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 naturally occurring sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, bird eggs, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game. This is a common practice among most omnivores. 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.
The San peoples, or Bushmen, are the members of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. Their ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. They speak, or their ancestors spoke, languages of the Khoe, Tuu and Kxʼa language families, and are only a 'people' in contrast to pastoralists such as the Khoekhoe and descendants of more recent waves of immigration such as the Bantu, Europeans and Asians.
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, Henry Harpending, Marjorie Shostak, Robert Bailey, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Wrangham and Terrence Deacon.
A band society, sometimes called a camp, or in older usage, a horde, is the simplest form of human society. A band generally consists of a small kin group, no larger than an extended family or clan. The general consensus of modern anthropology sees the average number of members of a social band at the simplest level of foraging societies with generally a maximum size of 30 to 50 people.
The ǃKungKUUNG 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.
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.
Marjorie Shostak was an American anthropologist. Though she never received a formal degree in anthropology, she conducted extensive fieldwork among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari desert in south-western Africa and was widely known for her descriptions of the lives of women in this hunter-gatherer society.
The Okiek, sometimes called the Ogiek or Akiek, are a Southern Nilotic ethnic group native to Tanzania and Southern Kenya, and Western Kenya. In 2019 the ethnic Okiek population was 52,596, although the number of those speaking the Akiek language was as low as 500.
Eleanor Burke Leacock was an anthropologist and social theorist who made major contributions to the study of egalitarian societies, the evolution of the status of women in society, Marxism, and the feminist movement.
Peter Sutton FASSA is an Australian social anthropologist and linguist who has, since 1969, contributed to: recording Australian Aboriginal languages; promoting Australian Aboriginal art; mapping Australian Aboriginal cultural landscapes; and increasing societies' general understanding of contemporary Australian Aboriginal social structures and systems of land tenure.
John Kennedy Marshall was an American anthropologist and acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for his work in Namibia recording the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi.
Hugh Brody is a British anthropologist, writer, director and lecturer.
Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert.
Environmental anthropology is a sub-discipline of anthropology that examines the complex relationships between humans and the environments which they inhabit. This takes many shapes and forms, whether it be examining the hunting/gathering patterns of humans tens of thousands of years ago, archaeological investigations of early agriculturalists and their impact on deforestation or soil erosion, or how modern human societies are adapting to climate change and other anthropogenic environmental issues. This sub-field of anthropology developed in the 1960s from cultural ecology as anthropologists borrowed methods and terminology from growing developments in ecology and applied then to understand human cultures.
The sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between male and female animals. Among human foragers, males and females targeted different types of foods and shared 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. In modern day society sex differences in occupation is seen across cultures, with the tendency that men do technical work and women tend to do work related to care.
Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept, that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.
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."
Pauline Wiessner is an American anthropologist who focused on cultural Anthropology. She is currently a professor at University of Utah. Wiessner has held various professor positions at Universities in the United States, Denmark, and France and various positions in Universities and communities across the world. During her research she work with Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari in South Africa to learn about the social networks and Enga of Papua New Guinea to learn about their customs of exchange, ritual and warfare.
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.
Andrew Jamieson Strathern is a British anthropologist.
