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Title: Future Primitive Author: John Zerzan Language: en Topics: anti-civ, green, primitivist Source: Retrieved on 11th February, 2009 from http://www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm Notes: This piece is the title essay for a book by John Zerzan, published by Autonomedia. It originally appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the
present global crisis, works daily to prevent our understanding the
origins of this horrendous present. Mary Lecron Foster (1990) surely
errs on the side of understatement in allowing that anthropology is
today “in danger of serious and damaging fragmentation.” Shanks and
Tilley (1987b) voice a rare, related challenge: “The point of
archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner
in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction
in the present.” Of course, the social sciences themselves work against
the breadth and depth of vision necessary to such a reconstruction. In
terms of human origins and development, the array of splintered fields
and sub-fields — anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, ethnology,
paleobotany, ethnoanthropology, etc., etc. — mirrors the narrowing,
crippling effect that civilization has embodied from its very beginning.
Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if
approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to
proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less
orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an
increasingly dissatisfied society. Unhappiness with contemporary life
becomes distrust with the official lies that are told to legitimate that
life, and a truer picture of human development emerges. Renunciation and
subjugation in modern life have long been explained as necessary
concomitants of “human nature.” After all, our pre-civilized existence
of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent
gift that rescued us from savagery. “Cave man” and ‘Neanderthal’ are
still invoked to remind us where we would be without religion,
government, and toil.
This ideological view of our past has been radically overturned in
recent decades, through the work of academics like Richard Lee and
Marshall Sahlins. A nearly complete reversal in anthropological
orthodoxy has come about, with important implications. Now we can see
that life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of
leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and
health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million years, prior
to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses.
And lately another stunning revelation has appeared, a related one that
deepens the first and may be telling us something equally important
about who we were and what we might again become. The main line of
attack against new descriptions of gatherer-hunter life has been, though
often indirect or not explicitly stated, to characterize that life,
condescendingly, as the most an evolving species could achieve at an
early stage. Thus, the argument allows that there was a long period of
apparent grace and pacific existence, but says that humans simply didn’t
have the mental capacity to leave simple ways behind in favor of complex
social and technological achievement.
In another fundamental blow to civilization, we now learn that not only
was human life once, and for so long, a state that did not know
alienation or domination, but as the investigations since the ’80s by
archaeologists John Fowlett, Thomas Wynn, and others have shown, those
humans possessed an intelligence at least equal to our own. At a stroke,
as it were, the ‘ignorance’ thesis is disposed of, and we contemplate
where we came from in a new light.
To put the issue of mental capacity in context, it is useful to review
the various (and again, ideologically loaded) interpretations of human
origins and development. Robert Ardrey (1961, 1976) served up a
bloodthirsty, macho version of prehistory, as have to slightly lesser
degrees, Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger. Similarly, Freud and Konrad
Lorenz wrote of the innate depravity of the species, thereby providing
their contributions to hierarchy and power in the present.
Fortunately, a far more plausible outlook has emerged, one that
corresponds to the overall version of Paleolithic life in general. Food
sharing has for some time been considered an integral part of earliest
human society (e.g. Washburn and DeVore, 1961). Jane Goodall (1971) and
Richard Leakey (1978), among others, have concluded that it was the key
element in establishing our uniquely Homo development at least as early
as 2 million years ago. This emphasis, carried forward since the early
’70s by Linton, Zihlman, Tanner, and Isaac, has become ascendant. One of
the telling arguments in favor of the cooperation thesis, as against
that of generalized violence and male domination, involves a
diminishing, during early evolution, of the difference in size and
strength between males and females. Sexual dimorphism, as it is called,
was originally very pronounced, including such features as prominent
canines or “fighting teeth” in males and much smaller canines for the
female. The disappearance of large male canines strongly suggests that
the female of the species exercised a selection for sociable, sharing
males. Most apes today have significantly longer and larger canines,
male to female, in the absence of this female choice capacity (Zihlman
1981, Tanner 1981).
Division of labor between the sexes is another key area in human
beginnings, a condition once simply taken for granted and expressed by
the term hunter-gatherer. Now it is widely accepted that gathering of
plant foods, once thought to be the exclusive domain of women and of
secondary importance to hunting by males, constituted the main food
source (Johansen and Shreeve 1989). Since females were not significantly
dependent on males for food (Hamilton 1984), it seems likely that rather
than division of labor, flexibility and joint activity would have been
central (Bender 1989). As Zihlman (1981) points out, an overall
behavioral flexibility may have been the primary ingredient in early
human existence. Joan Gero (1991) has demonstrated that stone tools were
as likely to have been made by women as by men, and indeed Poirier
(1987) reminds us that there is “no archaeological evidence supporting
the contention that early humans exhibited a sexual division of labor.”
It is unlikely that food collecting involved much, if any division of
labor (Slocum 1975) and probably that sexual specialization came quite
late in human evolution (Zihlman 1981, Crader and Isaac 1981).
So if the adaptation that began our species centered on gathering, when
did hunting come in? Binford (1984) has argued that there is no
indication of use of animal products (i.e. evidence of butchery
practices) until the appearance, relatively quite recent, of
anatomically modern humans. Electron microscope studies of fossil teeth
found in East Africa (Walker 1984) suggest a diet composed primarily of
fruit, while a similar examination of stone tools from a 1.5
million-year-old site at Koobi Fora in Kenya (Keeley and Toth 1981)
shows that they were used on plant materials. The small amount of meat
in the early Paleolithic diet was probably scavenged, rather than hunted
(Ehrenberg 1989b).
The ‘natural’ condition of the species was evidently a diet made up
largely of vegetables rich in fiber, as opposed to the modern high fat
and animal protein diet with its attendant chronic disorders (Mendeloff
1977). Though our early forbears employed their “detailed knowledge of
the environment and cognitive mapping” (Zihlman 1981) in the service of
a plant-gathering subsistence, the archaeological evidence for hunting
appears to slowly increase with time (Hodder 1991).
Much evidence, however, has overturned assumptions as to widespread
prehistoric hunting. Collections of bones seen earlier as evidence of
large kills of mammals, for example, have turned out to be, upon closer
examination, the results of movement by flowing water or caches by
animals. Lewis Binford’s “Were There Elephant Hunters at Tooralba?”
