In every anthropology subject I’ve done, the students take turns presenting a topic for each week. I volunteered to start this semester because I’m not sure what demands the book will put on me later on. This week, the topic was around what the term ‘hunters and gatherers’ really means. Can we say that Aborigines that live in suburbia but still prefer to hunt their food than buy it at a shop are H&Gs? What about nomads that move around but take livestock with them? Probably not in either case, but then even the Aborigines whose culture is least tainted by colonisation make huts and stay put until the food runs out. As everything in anthropology, the point is that there’s no strict definition and no line demarcating the boundary.
With only a brief time to present, I couldn’t cover the topic completely, so I decided to focus on the concept of affluence, inspired by a chapter of Marshall Sahlins’ book ‘Stone Age Economics’ called ‘The Original Affluent Society’. My point was that the dictionary defines affluence / wealth in terms of money and possessions, that’s a very modern view, though I even want to question the term ‘modern’. To these, I add health, leisure and happiness. In Western civilisations, these are definitely interrelated, but do they need to be? Sahlins pointed out that there are two paths to affluence: produce much or desire little.
The studies that we used suggest that Aborigines and other H&G societies live by the latter. Since animals and plants take time to replenish themselves, these bands suffer from the law of diminishing returns. As time goes on, food becomes scarce and more effort is required to generate the same amount of food. The solution is to up and move camp, taking what they need with them. Since they don’t have carts or pack animals, they must carry everything with them. Possessions then become a burden rather than a measure of wealth – as anyone who’s moved house recently will understand. So possessions are often shared among the community so that only 1 or 2 of any item need be carried.
But to control movement and to avoid having too many people hunting from the same stock at the same time, Aborigines have territories. These aren’t territories in the way that we think of them, still belonging to communities rather than individuals, and perhaps to multiple communities. These communities are all networked so that each knows where its neighbours are and what they’re doing. Young men in particular may travel through neighbouring territory and beyond, extending their network of ‘own countrymen’, but to travel beyond where he is known means that the man is less likely to be trusted and may not be given permission to hunt or move through it.
Such rights are granted by the elders who know the stories of the sacred sites and the land. Since these aren’t shared lightly, I can only presume that many of these stories contain knowledge of the dangers of the land and of food stocks and migration patterns that allow them to live comfortably. While everything else is shared on demand, these stories appear to be a stronghold of wealth for those who’ve earned it by demonstrating a caring for the land. I believe that in the case of the Aborigines, knowledge is the true wealth and I see this being true for the new world too.
I love the idea of the minimalist movement I’ve seen on the net recently. I’ve never liked clutter and I’ve always loved being able to move around easily, so it’s great to see more people taking on this approach to life, but extending it to making a smaller drain on the environment. I’d like to think that these people, including myself, consider wealth in terms of knowledge, leisure, happiness, relationships or whatever – as long as it’s sustainable and contagious. If you haven’t yet, check out Everett Bogue’s and Sheila Chandra’s blogs to learn more about the modern hunters and gatherers.