Читать книгу Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker - Страница 12

Traditionally, agricultural people have looked down on hunting people who are described as “savage,” “backward,” “primitive,” “ignorant,” “indolent,” “lazy,” “wild,” and “lacking in intelligence.” Europeans applied the term “civilized tribes” to some eastern North American natives who lived in towns and cultivated plants, but these Native Americans themselves referred to the hunting tribes of the plains as “wild Indians.” In Africa, farming groups that surround hunter‐gatherers, “… did not merely assert their political dominance over the hunter‐gatherers and ex‐hunter‐gatherers they encapsulated; they also treated them as inferiors, as people apart, stigmatized them and discriminated against them” (Woodburn, 1988, p. 37). Similar attitudes prevail in Asia, Oceania, and Tropical America. The prejudice is nearly universal.

The stereotype includes the idea that hunting–gathering people were always on the verge of starvation and that the pursuit of food took so much of their time and energy that there was not enough of either one left over to build more “advanced” cultures. Hunters were too nomadic to cultivate plants and too ignorant or unintelligent to understand the life cycles of plants. The idea of sowing or planting had never occurred to them and they lacked the intelligence to conceive of it. Hunters were concerned with animals and had no interest in plants. In the stereotype that developed, it was generally agreed that the life of the hunter‐gatherer was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and that any study of such people would only reveal that they lived like animals, were of low intelligence, and were intellectually insensitive and incapable of “improvement.”

Occasionally, an unusually perceptive student of mankind tried to point out that hunting man might be as intelligent as anyone else; that he had a sensitive spiritual and religious outlook; that he was capable of high art; that his mythologies were worthy of serious consideration; and that he was, in fact, as one of us and belonged to the same species with all its weaknesses and potentialities. Such opinions were seldom taken very seriously until recent years. It has finally become apparent that no part of the stereotype is correct and that widely held presuppositions are all completely false and untenable. Our ancestors were not as stupid or as brutish as we wanted to believe.

In 1966, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore organized a symposium on Man the Hunter held at the University of Chicago and published in 1968. Lee reported on his studies of the San !Kung of the Dobe area, Botswana. Over a three‐week period, Lee (1968) found that !Kung Bushmen spent 2.3, 1.9, and 3.2 days for the first, second, and third week, respectively, in subsistence activities. He wrote, “In all, the adults of the Dobe camp worked about 2 ½ days a week. Since the average working day was about 6 hr long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from 12 to 19 hr a week to getting food.”

Among the Bushmen, neither the children nor the aged are pressed into service. Children can help if they wish, but are not expected to contribute regularly to the work force until they are married. The aged are respected for their knowledge, experience, and legendary lore; and are cared for even when blind or lame or unable to contribute to the food‐gathering activities. Neither nonproductive children nor the aged are considered a burden.

To the !Kung Bushman, the mongongo nut [Schinziophyton rautanenii (Schinz) Radcl.‐Sm] is basically the staff of life. These nuts are available year‐round and are remarkably nutritious (Table 1.1). The average daily per‐capita consumption of 300 nuts weighs “only about 7.5 ounces (212.6 g) but contains the caloric equivalent of 2.5 pounds (1134 g) of cooked rice and the protein equivalent of 14 ounces (397 g) of lean beef” (Lee, 1968). Lee found the diet adequate, starvation unknown, the general health good, and longevity about as good as in modern industrial societies. The average of 2140 calories per person daily (Table 1.1) compares favorably to the 2015 USDA recommendations of 2400–3000 calories for an adult male and 1800–2400 calories for an adult female (https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/appendix‐2/).

Table 1.1 Diet of the !Kung Bushmen.

Source: Adapted from Lee (1968).

	Protein (g/day)	Calories per person per day	Percent caloric contribution of meat and vegetables
Meat	34.5	690	33
Mongongo nuts	56.7	1,260	67
Other vegetable foods	1.9	190
Total	93.1	2,140	100

Sahlins (1968) came in with almost identical figures for subsistence activities of the Australian Aborigines he studied and elaborated on his term “original affluent society.” One can be affluent, he said, either by having a great deal or by not wanting much. If one is consistently on the move and must carry all one's possessions, one does not want much. The Aborigines also appeared to be well fed and healthy, and enjoyed a great deal of leisure time.