(1989) is a good instance of such a closer look, in which he doubts
there was significant hunting until 200,000 years ago or sooner.
Adrienne Zihlman (1981) has concluded that “hunting arose relatively
late in evolution,” and “may not extend beyond the last one hundred
thousand years.” And there are many (e.g. Straus 1986, Trinkhaus 1986)
who do not see evidence for serious hunting of large mammals until even
later, viz. the later Upper Paleolithic, just before the emergence of
agriculture.
The oldest known surviving artifacts are stone tools from Hadar in
eastern Africa. With more refined dating methods, they may prove to be
3.1 million years old (Klein 1989). Perhaps the main reason these may be
classified as representing human effort is that they involve the
crafting of one tool by using another, a uniquely human attribute so far
as we know. Homo habilis, or “handy man,” designates what has been
thought of as the first known human species, its name reflecting
association with the earliest stone tools (Coppens 1989). Basic wooden
and bone implements, though more perishable and thus scantily
represented in the archaeological record, were also used by Homo habilis
as part of a “remarkably simple and effective” adaptation in Africa and
Asia (Fagan 1990). Our ancestors at this stage had smaller brains and
bodies than we do, but Poirier (1987) notes that “their postcranial
anatomy was rather like modern humans,” and Holloway (1972, 1974) allows
that his studies of cranial endocasts from this period indicate a
bascally modern brain organization. Similarly, tools older than 2
million years have been found to exhibit a consistent right-handed
orientation in the ways stone has been flaked off in their formation.
Right-handedness as a tendency is correlated in moderns with such
distinctly human features as pronounced lateralization of the brain and
marked functional separation of the cerebral hemispheres (Holloway
1981a). Klein (1989) concludes that “basic human cognitive and
communicational abilities are almost certainly implied.”
Homo erectus is the other main predecessor to Homo sapiens, according to
longstanding usage, appearing about 1.75 million years ago as humans
moved out of forests into drier, more open African grasslands. Although
brain size alone does not necessarily correlate with mental capacity,
the cranial capacity of Homo erectus overlaps with that of moderns such
that this species “must have been capable of many of the same behaviors”
(Ciochon, Olsen and Tames 1990). As Johanson and Edey (1981) put it, “If
the largest-brained erectus were to be rated against the
smallest-brained sapiens — all their other characteristics ignored —
their species names would have to be reversed.” Homo Neanderthalus,
which immediately preceded us, possessed brains somewhat larger than our
own (Delson 1985, Holloway 1985, Donald 1991). Though of course the
much-maligned Neanderthal has been pictured as a primitive, brutish
creature — in keeping with the prevailing Hobbesian ideology — despite
manifest intelligence as well as enormous physical strength (Shreeve
1991).
Recently, however, the whole species framework has become a doubtful
proposition (Day 1987, Rightmire 1990). Attention has been drawn to the
fact that fossil specimens from various Homo species “all show
intermediate morphological traits,” leading to suspicion of an arbitrary
division of humanity into separate taxa (Gingerich 1979, Tobias 1982).
Fagan (1989), for example, tells us that “it is very hard to draw a
clear taxonomic boundary between Homo erectus and archaic Homo sapiens
on the one hand, and between archaic and anatomically modern Homo
sapiens on the other.” Likewise, Foley (1989): “the anatomical
distinctions between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are not great.”
Jelinek (1978) flatly declares that “there is no good reason, anatomical
or cultural” for separating erectus and sapiens into two species, and
has concluded (1980a) that people from at least the Middle Paleolithic
onward “may be viewed as Homo sapiens” (as does Hublin 1986). The
tremendous upward revision of early intelligence, discussed below, must
be seen as connected to the present confusion over species, as the
once-prevailing overall evolutionary model gives way.
But the controversy over species categorization is only interesting in
the context of how our earliest forbears lived. Despite the minimal
nature of what could be expected to survive so many millennia, we can
glimpse some of the texture of that life, with its often elegant,
pre-division of labor approaches. The “tool kit” from the Olduvai Gorge
area made famous by the Leakeys contains “at least six clearly
recognizable tool types” dating from about 1.7 million years ago (M.
Leakey, 1978). There soon appeared the Acheulian handaxe, with its
symmetrical beauty, in use for about a million years. Teardrop-shaped,
and possessed of a remarkable balance, it exudes grace and utility from
an era much prior to symbolization. Isaac (1986) noted that “the basic
needs for sharp edges that humans have can be met from the varied range
of forms generated from ‘Oldowan’ patterns of stone flaking,” wondering
how it came to be thought that “more complex equals better adapted.” In
this distant early time, according to cut-marks found on surviving
bones, humans were using scavenged animal sinews and skins for such
things as cord, bags, and rugs (Gowlett 1984). Further evidence suggests
furs for cave wall coverings and seats, and seaweed beds for sleeping
(Butzer 1970).
The use of fire goes back almost 2 million years (Kempe 1988) and might
have appeared even earlier but for the tropical conditions of humanity’s
original African homeland, as Poirier (1987) implies. Perfected
fire-making included the firing of caves to eliminate insects and heated
pebble floors (Perles 1975, Lumley 1976), amenities that show up very
early in the Paleolithic.
As John Gowlett (1986) notes, there are still some archaeologists who
consider anything earlier than Homo sapiens, a mere 30,000 years ago, as
greatly more primitive than we “fully human” types. But along with the
documentation, referred to above, of fundamentally ‘modern’ brain
anatomy even in early humans, this minority must now contend with recent
work depicting complete human intelligence as present virtually with the
birth of the Homo species. Thomas Wynn (1985) judged manufacture of the
Acheulian handaxe to have required “a stage of intelligence that is
typical of fully modern adults.” Gowlett, like Wynn, examines the
required “operational thinking” involved in the right hammer, the right
force and the right striking angle, in an ordered sequence and with
flexibility needed for modifying the procedure. He contends that
manipulation, concentration, visualization of form in three dimensions,
and planning were needed, and that these requirements “were the common
property of early human beings as much as two million years ago, and
this,” he adds, “is hard knowledge, not speculation.”
