a few hours per day in subsistence-related activities, and they survive times of general severity, such as drought, better than neighbouring agricultural peoples.
Yet in spite of all this theoretical interest in hunter-gatherers, some specialists have come to question the utility of hunter-gatherers as a meaningful category. Ellen (1982) argues that there is little difference between the subsistence pursuits of ‘pure’ hunter-gatherers and horticulturists who hunt and gather for part of their food supply. Likewise, Ingold (1980) considers the case for a fuzzy boundary between hunting and herding. A number of writers have attacked the commonplace notion that foragers are somehow ‘purer’ than other branches of humanity. In earlier texts, foragers had been described as more ‘natural’ and therefore, but contradictorily, more ‘human’ than other peoples. Part-time foragers were thus seen as tainted by exposure to non-forager culture and less worthy of study.
Woodburn (1980) has suggested a way out of these impasses, but one which also questions the category hunters and gatherers. He draws the line not between hunter-gatherers and non-hunter-gatherers, but between ‘immediate-return’ hunter-gatherers and others. Immediate-return economies are characterized by a hand-to-mouth existence, that is, a lack of time-investment in activities designed to pay off later, such as making fishing nets, keeping horses for use in hunting, or the cultivation of crops. In contrast, hunter-gatherers who invest in horses, nets, etc., and all non-hunter-gatherers, have ‘delayed-return’ economies. Immediate-return economies are characteristically egalitarian, with social life based on the wide sharing of goods.
Since the mid-1980s there has been a major debate sparked off by the ‘revisionist’ critique. Revisionists, such as Wilmsen (1989), have attacked the notion that modern hunter-gatherers have long been isolated from their neighbours. They emphasize the impact of the regional and even the world economy, not only recently but also in the centuries before European exploration and colonization. Ironically, say some commentators, the encapsulation of hunter-gatherers in the last century has led to a ‘purer’ foraging lifestyle, rather than the destruction of that lifestyle.
Alan Barnard
University of Edinburgh
References
Ellen, R.F. (1982) Environment, Subsistence and System, Cambridge, UK.
Ingold, T. (1980) Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers, Cambridge, UK.
Lee, R.B. and DeVore, I. (1968) ‘Problems in the study of hunters and gatherers’, in R.B.Lee and I.DeVore (eds) Man the Hunter, Chicago.
Sahlins, M. (1974) Stone Age Economics, London.
Wilmsen, E.N. (1989) Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari, Chicago.
Woodburn, J. (1980) ‘Egalitarian societies’, Man 17.
Further reading
Burch, E.L. Jr and Ellanna, L.J. (1994) Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research, Oxford.
Ingold, T., Riches, D. and Woodburn, J. (eds) (1988) Hunters and Gatherers, 2 vols, Oxford.