Gatherers can obtain food in abundance even in the deserts of Australia and the Kalahari Desert of Africa. The rhythm of food‐getting activities is almost identical between the Australian Aborigine and the !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa. The women and children are primarily involved in obtaining plant and small animal materials. Hunting is reserved for males at the age of puberty or older but is more of a sport than a necessity. Meat is a welcome addition to a rather dull diet but is seldom required in any abundance for adequate nutrition. Both males and females tend to work for 2 days and every third day is a holiday (Figure 1.1). Even during the days they work, only about 3–4 hr per day are employed to supply food for the entire group (Australian data presented by Sahlins, 1968).

Figure 1.1 Food‐gathering activities of the Australian Aborigines.

Source: Adapted from Sahlins (1968).

Other reports at the symposium tended to support these general findings. A picture emerged of leisure, if not affluent societies, where the food supply was assured even under difficult environmental conditions and could be obtained from natural sources with little effort. The picture described did seem to fit the golden age of Hesiod or the Biblical Garden of Eden.

The publication of Man the Hunter was a surprise to many who believed some version of the hunter stereotype. The stimulation was enormous. Between 1968 and 1992, there were at least 12 international conferences on hunter‐gatherers as a direct result, but not all were published. A few of the early conferences included ones published by Ingold et al. (1988a, 1988b) and by Schire (1984). In addition, one may cite Bicchieri (1972), Hunters and Gatherers Today; Dahlberg (1981), Woman, the Gatherer; Winterhalder and Smith (1981), Hunter‐gatherer Foraging Strategies; Williams and Hunn (1982), Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter‐gatherers; Koyama and Thomas (1982), Affluent Foragers: Pacific Coasts East and West; Price and Brown (1985), Prehistoric Hunter‐gatherers: The Emergence of Social and Cultural Complexity; Harris and Hillman (1989), Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation; and such regional treatments as Hallam (1975), Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in Southwestern Australia; Silberbauer (1981, p. 242), Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert; Riches (1982), Northern Nomadic Hunter‐gatherers; Lee (1984), The Dobe!Kung; Akazawa and Aikens (1986), Prehistoric Hunter‐gatherers in Japan; and there are many hundreds of additional research papers. There is now a vast amount of new material on the subject, but some of the oldest papers are still the most useful because observations were made before the hunter‐gatherers were so restricted and encapsulated as they are now.

The biases of some of the investigators were often clear. Some set out to dispute the “affluent society” concept and others to support it. Some of the anthropologists were hung up on Marxist views of “history,” since the egalitarian nature of most hunter‐gatherer societies suggested Marx's view of communism: “No one starves unless all starve”; “no man need go hungry while another eats”; “rich and poor perish together,” and so forth (Lee, 1988). The quotes are from observers of Iroquois, Ainu, and Nuer, respectively, and seem to equate egalitarianism with hunger, which is probably not fair. Incidentally, Karl Marx took his model of basic communism from an agricultural Iroquois society, not from hunter‐gatherers, who are not so likely to starve.

What do the new studies show? To no one's surprise, they show that the golden age was more golden for some than for others. Even a few examples of famine were found (Johnson & Earle, 1987, p. 374). Brian Hayden (1981) listed a number of tribes showing a continuum of work from “a few minutes per day” (Tanaina in Alaska) or 2 hr per day (Hadza in Tanzania) to “all day every day” or “too busy to visit relatives” (Birhor in India). Well, I have been too busy to visit relatives even when I wasn't doing much of anything. It also comes as no surprise that if processing and cooking time is added to collecting time, it takes longer to get a meal than some figures would suggest. Processing some foods is laborious and time‐consuming. Grinding or pounding seeds into flour has always been drudgery, and boiling toxic foods in several changes of water takes a lot of time. Still, is watching a pot boil hard labor, especially if the kids make a game of picking up sticks to keep the fire going? And, of course, farmers must also process their food, too, so the addition of processing and cooking time does not necessarily change the comparison.