During the vast time-span of the Paleolithic, there were remarkably few
changes in technology (Rolland 1990). Innovation, “over 2 1/2 million
years measured in stone tool development was practically nil,” according
to Gerhard Kraus (1990). Seen in the light of what we now know of
prehistoric intelligence, such ‘stagnation’ is especially vexing to many
social scientists. “It is difficult to comprehend such slow
development,” in the judgment of Wymer (1989). It strikes me as very
plausible that intelligence, informed by the success and satisfaction of
a gatherer-hunter existence, is the very reason for the pronounced
absence of ‘progress’. Division of labor, domestication, symbolic
culture—these were evidently refused until very recently.
Contemporary thought, in its postmodern incarnation, would like to rule
out the reality of a divide between nature and culture; given the
abilities present among people before civilization, however, it may be
more accurate to say that basically, they long chose nature over
culture. It is also popular to see almost every human act or object as
symbolic (e.g. Botscharow 1989), a position which is, generally
speaking, part of the denial of a nature versus culture distinction. But
it is culture as the manipulation of basic symbolic forms that is
involved here. It also seems clear that reified time, language (written,
certainly, and probably spoken language for all or most of this period),
number, and art had no place, despite an intelligence fully capable of
them.
I would like to interject, in passing, my agreement with Goldschmidt
(1990) that “the hidden dimension in the construction of the symbolic
world is time.” And as Norman O. Brown put it, “life not repressed is
not in historical time,” which I take as a reminder that time as a
materiality is not inherent in reality, but a cultural imposition,
perhaps the first cultural imposition, on it. As this elemental
dimension of symbolic culture progresses, so does, by equal steps,
alienation from the natural.
Cohen (1974) has discussed symbols as “essential for the development and
maintenance of social order.” Which implies—as does, more forcefully, a
great deal of positive evidence—that before the emergence of symbols
there was no condition of disorder requiring them. In a similar vein,
Levi-Strauss (1953) pointed out that “mythical thought always progresses
from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution.” So whence
the absence of order, the conflicts or “oppositions?” The literature on
the Paleolithic contains almost nothing that deals with this essential
question, among thousands of monographs on specific features. A
reasonable hypothesis, in my opinion, is that division of labor,
unnoticed because of its glacially slow pace, and not sufficiently
understood because of its newness, began to cause small fissures in the
human community and unhealthy practices vis-a-vis nature. In the later
Upper Paleolithic, “15,000 years ago, we begin to observe specialized
collection of plants in the Middle East, and specialized hunting,”
observed Gowlett (1984). The sudden appearance of symbolic activities
(e.g. ritual and art) in the Upper Paleolithic has definitely seemed to
archaeologists one of prehistory’s “big surprises” (Binford 1972b),
given the absence of such behaviors in the Middle Paleolithic (Foster
1990, Kozlowski 1990). But signs of division of labor and specialization
were making their presence felt as a breakdown of wholeness and natural
order, a lack that needed redressing. What is surprising is that this
transition to civilization can still be seen as benign. Foster (1990)
seems to celebrate it by concluding that the “symbolic mode...has proved
extraordinarily adaptive, else why has Homo sapiens become material
master of the world?” He is certainly correct, as he is to recognize
“the manipulation of symbols [to be] the very stuff of culture,” but he
appears oblivious to the fact that this successful adaptation has
brought alienation and destruction of nature along to their present
horrifying prominence.
It is reasonable to assume that the symbolic world originated in the
formulation of language, which somehow appeared from a “matrix of
extensive nonverbal communication” (Tanner and Zihlman 1976) and
face-to-face contact. There is no agreement as to when language began,
but no evidence exists of speech before the cultural ‘explosion’ of the
later Upper Paleolithic (Dibble 1984, 1989). It seems to have acted as
an “inhibiting agent,” a way of bringing life under “greater control”
(Mumford 1972), stemming the flood of images and sensations to which the
pre-modern individual was open. In this sense it would have likely
marked an early turning away from a life of openness and communion with
nature, toward one more oriented to the overlordship and domestication
that followed symbolic culture’s inauguration. It is probably a mistake,
by the way, to assume that thought is advanced (if there were such a
thing as ‘neutral’ thought, whose advance could be universally
appreciated) because we actually think in language; there is no
conclusive evidence that we must do so (Allport 1983). There are many
cases (Lecours and Joanette 1980, Levine et al. 1982), involving stroke
and like impairments, of patients who have lost speech, including the
ability to talk silently to themselves, who were fully capable of
coherent thought of all kinds. These data strongly suggest that “human
intellectual skill is uniquely powerful, even in the absence of
language” (Donald 1991).
In terms of symbolization in action, Goldschmidt (1990) seems correct in
judging that “the Upper Paleolithic invention of ritual may well have
been the keystone in the structure of culture that gave it its great
impetus for expansion.” Ritual has played a number of pivotal roles in
what Hodder (1990) termed “the relentless unfolding of symbolic and
social structures” accompanying the arrival of cultural mediation. It
was as a means of achieving and consolidating social cohesion that
ritual was essential (Johnson 1982, Conkey 1985); totemic rituals, for
example, reinforce clan unity.
The start of an appreciation of domestication, or taming of nature, is
seen in a cultural ordering of the wild, through ritual. Evidently, the
female as a cultural category, viz. seen as wild or dangerous, dates
from this period. The ritual “Venus” figurines appear as of 25,000 years
ago, and seem to be an example of earliest symbolic likeness of women
for the purpose of representation and control (Hodder 1990). Even more
concretely, subjugation of the wild occurs at this time in the first
systematic hunting of large mammals; ritual was an integral part of this
activity (Hammond 1974, Frison 1986).
Ritual, as shamanic practice, may also be considered as a regression
from that state in which all shared a consciousness we would now
classify as extrasensory (Leonard 1972). When specialists alone claim
access to such perceptual heights as may have once been communal,
further backward moves in division of labor are facilitated or enhanced.
The way back to bliss through ritual is a virtually universal mythic
theme, promising the dissolution of measurable time, among other joys.
