Societies of perpetual movement
March 6, 2024 5:32 PM Subscribe
"...Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari and other researchers..., though they may treat hunter-gatherers with respect, still claim that settling down is a form of progress, leading toward more social complexity, with accompanying political and economic advantages. And so, agriculture is still seen as a checkpoint on a one-way road to progress and the development of large societies. This remains a familiar story. It is also wrong."
Interesting read. I'm glad these societies continue to prosper and hope the attempts by governments to make them stay still (all the better to tax them, I guess) continue to fail.
posted by dg at 6:50 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
posted by dg at 6:50 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
Agreed, Dip Flash, especially for passages like this:
the adoption of agriculture was not a definitive, one-way transition. Many societies ‘experimented’ with agriculture without becoming fully reliant on it. In other cases, societies that were at one stage fully reliant on agriculture later returned to hunting and gathering.
posted by doctornemo at 7:48 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]
the adoption of agriculture was not a definitive, one-way transition. Many societies ‘experimented’ with agriculture without becoming fully reliant on it. In other cases, societies that were at one stage fully reliant on agriculture later returned to hunting and gathering.
posted by doctornemo at 7:48 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]
I haven't read Harari, but Jared Diamond doesn't claim that settlement or agriculture is any kind of progress, but rather that agriculture makes for denser populations, more disease, and (eventually) more powerful weapons, which it absolutely does. It's not a good thing at all, but larger populations and especially larger populations with disease and guns, can decimate societies with smaller populations.
Even in the ancient period, neolithic farmers out competed foragers in most of the places suitable for farming. Farmers were less healthy due to their less varied diet and greater burden of disease, but there were more of them and, therefore, they became more powerful. It's not progress, but it is history.
posted by jb at 7:51 PM on March 6 [8 favorites]
Even in the ancient period, neolithic farmers out competed foragers in most of the places suitable for farming. Farmers were less healthy due to their less varied diet and greater burden of disease, but there were more of them and, therefore, they became more powerful. It's not progress, but it is history.
posted by jb at 7:51 PM on March 6 [8 favorites]
(sorry, I shouldn't be too dismissive. This article is summarizing what was already orthodox in agrarian studies 20 years ago - or longer. but I realize that was a specialist environment and this is a generalist publication.)
posted by jb at 7:54 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
posted by jb at 7:54 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
Or as one graduate student I met two decades ago said: agriculture is a 12,000 year long experiment that hasn't ended yet ... and maybe is ending very badly for all.
posted by jb at 7:59 PM on March 6 [5 favorites]
posted by jb at 7:59 PM on March 6 [5 favorites]
It's really trivial, but there's some imprecision in the article in terms of referring to manioc/cassava (a relatively recent New World introduction) as something tied to the immigration of farmers thousands of years ago (e.g., "The arrival of farmers in the region, and their seasonal cultivation of yams, palm nuts, manioc and other crops..."). I'm sure the authors understand the distinction, but it got a bit lost in the writing.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:31 PM on March 6
posted by Dip Flash at 8:31 PM on March 6
jb -- a physical anthropologist put it to be slightly differently. They pointed to intelligent life as the experiment that might be failing.
posted by constraint at 9:53 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
posted by constraint at 9:53 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
Stop fucking around and find out?
posted by flabdablet at 10:25 PM on March 6
posted by flabdablet at 10:25 PM on March 6
Article seems to treat hunter/gatherer and nomadic as if they were one thing, which bothered me a bit -- what about nomadic pastoralists? What about Roma/Travelers? What about settled hunter/gatherer groups?
posted by Rhedyn at 2:57 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
posted by Rhedyn at 2:57 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
The article links to lots and lots of interesting-looking studies, and I may take the time to read some of them. The first one that jumps out at me is Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies:
posted by clawsoon at 3:34 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
Mobile hunter-gatherers are often characterized as living in small communities where mobility and group size are products of the environmentally determined distribution of resources, and where social organization is multi-scalar: groups of co-residents are nested within small communities that are, in turn, nested within small-scale societies. Such organization is often assumed to be reflective of the human past, emerging as human cognition and communication evolved through earlier fission-fusion social processes, typical of many primate social systems.The idea is that humans have always lived in large-scale societies. It wasn't agriculture that forced us into large-scale societies, or cities.
