Man the Hunter

Last updated

Man the Hunter was a 1966 symposium organized by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore. The symposium resulted in a book of the same title and attempted to bring together for the first time a comprehensive look at recent ethnographic research on hunter-gatherers.

Contents

Eriksen and Nielson argue that the symposium was one of the high points of cultural ecology. [1] They report the symposium as concentrating on contemporary hunters and gatherers and noted that the contributors were mostly American cultural anthropologists. The main point of the conference was that given that hunting was humanity's original source of livelihood, any theory of society and the nature of Man would require a deep knowledge of how hunters live. The symposium also emphasised the rivalry between cultural and materialist understanding of culture and society.

The symposium was held at the Center for Continuing Education, University of Chicago, from April 6 to the 9th, 1966 and was attended by several of the most influential figures in then contemporary anthropology. In addition to Lee and DeVore, the symposium was attended by Marshall Sahlins, Aram Yengoyan, George Peter Murdock, Colin Turnbull, Lewis Binford, and Julian Steward.

The corresponding book, containing the papers presented at the symposium, was published by Aldine Transaction in 1968.

Critiques

In the decades after its publication, Man the Hunter was critiqued by both sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists. While conference attendees had stressed their studies of hunters and gatherers as a link to a Pleistocene past, historical particularists like Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow critiqued this approach in what became known as the Kalahari Debate. [2] Another response from feminists like Jane F. Collier and Michelle Rosaldo critiqued the gendered assumptions in Man the Hunter, highlighting how masculine-coded activities like hunting were considered central to human development, whereas so-called women's work was devalued and considered evolutionarily unimportant. [3] Finally, a strain of critiques focused on the ways that hunter-gatherer societies have been considered 'passive' landscape managers. Using archaeological evidence to show how landscape management strategies like fire shaped the landscape at a large scale, archaeologists like Kent Lightfoot, Rob Cuthrell, Chuck Striplen, and Mark Hylkema have shown how indigenous hunter-gatherers changed landscape ecology. [4]

Literature

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthropology</span> Scientific study of humans, human behavior, and societies

Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cultural anthropology</span> Branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Society</span> Individuals that interact with each other

A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent of members. In the social sciences, a larger society often exhibits stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hunter-gatherer</span> Peoples who forage or hunt for most or all of their food

A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game, roughly as most animal omnivores do. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San people</span> Members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer people of Southern Africa

The San peoples, or Bushmen, are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxʼa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San people making it the country with the highest number of San people.

Irven DeVore was an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He headed Harvard's Department of Anthropology from 1987 to 1992. He taught generations of students at Harvard both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He mentored many young scientists who went on to prominence in anthropology and behavioral biology, including Richard Lee, Robert Trivers, Sarah Hrdy, Peter Ellison, Barbara Smuts, Patricia Draper, Henry Harpending, Marjorie Shostak, Robert Bailey, Nadine Peacock, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Wrangham, Terrence Deacon, Steven Gaulin, and others.

Feminist archaeology employs a feminist perspective in interpreting past societies. It often focuses on gender, but also considers gender in tandem with other factors, such as sexuality, race, or class. Feminist archaeology has critiqued the uncritical application of modern, Western norms and values to past societies. It is additionally concerned with increasing the representation of women in the discipline of archaeology, and reducing androcentric bias within the field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ǃKung people</span> Ethnic group in Southern Africa

The ǃKung are one of the San peoples who live mostly on the western edge of the Kalahari desert, Ovamboland, and Botswana. The names ǃKung (ǃXun) and Ju are variant words for 'people', preferred by different ǃKung groups. This band level society used traditional methods of hunting and gathering for subsistence up until the 1970s. Today, the great majority of ǃKung people live in the villages of Bantu pastoralists and European ranchers.

Richard Borshay Lee is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. He holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. Lee researches issues concerning the indigenous people of Botswana and Namibia, particularly their ecology and history.

The "original affluent society" is the proposition that argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security to be considered affluent. The theory was first put forward in a paper presented by Marshall Sahlins at a famous symposium in 1966 entitled 'Man the Hunter'. Sahlins observes that affluence is the satisfaction of wants, "which may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little." Given a culture characterized by limited wants, Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were able to live 'affluently' through the relatively easy satisfaction of their material needs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bugkalot</span> Ethnic group of the Philippines (also Ilongot)

The Bugkalot are a tribe inhabiting the southern Sierra Madre and Caraballo Mountains, on the east side of Luzon in the Philippines, primarily in the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya and Nueva Ecija and along the mountain border between the provinces of Quirino and Aurora. They are also commonly referred to as "Ilongot", especially in older studies, but nowadays, the endonym Bugkalot is preferred in modern ethnic research. They were formerly headhunters.

Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.

Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist Rosaldo was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot people in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.

The Department of Social Relations for Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies, more commonly known as the "Department of Social Relations", was an interdisciplinary collaboration among three of the social science departments at Harvard University beginning in 1946. Originally, the program was headquartered in Emerson Hall at Harvard before moving to William James Hall in 1965. While the name "Social Relations" is often associated with the program's long-time chair and guiding spirit, sociologist Talcott Parsons, many major figures of mid-20th-century social science also numbered among the program's faculty, including psychologists Gordon Allport, Jerome Bruner, Roger Brown, and Henry Murray (personality); anthropologists Clyde and Florence Kluckhohn, John and Beatrice Whiting, Evon Z. Vogt ; and sociologist Alex Inkeles. Other prominent scholars, such as Jerome Kagan and Ezra Vogel belonged to the department early in their careers before it split. Many of the department's graduate students also went on to be major figures in US social sciences during the latter part of the twentieth century; their work tends towards strong interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Marshall (filmmaker)</span>

John Kennedy Marshall was an American anthropologist and acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for his work in Namibia recording the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi.

The sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between males and females. Among human foragers, males and females target different types of foods and share them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food; but only in humans are these two attributes combined. The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labor. Many studies on the sexual division of labor have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania.

This bibliography of anthropology lists some notable publications in the field of anthropology, including its various subfields. It is not comprehensive and continues to be developed. It also includes a number of works that are not by anthropologists but are relevant to the field, such as literary theory, sociology, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.

Paula S. England, is an American sociologist and Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research has focused on gender inequality in the labor market, the family, and sexuality. She has also studied class differences in contraception and nonmarital births.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kalahari Debate</span>

The Kalahari Debate is a series of back and forth arguments that began in the 1980s amongst anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians about how the San people and hunter-gatherer societies in southern Africa have lived in the past. On one side of the debate were scholars led by Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore, considered traditionalists or "isolationists." On the other side of the debate were scholars led by Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, considered revisionists or "integrationists."

A subsistence pattern – alternatively known as a subsistence strategy – is the means by which a society satisfies its basic needs for survival. This encompasses the attainment of nutrition, water, and shelter. The five broad categories of subsistence patterns are foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, agriculture, and industrial food production.

References

  1. Eriksen, Nielsen (2001), p. 82
  2. Wilmsen 1989
  3. Jane F. Collier, Michelle Rosaldo (1981)
  4. Lightfoot et al (2013)