The range of social structures exhibited by hunter-gatherers, from the past through to the present-day, may be best addressed by analysis which examines the structures’ essential features, the corresponding ideologies, and the factors which precipitate change from one structure to another. A good example is Wodburn’s distinction (1982) between †‘immediate-return’ and ‘delayed return’ hunter-gatherer societies which grasps the difference between egalitarian and more complex hunter-gatherer social structures in terms of different types of social bonding implicated by differing technological and economic constraints. From another perspective, discussion of egalitarian hunter-gatherers often makes much of the unrestricted access to territory and ungarnered resources which uniquely seems central to their cultures. Thus Ingold (1986) notes that in these societies the prevalent food sharing among members of the community replays the fact that the means of subsistence are held in common, and that this differs from more complex societies where sharing amounts to the giving up of that which is first personally owned. Other writers have attended to the essential instability of egalitarianism and how ‘immediate-return’ hunter-gatherers must work to sustain it, for example by employing joking, teasing, put-downs and other ‘levelling mechanisms’ against those who might seek to translate superior ability (e.g. in hunting) into higher †status. Meanwhile, the attempt to grasp what precipitates the emergence of the more complex social structures has resulted in a variety of proposals ranging from the development of systems of food storage, the intensification of control over women, and the emergence of notions of ownership associated with the conservation of resources. Among the Australian Aborigines, more complex social structures may be connected with large-scale †initiation ceremonies such as do not generally occur among egalitarian hunter-gatherers.
Peoples with flexible, egalitarian social structures commonly subscribe to religions which embrace shamanistic principles, and hunter-gatherers are no exception. In *shamanism direct contact by humans with the spirit domain, usually in order to relieve misfortune, is achieved through soul loss, and this is normally discharged by a specialist—the shaman—whose techniques of ecstasy and trance have been refined through a long period of apprenticeship. Shamanism, a religion marked by social unpredictability, seems less compatible with complex social structures with their more rigidly organized social groupings. Thus Australian Aboriginal religion, once thought to exemplify the elementary religion, revolves around *totemic beliefs which are connected with the existence of discrete social subdivisions, including descent groups.
Among the Northwest Coast Indians there are closed religious ‘societies’ into which young men are initiated, and inter-group ranking celebrated by ceremonial *potlatch feasting.
In more recent times many hunter-gatherer peoples have come to subscribe to world religions such as *Christianity, melding indigenous beliefs with new, and radically different, concepts and notions. Underpinning such religious change may be the heterogeneous economic values to which many contemporary hunter-gatherers now subscribe and the serious disruptions in the indigenous economy wrought by colonial contact. Thus Tanner (1979) shows, in the case of the Cree Indians, that merging both subsistence and commercial economic concerns can pose enormous ideological dilemmas, which may be rationalized through selectively, and situationally, upholding beliefs from more than one religious tradition. This sort of analysis will increasingly be required to grasp the changing circumstances of hunter-gatherers throughout the world.
