Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter‐Gatherer Economics and Environment

Citation

Wilson, P. (1999), "Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter‐Gatherer Economics and Environment", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 26 No. 12, pp. 1505-1516. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.1999.26.12.1505.2

The benevolent, passionate intention of this collection of papers is admirable. And the excellence of the majority of the contributions represent the best in anthropological writing. But these articles were not written for the purposes intended by the editor, an economist. So when we get beyond the editorial introduction, the hopes fade away that, somehow, hunter‐gatherers might teach us something “that can be applied to our present quest for environmental and social equality”.

Although the editor condemns the modern economic system because it is based on scarcity – “largely a social construct” – which is not an essential characteristic of human existence, the starting, keynote essay, by Marshall Sahlins, entitled “The original affluent society” is surely about a social construction – affluence. This is further confirmed by Nurit‐Bird‐David’s paper which points out that the mechanism for attaining this affluence is sharing, the means by which hunter‐gatherers dissociate production from income (p. 153). The association of production with income is identified as the danger point in capitalism in John Kenneth Gallbraith’s The Affluent Society. Most of the writers confirm that sharing is indeed characteristic of hunter‐gatherers, that sharing is social, and that sharing is the core of social life. Reciprocity and sharing, by their very contrived nature, are shown to be both social and constructed, not natural. Indeed, in a paper referred to, but not included in this anthology, Polly Wiessner has analysed the social rules and mechanics of hxaro, the Kung system of reciprocity. The central hunter‐gatherer “economic” mechanism is as socially constructed as the scarcity of capitalism.

Is the social life of hunter‐gatherers as harmonious as the editor would like us to think? As Lorna Marshall’s essay in particular emphasises, sharing, and food, sociability and talk are closely related to stress: “food is a source of constant anxiety” (p. 71); talk emerges from stress (p. 69): “their security and comfort must be achieved side‐by‐side with self‐interest and jealous watchfulness. Altruism, kindness, sympathy, or genuine generosity were not qualities that I observed often in their behavior” (p. 66). Tim Flannery also writes of Aborigine stress and pitched battles (pp. 242‐3). Of course, one of the most important features of hunter‐gatherer life is the licence each individual enjoys to leave a camp and join another when, or if, social relations start to get unpleasant. Australia is criss‐crossed by a network of social relations; the Kung not only have hxaro partners, but affines and kin to whom they can go; the Hadza often leave a camp for weeks and live quite self‐sufficient lives as individuals and “Hadza society is quite open. People who are able to associate themselves at will with whatever area and whatever camp they choose do not impose social boundaries between themselves and others” (Woodburn, p. 107). Hunter‐gatherers clearly practise a concept, the “exit‐option”, introduced by an economist, Albert Hirschman, to explain the working of the market!If you are not satisfied, you go somewhere else.

Being nomadic, immoveable property is not an effective concept of life for hunter‐gatherers, in contrast to capitalism. Portable, personal property is all a hunter‐gatherer “owns”. Yet, whether the writers are not being precise in their choice of words, or whether there is indeed a nascent sense of ownership, hints certainly crop up. John Yellen writes of the Aborigines: “Groups of people were loosely organized into bands, and each band had the right to seek food in specified areas. During the dry season the members of a single band would congregate, setting up camps near a water hole (a year round source of drinking water) understood to belong to that band” (p. 227, emphasis added). The situation is similar amongst the Kung. We are not told what are the sanctions which protect these rights; this leaves the idea of the presence of property hazy, but present nevertheless.

The domestication of plants and animals has been blamed by numerous authors for the rise of hierarchy and the suppression of women (John Zerzan makes this point in this volume). Two papers, one by Eleanor Leacock and another by James Woodburn, portray the “autonomy” (the term preferred by Leacock) of women and political egalitarianism in hunter‐gatherer societies. Other papers (for example the paper by Richard Lee) further illustrate their discussion. The question is not whether these societies are egalitarian, or whether women in particular are autonomous within them; we can take the ethnographers’ words for it, I think. But why? Is it, as idealists might have us think, part of “human nature” before it was despoiled by agriculture? Or is it socially (economically?) determined? In the sense that all anthropologists, and most others, would describe Homo sapiens as the social species, the question of social determination is a bit of a nonsense. What comes out of this volume is that hunter‐gatherers are so aware of the difficulties of hierarchy, of the damage that can be done to their entire way of life, that they make every effort to nullify avenues to power. They share (or gamble) and do not accumulate – though they could accumulate such hard goods as beads or arrow heads, or, in the Arctic, they could keep meat frozen in storage pits. They share meat, which in the tropical and temperate zones is the preferred food, and the only food in the Arctic, but they go to such lengths (described in detail by Lorna Marshall) that, as she says, one cannot attribute this to altruism. Modesty after success in the kill is put on and is expected, and the best hunter has no privileges in other spheres of life. This behaviour, as illustrated in many papers in the collection, seems so deliberate and rationalised that I, for one, would have to conclude that hunter‐gatherers do have the desire for, and the means to power, but that they impose equality upon themselves. This raises many questions of the classical sort (Hobbes versus Rousseau) and the Freudian sort. But these are not brought up in the volume.