This theme of ritual points to an absence that it falsely claims to
fill, as does symbolic culture in general.
Ritual as a means of organizing emotions, a method of cultural direction
and restraint, introduces art, a facet of ritual expressiveness (Bender
1989). “There can be little doubt,” to Gans (1985), “that the various
forms of secular art derive originally from ritual.” We can detect the
beginning of an unease, a feeling that an earlier, direct authenticity
is departing. La Barre (1972), I believe, is correct in judging that
“art and religion alike arise from unsatisfied desire.” At first, more
abstractly as language, then more purposively as ritual and art, culture
steps in to deal artificially with spiritual and social anxiety.
Ritual and magic must have dominated early (Upper Paleolithic) art and
were probably essential, along with an increasing division of labor, for
the coordination and direction of community (Wymer 1981). Similarly,
Pfeiffer (1982) has depicted the famous Upper Paleolithic European cave
paintings as the original form of initiating youth into now complex
social systems; as necessary for order and discipline (see also Gamble
1982, Jochim 1983). And art may have contributed to the control of
nature, as part of development of the earliest territorialism, for
example (Straus 1990).
The emergence of symbolic culture, with its inherent will to manipulate
and control, soon opened the door to domestication of nature. After two
million years of human life within the bounds of nature, in balance with
other wild species, agriculture changed our lifestyle, our way of
adapting, in an unprecedented way. Never before has such a radical
change occurred in a species so utterly and so swiftly (Pfeiffer 1977).
Self-domestication through language, ritual, and art inspired the taming
of plants and animals that followed. Appearing only 10,000 years ago,
farming quickly triumphed; for control, by its very nature, invites
intensification. Once the will to production broke through, it became
more productive the more efficiently it was exercised, and hence more
ascendant and adaptive.
Agriculture enables greatly increased division of labor, establishes the
material foundations of social hierarchy, and initiates environmental
destruction. Priests, kings, drudgery, sexual inequality, warfare are a
few of its fairly immediate specific consequences (Ehrenberg 1986b,
Wymer 1981, Festinger 1983). Whereas Paleolithic peoples enjoyed a
highly varied diet, using several thousand species of plants for food,
with farming these sources were vastly reduced (White 1959, Gouldie
1986).
Given the intelligence and the very great practical knowledge of Stone
Age humanity, the question has often been asked, “Why didn’t agriculture
begin, at say, 1,000,000 B.C. rather than about 8,000 B.C.?” I have
provided a brief answer in terms of slowly accelerating alienation in
the form of division of labor and symbolization, but given how negative
the results were, it is still a bewildering phenomenon. Thus, as Binford
(1968) put it, “The question to be asked is not why agriculture...was
not developed everywhere, but why it was developed at all.” The end of
gatherer-hunter life brought a decline in size, stature, and skeletal
robusticity (Cohen and Armelagos 1981, Harris and Ross 1981), and
introduced tooth decay, nutritional deficiencies, and most infectious
diseases (Larsen 1982, Buikstra 1976a, Cohen 1981). “Taken as a
whole...an overall decline in the quality—and probably the length—of
human life,” concluded Cohen and Armelagos (1981).
Another outcome was the invention of number, unnecessary before the
ownership of crops, animals, and land that is one of agriculture’s
hallmarks. The development of number further impelled the urge to treat
nature as something to be dominated. Writing was also required by
domestication, for the earliest business transactions and political
administration (Larsen 1988). Levi-Strauss has argued persuasively that
the primary function of written communication was to facilitate
exploitation and subjugation (1955); cities and empires, for example,
would be impossible without it. Here we see clearly the joining of the
logic of symbolization and the growth of capital.
Conformity, repetition, and regularity were the keys to civilization
upon its triumph, replacing the spontaneity, enchantment, and discovery
of the pre-agricultural human state that survived so very long. Clark
(1979) cites a gatherer-hunter “amplitude of leisure,” deciding “it was
this and the pleasurable way of life that went with it, rather than
penury and a day-long grind, that explains why social life remained so
static.” One of the most enduring and widespread myths is that there was
once a Golden Age, characterized by peace and innocence, and that
something happened to destroy this idyll and consign us to misery and
suffering. Eden, or whatever name it goes by, was the home of our
primeval forager ancestors, and expresses the yearning of disillusioned
tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.
The once rich environs people inhabited prior to domestication and
agriculture are now virtually nonexistent. For the few remaining
foragers there exist only the most marginal lands, those isolated places
as yet unwanted by agriculture. And surviving gatherer-hunters, who have
somehow managed to evade civilization’s tremendous pressures to turn
them into slaves (i.e. farmers, political subjects, wage laborers), have
all been influenced by contact with outside peoples (Lee 1976, Mithen
1990).
Duffy (1984) points out that the present day gatherer-hunters he
studied, the Mbuti Pygmies of central Africa, have been acculturated by
surrounding villager-agriculturalists for hundreds of years, and to some
extent, by generations of contact with government authorities and
missionaries. And yet it seems that an impulse toward authentic life can
survive down through the ages: “Try to imagine,” he counsels, “a way of
life where land, shelter, and food are free, and where there are no
leaders, bosses, politics, organized crime, taxes, or laws. Add to this
the benefits of being part of a society where everything is shared,
where there are no rich people and no poor people, and where happiness
does not mean the accumulation of material possessions.” The Mbuti have
never domesticated animals or planted crops.
Among the members of non-agriculturalist bands resides a highly sane
combination of little work and material abundance. Bodley (1976)
discovered that the San (aka Bushmen) of the harsh Kalahari Desert of
southern Africa work fewer hours, and fewer of their number work, than
do the neighboring cultivators. In times of drought, moreover, it has
been the San to whom the farmers have turned for their survival (Lee
1968). They spend “strikingly little time laboring and much time at rest
and leisure,” according to Tanaka (1980), while others (e.g. Marshall
1976, Guenther 1976) have commented on San vitality and freedom compared
with sedentary farmers, their relatively secure and easygoing life.