We review the history of this assumption in light of recent empirical data of co-residence and social networks among contemporary hunter-gatherers. We suggest that while residential and foraging groups are often small, there is little evidence that these groups are drawn from small communities nested within small-scale societies. Most mobile hunter-gatherers live in groups dominated by links between non-relatives, where residential group membership is fluid and supports large-scale social networks of interaction.
posted by clawsoon at 3:34 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
A half-baked theory that I've been rolling around since I read Graeber and Wengrow, and that this article got me thinking about again, is that religion needed to develop many psychological hacks to get people to permanently switch from playing with agriculture to fully committing to it.
Sure, agriculture can make the group as a whole more powerful, but (as y'all have pointed out) it makes most individual lives worse, and you have to convince individuals to make the switch to a worse life.
As this is a half-baked theory, I don't have much evidence for how this might've worked in the ancient world, but I've noticed again and again that Christianity hates nomadic hunter-gatherers and uses every psychological trick it has - from its all-powerful God to the threat of Hell to the condemnation of Indigenous forms of knowledge transfer as "demonic" - to get nomads to settle down. Without looking it up, I'm willing to bet that this bit:
My supposition (without evidence, I admit) is that the 3,000-or-so years that people played with agriculture but didn't commit to it were a time before religions had developed all the "God says you have to" psychological tricks to make the disease and malnutrition and intense warfare seem like a good deal.
But I could be wrong.
posted by clawsoon at 3:50 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Sure, agriculture can make the group as a whole more powerful, but (as y'all have pointed out) it makes most individual lives worse, and you have to convince individuals to make the switch to a worse life.
As this is a half-baked theory, I don't have much evidence for how this might've worked in the ancient world, but I've noticed again and again that Christianity hates nomadic hunter-gatherers and uses every psychological trick it has - from its all-powerful God to the threat of Hell to the condemnation of Indigenous forms of knowledge transfer as "demonic" - to get nomads to settle down. Without looking it up, I'm willing to bet that this bit:
despite strong government efforts, beginning in the 1950s across Central Africa, resulting in many being settled into villages...was inspired by Christianity, since there have been so many similar Christianity-driven efforts around the world to force-convince people to join settled agricultural society, going back at least to the Livonian Crusade.
My supposition (without evidence, I admit) is that the 3,000-or-so years that people played with agriculture but didn't commit to it were a time before religions had developed all the "God says you have to" psychological tricks to make the disease and malnutrition and intense warfare seem like a good deal.
But I could be wrong.
posted by clawsoon at 3:50 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I would be interested to see studies/articles that look at this through the lens of food preservation techniques. At what point in population size and in which climates/ecosystems/environments is the limit hit for a group to comfortably survive a seasonal period relying on caches of preserved hunted/gathered food? Also important to remember that agriculture is not just peasants plowing wheat fields and that nomadic groups did/do cultivate/encourage plants they wanted along their migration paths.
posted by Rhedyn at 4:47 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
posted by Rhedyn at 4:47 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Clawsoon, your halfbaked theory is a major throughline in Deleuze & Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia!
posted by Richard Saunders at 5:10 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”Their answer includes religion as an intermediate step, encoding new systems of meaning and behavior on the psyche, but their thesis doesn't really start cooking until the appearance of capitalism. Definitely worth the read.
posted by Richard Saunders at 5:10 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
Agriculture and nomadic living are phases of a spectrum of survival strategies. None are good or bad, but agriculture added a hefty bank of resources to a distributed species that seems to have been really effective for keeping a species reproducing. The genetic imprints of pre- and peri-agricultural populations are a good reminder of how often humans have been reduced to a sparse few dozen individuals. Nomadic living is one strategy confronting this, distributing people so that regional catastrophe has less opportunity to be an extinction event. In times of stress, the ability to intentionally concentrate survival resources brought about through agriculture seems to have been a helpful addition to that long term, emergent strategy. As the article mentions, social complexity bubbles up out of us and seems to have spun off all sorts of initiatives of variable levels of genius and success.