Next, there is the question of “affluence”. In terms of some of the papers in this book it means working for your daily bread on average about 2.5 days of the week for the Kung (p. 51), though the Kung are lucky in that they have an abundant supply of mongongo nuts. Not all are so lucky, but let us accept the nutritional adequacy of the diet and the ease of obtaining it. What do hunter‐gatherers do with all that spare time? They visit, they entertain friends, they dance, they sing, they go into trance and they talk. They laugh, but they also quarrel; they are affectionate but they lose their tempers and can become very excitable. Presumably they make weapons, baskets, ornaments, and clothes (some of these items are mentioned, but not discussed in this collection). All in all, though they live in small groups they seem to be as able to enjoy each other and get on each others’ nerves in much the same way as people who are not hunter‐gatherers (and there is no paper here about their sexual lives which, we know from other accounts, are often a great source of tension). If the hunter‐gatherer way of life manages to avoid political tension, social stress and anxiety do not seem absent – though the scale and depth is probably less than in societies such as our own.

Next, there is the harmony with the environment in which hunter‐gatherers are said to live. One or two papers (Zerzan, Shepard) get all misty and mystical here about “inwardness” versus “outwardness” in human relations to the environment. The former is the hunter‐gatherer relation. There is no break between them and the world of animals, trees, streams, and rocks, or between the past, the present, and the future (p. 265). The environment is a “giving environment” according to Nurit Bird‐David (p. 123), as opposed to one in which we barter or exchange through sacrifice (p. 299). Though Paul Shepard denies the human responsibility for the Palaeolithic extinctions, the fact is that the great birds of Madagascar and New Zealand were hunted to extinction by humans, as were the giant marsupials, the mammoths, and others too numerous to mention – and all by Palaeolithic or even modern hunter‐gatherers. The animate or inanimate world for the hunter‐gatherer is a world of consciousness equal if not the same as our own, according to several of the essays in this volume. I have no doubt that this may be so, as it is for countless non hunter‐gatherer societies. Sir James Frazer’s book is still in print and the tribal, capitalist Ngai Tahu people of New Zealand’s South Island have successfully made a case before the New Zealand court that the summit of Mount Cook not be walked upon as it is the head, and hence tapu. Even good Christians and Jews, Moslems and Hindus give thanks before an ordinary meal without making a sacrifice out of it.

So, what can we victims and perpetrators of capitalism learn from hunters and gatherers? Paul Shepard says we do not have to take the whole society as our blueprint because a society (or a culture) is a mosaic and we can take some parts and leave others. So we do not have to go back to being hunter‐gatherers. This sounds fine. But, in fact, all the empirical essays in the volume demonstrate the necessary integration of mobility, reciprocity and sharing, small communities, egalitarianism, immediate return (minimal investment), and lack of immovable property. Take away one, and all fall apart. Superficial features such as clothing or china for shell beads could be changed without dissolving the hunter‐gatherer life‐system, but not the basics. What if we added egalitarianism to modern society? Egalitarianism begins and ends with an economic technique, storage. We would have great difficulty feeding 6 billion people without storage and modern transport. What if we broke up into bands of 25 people? That would be alright for those allotted to a friendly and bounteous environment (and who would do the allotting?). Those in the good parts, where things grow year round, would have to have the means and the inclination to supply, gratis, those in the bad and temperate zones. Those who already have an industrial infrastructure would, if equality was to be achieved, have to be prepared to maintain and share it. But what would they get in return? What and how could they all share? What are the means for a political and social equality in a post‐industrial world? We could think and feel more sensitively about, and for, the natural environment; though I think we have a long way to go, we are doing that already (some of us are, at any rate). We could certainly spend more time entertaining ourselves instead of being passively entertained – but it is amazing how much talent there is around performing locally. Indeed, we seem to have gone many steps further than hunter‐gatherers by developing a leisure industry (not to mention a hospitality industry and an entertainment industry). Don’t think it doesn’t cost hunter‐gatherers to entertain. It does. They provide food, tobacco, and gifts.

Yes, I applaud this book. It is a marvellous anthology for anthropologists. It provides a good recipe book should the apocalypse arrive and the few survivors need to start again. It shows how human beings can live pleasurable lives without wanting to satisfy ever‐changing, mounting, desires. If we have to, we will, presumably, be able to do the same, as has been demonstrated by prisoners of war, escapees, refugees and slaves. But, in one crucial respect, this volume sets before us an ideal we simply cannot afford to follow. Hunter‐gatherers think only in terms of the present, and in the short term. Economically and socially the capitalist world has been accused by its critics of the same thinking and a major plank in any sustainability program is long‐term thinking. Another message that comes out of this book is that hunter‐gatherers are not innovators. Materially it is a simple life; if anything, the material life of modern hunter‐gathers seems simpler than that of Upper Palaeolithic people. There is nothing in their art to compare with the Lascaux caves for example, except, perhaps, some Australian Aborigine art. But innovation, whether we like it or not, has become a human driving force, and we need it to haul ourselves out of the socio‐environmental mess that John Gowdy believes we have created. The title of the book indicates hunter‐gatherers have limited wants which they can easily satisfy without disturbing the world around them. We are, alas, not in that position. Even if individuals were to be ascetic and abstemious, satisfying only their needs, there are now so many people in the world that the arithmetical situation has created unlimited, though basic, wants. This reminds us of another parallel between our own society and that of hunter‐gatherers: mobility. They move from group to group, or form new groups, constantly. One of the secrets of their harmony, and egalitarianism, is their nomadism. Our global world is more mobile than at any time in its history, but we move among a world of strangers.

This fascinating collection of essays does not really provide us with the ideals and models of human nature the editor is hoping for, but it does provide unintended comparisons and much food for thought – given the foraging is thorough‐going.