Flood (1983) noted that to Australian aborigines “the labour involved in
tilling and planting outweighed the possible advantages.” Speaking more
generally, Tanaka (1976) has pointed to the abundant and stable plant
foods in the society of early humanity, just as “they exist in every
modern gatherer society.” Likewise, Festinger (1983) referred to
Paleolithic access to “considerable food without a great deal of
effort,” adding that “contemporary groups that still live on hunting and
gathering do very well, even though they have been pushed into very
marginal habitats.”
As Hole and Flannery (1963) summarized: “No group on earth has more
leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on
games, conversation and relaxing.” They have much more free time, adds
Binford (1968), “than do modern industrial or farm workers, or even
professors of archaeology.”
The non-domesticated know that, as Vaneigem (1975) put it, only the
present can be total. This by itself means that they live life with
incomparably greater immediacy, density and passion than we do. It has
been said that some revolutionary days are worth centuries; until then
“We look before and after,” as Shelley wrote, “And sigh for what is
not....”
The Mbuti believe (Turnbull 1976) that “by a correct fulfillment of the
present, the past and the future will take care of themselves.”
Primitive peoples do not live through memories, and generally have no
interest in birthdays or measuring their ages (Cipriani 1966). As for
the future, they have little desire to control what does not yet exist,
just as they have little desire to control nature. Their
moment-by-moment joining with the flux and flow of the natural world
does not preclude an awareness of the seasons, but this does not
constitute an alienated time consciousness that robs them of the
present.
Though contemporary gatherer-hunters eat more meat than their
pre-historic forbears, vegetable foods still constitute the mainstay of
their diet in tropical and subtropical regions (Lee 1968a, Yellen and
Lee 1976). Both the Kalahari San and the Hazda of East Africa, where
game is more abundant than in the Kalahari, rely on gathering for 80
percent of their sustenance (Tanaka 1980). The !Kung branch of the San
search for more than a hundred different kinds of plants (Thomas 1968)
and exhibit no nutritional deficiency (Truswell and Hansen 1976). This
is similar to the healthful, varied diet of Australian foragers (Fisher
1982, Flood 1983). The overall diet of gatherers is better than that of
cultivators, starvation is very rare, and their health status generally
superior, with much less chronic disease (Lee and Devore 1968a, Ackerman
1990).
Lauren van der Post (1958) expressed wonder at the exuberant San laugh,
which rises “sheer from the stomach, a laugh you never hear among
civilized people.” He found this emblematic of a great vigor and clarity
of senses that yet manages to withstand and elude the onslaught of
civilization. Truswell and Hansen (1976) may have encountered it in the
person of a San who had survived an unarmed fight with a leopard;
although injured, he had killed the animal with his bare hands.
The Andaman Islanders, west of Thailand, have no leaders, no idea of
symbolic representation, and no domesticated animals. There is also an
absence of aggression, violence, and disease; wounds heal surprisingly
quickly, and their sight and hearing are particularly acute. They are
said to have declined since European intrusion in the mid-19^(th)
century, but exhibit other such remarkable physical traits as a natural
immunity to malaria, skin with sufficient elasticity to rule out
post-childbirth stretch marks and the wrinkling we associate with
ageing, and an ‘unbelievable’ strength of teeth: Cipriani (1966)
reported seeing children of 10 to 15 years crush nails with them. He
also testified to the Andamese practice of collecting honey with no
protective clothing at all; “yet they are never stung, and watching them
one felt in the presence of some age-old mystery, lost by the civilized
world.”
DeVries (1952) has cited a wide range of contrasts by which the superior
health of gatherer-hunters can be established, including an absence of
degenerative diseases and mental disabilities, and childbirth without
difficulty or pain. He also points out that this begins to erode from
the moment of contact with civilization.
Relatedly, there is a great deal of evidence not only for physical and
emotional vigor among primitives but also concerning their heightened
sensory abilities. Darwin described people at the southernmost tip of
South America who went about almost naked in frigid conditions, while
Peasley (1983) observed Aborigines who were renowned for their ability
to live through bitterly cold desert nights “without any form of
clothing.” Levi-Strauss (1979) was astounded to learn of a particular
[South American] tribe which was able to “see the planet Venus in full
daylight,” a feat comparable to that of the North African Dogon who
consider Sirius B the most important star; somehow aware, without
instruments, of a star that can only be found with the most powerful of
telescopes (Temple 1976). In this vein, Boyden (1970) recounted the
Bushman ability to see four of the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye.
In The Harmless People (1959), Marshall told how one Bushman walked
unerringly to a spot in a vast plain, “with no bush or tree to mark
place,” and pointed out a blade of grass with an almost invisible
filament of vine around it. He had encountered it months before in the
rainy season when it was green. Now, in parched weather, he dug there to
expose a succulent root and quenched his thirst. Also in the Kalahari
Desert, van der Post (1958) meditated upon San/Bushman communion with
nature, a level of experience that “could almost be called mystical. For
instance, they seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an
elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse,
mantis, baobab tree, yellow-crested cobra or starry-eyed amaryllis, to
mention only a few of the brilliant multitudes through which they
moved.” It seems almost pedestrian to add that gatherer-hunters have
often been remarked to possess tracking skills that virtually defy
rational explanation (e.g. Lee 1979).
Rohrlich-Leavitt (1976) noted, “The data show that gatherer-hunters are
generally non-territorial and bilocal; reject group aggression and
competition; share their resources freely; value egalitarianism and
personal autonomy in the context of group cooperation; and are indulgent
and loving with children.” Dozens of studies stress communal sharing and
egalitarianism as perhaps the defining traits of such groups (e.g.
Marshall 1961 and 1976, Sahlins 1968, Pilbeam 1972, Damas 1972, Diamond
1974, Lafitau 1974, Tanaka 1976 and 1980, Wiessner 1977, Morris 1982,
Riches 1982, Smith 1988, Mithen 1990). Lee (1982) referred to the
“universality among foragers” of sharing, while Marshall’s classic 1961
work spoke of the “ethic of generosity and humility” informing a
“strongly egalitarian” gatherer-hunter orientation. Tanaka provides a
typical example: “The most admired character trait is generosity, and
the most despised and disliked are stinginess and selfishness.”