When I was reading The Dawn of Everything, I had a thought pop into my head. Is the drive I have to move thousands of miles at a time every few years a reminder of how central movement was for our species in the deep past? And does the almost simulatneous homesickness and yearning for roots recalling a later but just as human desire to escape the slog of always being on the move? Whatever the real answers, I feel them very deeply.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 5:20 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
When I was reading The Dawn of Everything, I had a thought pop into my head. Is the drive I have to move thousands of miles at a time every few years a reminder of how central movement was for our species in the deep past? And does the almost simulatneous homesickness and yearning for roots recalling a later but just as human desire to escape the slog of always being on the move? Whatever the real answers, I feel them very deeply.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 5:20 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
Do individual lives get worse under agriculture? I doubt you can make such a blanket statement. Hunter-gatherers have their own versions of patriarchy and xenophobia and slavery and racism too, all the ways to oppress individuals are human phenomena - not the result of settling down to grow crops.
posted by MiraK at 7:04 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
posted by MiraK at 7:04 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
Dropping my daughter off at school this morning got me thinking about the bit about the scale of chimpanzee societies mentioned in the article, and how "small-scale societies" was used as yet another way for Europeans to infantilize hunter-gatherers. We send our kids to small elementary schools, because that's the scale of society that their brains can handle at that age; we send our teens to larger high schools, because they're ready for a bigger social setting; adults head out into the social world at large.
So calling them "small-scale societies" was a way of saying that they were on the level of children or chimps, not capable of dealing with the complexity of "higher" European life.
I was reading a book about the making of Treaty 9 with the Indigenous people of northern Ontario, and this attitude is dripping out of everything that treaty commissioner (and poet) Duncan Campbell Scott wrote:
posted by clawsoon at 7:48 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
So calling them "small-scale societies" was a way of saying that they were on the level of children or chimps, not capable of dealing with the complexity of "higher" European life.
I was reading a book about the making of Treaty 9 with the Indigenous people of northern Ontario, and this attitude is dripping out of everything that treaty commissioner (and poet) Duncan Campbell Scott wrote:
They were to make certain promises, and we were to make certain promises, but our purpose and our reasons were alike unknowable. What could they grasp of the pronouncement on Indian tenure, which had been delivered by the law lords of the Crown?And this attitude that they were small-scale society people who couldn't understand large-scale society stuff resulted in the absolutely horrid residential school system, where kids were beaten into accepting that they'd be taught nothing more advanced than "cleanly modes of life" for twelve years of schooling.
...
The Indians of the district do not require an advanced education on ordinary subjects. They require an elementary training and instruction in cleanly modes of life...
posted by clawsoon at 7:48 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
MiraK: Do individual lives get worse under agriculture? I doubt you can make such a blanket statement. Hunter-gatherers have their own versions of patriarchy and xenophobia and slavery and racism too, all the ways to oppress individuals are human phenomena - not the result of settling down to grow crops.
That's a fair point. One argument is that once agriculture has developed densely enough and across a large enough area it removes the possibility of escape. At the lower densities of typical hunter-gatherer societies, a family can walk away if things get too bad; conflict, with the binary outcomes of conquest and submission, can't be forced on a low-density hunter-gatherer as easily.
A couple of vague impressions I have which might support this: The hunter-gatherer societies I know about which had the most slaves and the worse forms of slavery were also the densest and most settled hunter-gatherers, groups like the Haida and Tlingit of the PNW.