There are certain aspects of time and work that do not seem to receive due attention. Suppose you like your work? I always have, and have spent far more time at it than necessary for survival. Consider those men of industrial societies who spend endless hours cramped and freezing in a duck blind for little or no reward, or those who huddle in a shelter fishing through the ice in the middle of a Minnesota winter. The social aspects are what matter; after a few nips of whiskey, no one cares if the rod bends or not. I record two ethnographic notes from my own experience, both from farming societies, but the principles apply to anyone. Early one morning on a deserted road in Afghanistan, I came across a line of men dressed in colorful embroidered jackets, balloon pants, and pixie‐toed shoes. They had two drums and were singing and dancing up and down with their sickles in the air. A group of women followed, shrouded in their chadors, but obviously enjoying the occasion. I stopped and asked in broken Farsee: “Is this a wedding celebration or something?” They looked surprised and said: “No, nothing. We are just going out to cut wheat.” Harvest time is a good time of year even if it is hot and the “work” is hard. It is a time for socializing and, if the harvest is good, for celebrating.

A second observation was in eastern Turkey. My interpreter and I had seen a family harvesting a field and we stopped. He talked to the people while I collected some samples. My interpreter later told me that he had commented to the farmer that he could harvest the field in half the time if he would use a scythe and cradle. The farmer looked at him in astonishment and said: “Then what would I do?” There is a certain amount of Parkinson's law in all these activities. One fills up the time available. What is the meaning of time if there is more of it than you know how to use? As for getting by with the least effort possible for survival, I do not think that is human nature. Sure, anyone can drink vin ordinaire, but why not work a little harder and drink Chateauneuf‐du‐Pape?

How do hunter‐gatherers spend their leisure? Apparently they sleep a lot, but there are other diversions. Gambling is popular among many tribes; Woodburn (1970, p. 59) states that the Hadza people spend more time in gambling than in obtaining food. The most popular gambling stake is poisoned arrows. There are also music, dances, ritual and ceremony, rites of passage, playing cat's cradle, storytelling, creative arts, making useful and decorative articles, and similar activities. Life appears easy, but generally dull. Perhaps as a consequence there is a great deal of coming and going; the camp population is fluid and camps may be moved on the slightest pretext or for no reason at all. Understandably, there is a tendency to concentrate on the foods most easily obtained at a given time, and these are likely to change from season to season and, to some extent, from year to year. Groups of people in many gathering societies tend to be very fluid for that reason. When food is at maximum abundance, there is a tendency to gather in large bands. This is the season for rejoicing, celebrating, observing ancient tribal rituals, arranging marriages, and having naming ceremonies, coming of age ceremonies, and so on. The tribe is more fully represented at this time. During the most difficult season of the year, the people may break up into microbands to better exploit the gathering range and to avoid exhausting the food supply near the larger camps.

Many Australian Aborigines remain apart much of the yearly cycle even after becoming dependent on European agricultural–industrial systems. For most of the year they find jobs as ranch hands, laborers, mechanics, and so forth, but they may quit whatever they are doing, take off their store‐bought clothes, and take a three‐month “walkabout” during their traditionally festive season. Gathering is still easier than working at that time of year.

The study of hunting tribes that have survived long enough to have been observed by modern ethnographers is full of difficulties and pitfalls. Many tribes had become profoundly modified through contact with and by the pressures applied by agriculturalists. Some were reduced to the status of slaves or servants; others were restricted on reservations or their normal ranges were constricted by pressures of stronger groups. The social and economic structures of many tribes were in an advanced stage of disintegration at the time of ethnographic description.

The geographic distribution of surviving hunters results in a serious bias. By and large, hunters have survived where agriculture is unrewarding. We find them in the Kalahari Desert and adjacent dry savanna in southern Africa, in small pockets of tropical rain forest, in the frozen wastes of the Arctic, or in western North America, but there are no examples left in the more productive agricultural lands of the world.

At the time of European contact, the eastern forests and woodlands of North America were largely populated by native agriculturalists; the people living in the plains and westward mostly maintained hunting–gathering economies. There were enclaves of farmers, such as the Mandan on the Missouri River in North Dakota, and a highly sophisticated agriculture had developed in the Southwest USA where people practiced irrigation on a large scale and often lived in towns. Some farming was practiced along the Colorado River watershed and into southern California, but most of the California natives and other tribes of western North America lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering. A substantial body of information has been assembled about them, but we must remember that they did have contact with farming people and some of their cultural elements could have been borrowed.