Baer (1986) listed “egalitarianism, democracy, personalism,
individuation, nurturance” as key virtues of the non-civilized, and Lee
(1988) cited “an absolute aversion to rank distinctions” among “simple
foraging peoples around the world.” Leacock and Lee (1982) specified
that “any assumption of authority” within the group “leads to ridicule
or anger among the !Kung, as has been recorded for the Mbuti (Turnbull
1962), the Hazda (Woodburn 1980) and the Montagnais-Naskapi (Thwaites
1906), among others.”
“Not even the father of an extended family can tell his sons and
daughters what to do. Most people appear to operate on their own
internal schedules,” reported Lee (1972) of the !Kung of Botswana.
Ingold (1987) judged that “in most hunting and gathering societies, a
supreme value is placed upon the principle of individual autonomy,”
similar to Wilson’s finding (1988) of “an ethic of independence” that is
“common to the focused open societies.” The esteemed field
anthropologist Radin (1953) went so far as to say: “Free scope is
allowed for every conceivable kind of personality outlet or expression
in primitive society. No moral judgment is passed on any aspect of human
personality as such.”
Turnbull (1976) looked on the structure of Mbuti social life as “an
apparent vacuum, a lack of internal system that is almost anarchical.”
According to Duffy (1984), “the Mbuti are naturally acephalous — they do
not have leaders or rulers, and decisions concerning the band are made
by consensus.” There is an enormous qualitative difference between
foragers and farmers in this regard, as in so many others. For instance,
agricultural Bantu tribes (e.g. the Saga) surround the San, and are
organized by kingship, hierarchy and work; the San exhibit
egalitarianism, autonomy, and sharing. Domestication is the principle
which accounts for this drastic distinction.
Domination within a society is not unrelated to domination of nature. In
gatherer-hunter societies, on the other hand, no strict hierarchy exists
between the human and the non-human species (Noske 1989), and relations
among foragers are likewise non-hierarchical. The non-domesticated
typically view the animals they hunt as equals; this essentially
egalitarian relationship is ended by the advent of domestication.
When progressive estrangement from nature became outright social control
(agriculture), more than just social attitudes changed. Descriptions by
sailors and explorers who arrived in “newly discovered” regions tell how
wild mammals and birds originally showed no fear at all of the human
invaders (Brock 1981). A few contemporary gatherers practiced no hunting
before outside contact, but while the majority certainly do hunt, “it is
not normally an aggressive act” (Rohrlich-Leavitt 1976). Turnbull (1965)
observed Mbuti hunting as quite without any aggressive spirit, even
carried out with a sort of regret. Hewitt (1986) reported a sympathy
bond between hunter and hunted among the Xan Bushmen he encountered in
the 19^(th) century.
As regards violence among gatherer-hunters, Lee (1988) found that “the
!Kung hate fighting, and think anybody who fought would be stupid.” The
Mbuti, by Duffy’s account (1984), “look on any form of violence between
one person and another with great abhorrence and distaste, and never
represent it in their dancing or playacting.” Homicide and suicide,
concluded Bodley (1976), are both “decidedly uncommon” among undisturbed
gatherer-hunters. The ‘warlike’ nature of Native American peoples was
often fabricated to add legitimacy to European aims of conquest (Kroeber
1961); the foraging Comanche maintained their non-violent ways for
centuries before the European invasion, becoming violent only upon
contact with marauding civilization (Fried 1973).
The development of symbolic culture, which rapidly led to agriculture,
is linked through ritual to alienated social life among extant foraging
groups. Bloch (1977) found a correlation between levels of ritual and
hierarchy. Put negatively, Woodburn (1968) could see the connection
between an absence of ritual and the absence of specialized roles and
hierarchy among the Hazda of Tanzania. Turner’s study of the west
African Ndembu (1957) revealed a profusion of ritual structures and
ceremonies intended to redress the conflicts arising from the breakdown
of an earlier, more seamless society. These ceremonies and structures
function in a politically integrative way. Ritual is a repetitive
activity for which outcomes and responses are essentially assured by
social contract; it conveys the message that symbolic practice, via
group membership and social rules, provides control (Cohen 1985). Ritual
fosters the concept of control or domination, and has been seen to tend
toward leadership roles (Hitchcock 1982) and centralized political
structures (Lourandos 1985). A monopoly of ceremonial institutions
clearly extends the concept of authority (Bender 1978), and may itself
be the original formal authority.
Among agricultural tribes of New Guinea, leadership and the inequality
it implies are based upon participation in hierarchies of ritual
initiation or upon shamanistic spirit-mediumship (Kelly 1977, Modjeska
1982). In the role of shamans we see a concrete practice of ritual as it
contributes to domination in human society.
Radin (1937) discussed “the same marked tendency” among Asian and North
American tribal peoples for shamans or medicine men “to organize and
develop the theory that they alone are in communication with the
supernatural.” This exclusive access seems to empower them at the
expense of the rest; Lommel (1967) saw “an increase in the shaman’s
psychic potency...counterbalanced by a weakening of potency in other
members of the group.” This practice has fairly obvious implications for
power relationships in other areas of life, and contrasts with earlier
periods devoid of religious leadership.
The Batuque of Brazil are host to shamans who each claim control over
certain spirits and attempt to sell supernatural services to clients,
rather like priests of competing sects (S. Leacock 1988). Specialists of
this type in “magically controlling nature...would naturally come to
control men, too,” in the opinion of Muller (1961). In fact, the shaman
is often the most powerful individual in pre-agricultural societies
(e.g. Sheehan 1985); he is in a position to institute change.
Johannessen (1987) offers the thesis that resistance to the innovation
of planting was overcome by the influence of shamans, among the Indians
of the American Southwest, for instance. Similarly, Marquardt (1985) has
suggested that ritual authority structures have played an important role
in the initiation and organization of production in North America.
Another student of American groups (Ingold 1987) saw an important
connection between shamans’ role in mastering wildness in nature and an
emerging subordination of women.
Berndt (1974a) has discussed the importance among Aborigines of ritual
sexual division of labor in the development of negative sex roles, while
Randolph (1988) comes straight to the point: “Ritual activity is needed
to create ‘proper’ men and women.” There is “no reason in nature” for
gender divisions, argues Bender (1989). “They have to be created by
proscription and taboo, they have to be ‘naturalized’ through ideology
and ritual.”
But gatherer-hunter societies, by their very nature, deny ritual its
potential to domesticate women. The structure (non-structure?) of
egalitarian bands, even those most oriented toward hunting, includes a
guarantee of autonomy to both sexes. This guarantee is the fact that the
materials of subsistence are equally available to women and men and
that, further, the success of the band is dependent on cooperation based
on that autonomy (Leacock 1978, Friedl 1975). The spheres of the sexes
are often somewhat separate, but inasmuch as the contribution of women
is generally at least equal to that of men, social equality of the sexes
is “a key feature of forager societies” (Ehrenberg 1989b). Many
anthropologists, in fact, have found the status of women in forager
groups to be higher than in any other type of society (e.g. Fluer-Lobban
1979, Rohrlich-Leavitt, Sykes and Weatherford 1975, Leacock 1978).
In all major decisions, observed Turnbull (1970) of the Mbuti, “men and
women have equal say, hunting and gathering being equally important.” He
made it clear (1981) that there is sexual differentiation — probably a
good deal more than was the case with their distant forbears — “but
without any sense of superordination or subordination.” Men actually
work more hours than women among the !Kung, according to Post and Taylor
(1984).
It should be added, in terms of the division of labor common among
contemporary gatherer-hunters, that this differentiation of roles is by
no means universal. Nor was it when the Roman historian Tacitus wrote,
of the Fenni of the Baltic region, that “the women support themselves by
hunting, exactly like the men...and count their lot happier than that of
others who groan over field labor.” Or when Procopius found, in the
6^(th) century A.D., that the Serithifinni of what is now Finland
“neither till the land themselves, nor do their women work it for them,
but the women regularly join the men in hunting.”
The Tiwi women of Melville Island regularly hunt (Martin and Voorhies
1975) as do the Agta women in the Philippines (Estioko-Griffen and
Griffen 1981). In Mbuti society, “there is little specialization
according to sex. Even the hunt is a joint effort,” reports Turnbull
(1962), and Cotlow (1971) testifies that “among the traditional Eskimos
it is (or was) a cooperative enterprise for the whole family group.”
Darwin (1871) found another aspect of sexual equality: “...in utterly
barbarous tribes the women have more power in choosing, rejecting, and
tempting their lovers, or of afterwards changing their husbands, than
might have been expected.” The !Kung Bushmen and Mbuti exemplify this
female autonomy, as reported by Marshall (1959) and Thomas (1965);
“Women apparently leave a man whenever they are unhappy with their
marriage,” concluded Begler (1978). Marshall (1970) also found that rape
was extremely rare or absent among the !Kung.
An intriguing phenomenon concerning gatherer-hunter women is their
ability to prevent pregnancy in the absence of any contraception
(Silberbauer 1981). Many hypotheses have been put forth and debunked,
e.g. conception somehow related to levels of body fat (Frisch 1974,
Leibowitz 1986). What seems a very plausible explanation is based on the
fact that undomesticated people are very much more in tune with their
physical selves. Foraging women’s senses and processes are not alienated
from themselves or dulled; control over childbearing is probably less
than mysterious to those whose bodies are not foreign objects to be
acted upon.
The Pygmies of Zaire celebrate the first menstrual period of every girl
with a great festival of gratitude and rejoicing (Turnbull 1962). The
young woman feels pride and pleasure, and the entire band expresses its
happiness. Among agricultural villagers, however, a menstruating woman
is regarded as unclean and dangerous, to be quarantined by taboo (Duffy
1984). The relaxed, egalitarian relationship between San men and women,
with its flexibility of roles and mutual respect impressed Draper (1971,
1972, 1975); a relationship, she made clear, that endures as long as
they remain gatherer-hunters and no longer.
Duffy (1984) found that each child in an Mbuti camp calls every man
father and every woman mother. Forager children receive far more care,
time, and attention than do those in civilization’s isolated nuclear
families. Post and Taylor (1984) described the “almost permanent
contact” with their mothers and other adults that Bushman children
enjoy. !Kung infants studied by Ainsworth (1967) showed marked precocity
of early cognitive and motor skills development. This was attributed
both to the exercise and stimulation produced by unrestricted freedom of
movement, and to the high degree of physical warmth and closeness
between !Kung parents and children (see also Konner 1976).
Draper (1976) could see that “competitiveness in games is almost
entirely lacking among the !Kung,” as Shostack (1976) observed ”!Kung
boys and girls playing together and sharing most games.” She also found
that children are not prevented from experimental sex play, consonant
with the freedom of older Mbuti youth to “indulge in premarital sex with
enthusiasm and delight” (Turnbull 1981). The Zuni “have no sense of
sin,” Ruth Benedict (1946) wrote in a related vein. “Chastity as a way
of life is regarded with great disfavor...Pleasant relations between the
sexes are merely one aspect of pleasant relations with human
beings...Sex is an incident in a happy life.”
Coontz and Henderson (1986) point to a growing body of evidence in
support of the proposition that relations between the sexes are most
egalitarian in the simplest foraging societies. Women play an essential
role in traditional agriculture, but receive no corresponding status for
their contribution, unlike the case of gatherer-hunter society
(Chevillard and Leconte 1986, Whyte 1978). As with plants and animals,
so are women subject to domestication with the coming of agriculture.
Culture, securing its foundations with the new order, requires the firm
subjugation of instinct, freedom, and sexuality. All disorder must be
banished, the elemental and spontaneous taken firmly in hand. Women’s
creativity and their very being as sexual persons are pressured to give
way to the role, expressed in all peasant religions, of Great Mother,
that is, fecund breeder of men and food.
The men of the South American Munduruc, a farming tribe, refer to plants
and sex in the same phrase about subduing women: “We tame them with the
banana” (Murphy and Murphy 1985). Simone de Beauvoir (1949) recognized
in the equation of the plow and the phallus a symbol of male authority
over women. Among the Amazonian Jivaro, another agricultural group,
women are beasts of burden and the personal property of men (Harner
1972); the “abduction of adult women is a prominent part of much
warfare” by these lowland South American tribes (Ferguson 1988).