Data for hunter‐gatherers in South America have been accumulating during the late 20th and into the 21st centuries. In the review by Scheinsohn (2003), she indicates distinct areas occupied by hunter‐gatherers in the grasslands of Argentina and southern Chile, farming communities in the highlands of western South America, and mixed hunter‐gatherer and farming societies in more mid‐to‐low land areas of Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela by about 6000 BP (Before Present). There is some evidence of man in South America by at least 30,000 BP (Scheinsohn, 2003), and these peoples were certainly hunter‐gatherers. The Bushman of southern Africa has been studied in some detail, but we know historically that they had long contact with the livestock‐herding Hottentot and farming Bantu tribes. The Congo pygmies often spend part of each year with agricultural people. The Ainu of Japan have taken up some farming in the last century or so. Many of the hunter‐gatherers of India are so constricted by agriculturalists that they have virtually become members of a nonfarming caste.

The Andaman Islanders succeeded in preserving a greater degree of isolation, partly by killing off strangers who landed or were shipwrecked on their shores. Still, we know they borrowed some customs from outsiders. Both pottery and pigs seem to have been introduced about 1500 AD (Coon, 1971). It is even possible that they were agriculturalists when they arrived and abandoned the practice when they found it unnecessary.

Perhaps our most reliable data come from Australia. At the time of European contact in the early 19th century, there was an entire continent populated by an estimated 300,000 people without a single domesticated plant and no genuine agriculture. Although it is true that for some centuries before European contact there were Malayan traders visiting northern Australia on a fairly regular basis, there is little evidence that this resulted in significant changes in use of food resources and it did not induce the Aborigines to take up the cultivation of plants. The Torres Strait is also rather narrow and some contact with agricultural Melanesians occurred. That this would influence the whole of Australia very much seems doubtful.

I shall, therefore, rely more on ethnographic data from Australia than elsewhere, but will remind the reader that any reconstruction of a way of life of some thousands of years ago, based on a small, biased sample of living people, is full of hazards and sources of error. The earlier accounts may have more value than some of the later ones because the effects of European contact were rapid and profound.

Woodburn (1988) and in a series of papers, outlined an important distinction between immediate return strategies and delayed return strategies. The former live from day to day, or at most a few days at a time on current returns. Delayed return groups have longer‐term goals; these include manufacturing of boats, nets, weirs, traps, and deadfalls, tending bee hives, the capture and keeping of animals to be eaten later, the replacement of the tops of yams at digging time, sowing of seeds, managing vegetation with fire, water spreading, irrigation, flooding of forests, arranged marriages, and so forth. The Australian Aborigines were delayed return strategists of great skill, and as such were closer to agriculturalists than to immediate return hunter‐gatherers such as the Bushmen and Hadza. Great Basin and West Coast Native Americans and the Jomon of Japan were also delayed return strategists.

As more and more data have accumulated, a consensus has developed that present day and recent hunter‐gatherers, whether of immediate or delayed return, have evolved in parallel with agriculturalists and no longer represent the original condition before agriculture. They are not the “pristine” hunger–gatherers of 10,000–12,000 years ago. In addition, the diversity among hunter‐gatherers is such that no single model can represent them. There is not even a single model for Australia, let alone the other hunter‐gatherers in the world. Our extensive field studies will not tell us all we want to know about preagricultural societies, but they are suggestive.

The oldest remains of Homo sapiens L. were left in Morocco about 315,000 years ago (Hublin et al., 2017a, 2017b), which is much older than previously thought. Foley (1988) reserved the term “human” for anatomically modern man who appeared on earth as early as 100,000 years ago and as late as 30,000 years ago in some regions, but many intermediate fossil remains define the evolution within the genus Homo. However, early species of Homo were not “human.” Late Pleistocene man was anatomically modern, but larger, heavier, and more sexually dimorphic. Foley suggests reduction in size and dimorphism was a response to a change in food procurement systems. With the extinction of many large mammals and general impoverishment of the fauna at the end of Pleistocene, men and women began to share more evenly in food procurement, and the broader spectrum of plants and animals exploited was accompanied by morphological changes in humans.