Brutalization and isolation of women seem to be functions of
agricultural societies (Gregor 1988), and the female continues to
perform most or even all of the work in such groups (Morgan 1985).
Head-hunting is practiced by the above-mentioned groups, as part of
endemic warfare over coveted agricultural land (Lathrap 1970);
head-hunting and near-constant warring is also witnessed among the
farming tribes of Highlands New Guinea (Watson 1970). Lenski and
Lenski’s 1974 researches concluded that warfare is rare among foragers
but becomes extremely common with agrarian societies. As Wilson (1988)
put it succinctly, “Revenge, feuds, rioting, warfare and battle seem to
emerge among, and to be typical of, domesticated peoples.”
Tribal conflicts, Godelier (1977) argues, are “explainable primarily by
reference to colonial domination” and should not be seen as having an
origin “in the functioning of pre-colonial structures.” Certainly
contact with civilization can have an unsettling, degenerative effect,
but Godelier’s marxism (viz. unwillingness to question
domestication/production), is, one suspects, relevant to such a
judgment. Thus it could be said that the Copper Eskimos, who have a
significant incidence of homicide within their group (Damas 1972), owe
this violence to the impact of outside influences, but their reliance on
domesticated dogs should also be noted.
Arens (1979) has asserted, paralleling Godelier to some extent, that
cannibalism as a cultural phenomenon is a fiction, invented and promoted
by agencies of outside conquest. But there is documentation of this
practice (e.g. Poole 1983, Tuzin 1976) among, once again, peoples
involved in domestication. The studies by Hogg (1966), for example,
reveal its presence among certain African tribes, steeped in ritual and
grounded in agriculture. Cannibalism is generally a form of cultural
control of chaos, in which the victim represents animality, or all that
should be tamed (Sanday 1986). Significantly, one of the important myths
of Fiji Islanders, “How the Fijians first became cannibals,” is
literally a tale of planting (Sahlins 1983). Similarly, the highly
domesticated and time-conscious Aztecs practiced human sacrifice as a
gesture to tame unruly forces and uphold the social equilibrium of a
very alienated society. As Norbeck (1961) pointed out, non-domesticated,
“culturally impoverished” societies are devoid of cannibalism and human
sacrifice.
As for one of the basic underpinnings of violence in more complex
societies, Barnes (1970) found that “reports in the ethnographic
literature of territorial struggles” between gatherer-hunters are
“extremely rare.” !Kung boundaries are vague and undefended (Lee 1979);
Pandaram territories overlap, and individuals go where they please
(Morris 1982); Hazda move freely from region to region (Woodburn 1968);
boundaries and trespass have little or no meaning to the Mbuti (Turnbull
1966); and Australian Aborigines reject territorial or social
demarcations (Gumpert 1981, Hamilton 1982). An ethic of generosity and
hospitality takes the place of exclusivity (Steward 1968, Hiatt 1968).
Gatherer-hunter peoples have developed “no conception of private
property,” in the estimation of Kitwood (1984). As noted above in
reference to sharing, and with Sansom’s (1980) characterization of
Aborigines as “people without property,” foragers do not share
civilization’s obsession with externals.
“Mine and thine, the seeds of all mischief, have no place with them,”
wrote Pietro (1511) of the native North Americans encountered on the
second voyage of Columbus. The Bushmen have “no sense of possession,”
according to Post (1958), and Lee (1972) saw them making “no sharp
dichotomy between the resources of the natural environment and the
social wealth.” There is a line between nature and culture, again, and
the non-civilized choose the former.
There are many gatherer-hunters who could carry all that they make use
of in one hand, who die with pretty much what they had as they came into
the world. Once humans shared everything; with agriculture, ownership
becomes paramount and a species presumes to own the world. A deformation
the imagination could scarcely equal.
Sahlins (1972) spoke of this eloquently: “The world’s most primitive
people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a
certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means
and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a
social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”
The “common tendency” of gatherer-hunters “to reject farming until it
was absolutely thrust upon them” (Bodley 1976) bespeaks a nature/culture
divide also present in the Mbuti recognition that if one of them becomes
a villager he is no longer an Mbuti (Turnbull 1976). They know that
forager band and agriculturalist village are opposed societies with
opposed values.
At times, however, the crucial factor of domestication can be lost sight
of. “The historic foraging populations of the Western Coast of North
America have long been considered anomalous among foragers,” declared
Cohen (1981); as Kelly (1991) also put it, “tribes of the Northwest
Coast break all the stereotypes of hunter-gatherers.” These foragers,
whose main sustenance is fishing, have exhibited such alienated features
as chiefs, hierarchy, warfare and slavery. But almost always overlooked
are their domesticated tobacco and domesticated dogs. Even this
celebrated ‘anomaly’ contains features of domestication. Its practice,
from ritual to production, with various accompanying forms of
domination, seems to anchor and promote the facets of decline from an
earlier state of grace.
Thomas (1981) provides another North American example, that of the Great
Basin Shoshones and three of their component societies, the Kawich
Mountain Shoshones, Reese River Shoshones, and Owens Valley Paiutes. The
three groups showed distinctly different levels of agriculture, with
increasing territoriality or ownership and hierarchy closely
corresponding to higher degrees of domestication.
To ‘define’ a disalienated world would be impossible and even
undesirable, but I think we can and should try to reveal the unworld of
today and how it got this way. We have taken a monstrously wrong turn
with symbolic culture and division of labor, from a place of
enchantment, understanding and wholeness to the absence we find at the
heart of the doctrine of progress. Empty and emptying, the logic of
domestication with its demand to control everything now shows us the
ruin of the civilization that ruins the rest. Assuming the inferiority
of nature enables the domination of cultural systems that soon will make
the very earth uninhabitable.
Postmodernism says to us that a society without power relations can only
be an abstraction (Foucault, 1982). This is a lie unless we accept the
death of nature and renounce what once was and what we can find again.
Turnbull spoke of the intimacy between Mbuti people and the forest,
dancing almost as if making love to the forest. In the bosom of a life
of equals that is no abstraction, that struggles to endure, they were
“dancing with the forest, dancing with the moon.”