And European absolutism started loosening right around the time that the conquest of North American opened up an escape route for a large number of Europeans.
But, yeah, ultimately assholes who like to control other people have always been with us, and being a low-density hunter-gatherer isn't a magic formula to escape all the things you mention.
posted by clawsoon at 8:00 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
That's a fair point. One argument is that once agriculture has developed densely enough and across a large enough area it removes the possibility of escape. At the lower densities of typical hunter-gatherer societies, a family can walk away if things get too bad; conflict, with the binary outcomes of conquest and submission, can't be forced on a low-density hunter-gatherer as easily.
A couple of vague impressions I have which might support this: The hunter-gatherer societies I know about which had the most slaves and the worse forms of slavery were also the densest and most settled hunter-gatherers, groups like the Haida and Tlingit of the PNW.
And European absolutism started loosening right around the time that the conquest of North American opened up an escape route for a large number of Europeans.
But, yeah, ultimately assholes who like to control other people have always been with us, and being a low-density hunter-gatherer isn't a magic formula to escape all the things you mention.
posted by clawsoon at 8:00 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
> At the lower densities of typical hunter-gatherer societies, a family can walk away if things get too bad; conflict, with the binary outcomes of conquest and submission, can't be forced on a low-density hunter-gatherer as easily.
Okay, stop me if my very haphazard/new thinking on this is incorrect, but being able to walk away is a myth, right? You don't just get to go off and live in a society of one family, humans can't generally survive that way.
Indeed the closest we get to a capacity to walk away is in very large settlements and societies where you get the anonymity of cities and large towns, and so starting anew becomes an option. That, or you need a vast interconnected network of many communities allowing you to pick up from one place/group and set up in the next as an outsider. Neither of these are small hunter gatherer groups.
Also worth noting: this all only works for individual disputes. For larger scale issues (race based slavery or misogyny or queerphobic structures) - yeah you can't walk away from them but also you can't walk away from versions of them that exist in hunter-gatherer communities either.
posted by MiraK at 8:14 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Okay, stop me if my very haphazard/new thinking on this is incorrect, but being able to walk away is a myth, right? You don't just get to go off and live in a society of one family, humans can't generally survive that way.
Indeed the closest we get to a capacity to walk away is in very large settlements and societies where you get the anonymity of cities and large towns, and so starting anew becomes an option. That, or you need a vast interconnected network of many communities allowing you to pick up from one place/group and set up in the next as an outsider. Neither of these are small hunter gatherer groups.
Also worth noting: this all only works for individual disputes. For larger scale issues (race based slavery or misogyny or queerphobic structures) - yeah you can't walk away from them but also you can't walk away from versions of them that exist in hunter-gatherer communities either.
posted by MiraK at 8:14 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
MiraK: That, or you need a vast interconnected network of many communities allowing you to pick up from one place/group and set up in the next as an outsider. Neither of these are small hunter gatherer groups.
Thinking about this... the article puts a really interesting twist on that idea that cuts both ways, doesn't it? If hunter-gatherers are not small-scale societies, but instead small groups within much larger hunter-gatherer societies, it both:
- takes away the ability to easily run away from the society as a whole, since the society is spread across a very large area
- gives the ability to pick up and settle down in a different part of the society, since it is in fact a large interconnected network of communities
posted by clawsoon at 8:26 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
Thinking about this... the article puts a really interesting twist on that idea that cuts both ways, doesn't it? If hunter-gatherers are not small-scale societies, but instead small groups within much larger hunter-gatherer societies, it both:
- takes away the ability to easily run away from the society as a whole, since the society is spread across a very large area
- gives the ability to pick up and settle down in a different part of the society, since it is in fact a large interconnected network of communities
posted by clawsoon at 8:26 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
Do individual lives get worse under agriculture? I doubt you can make such a blanket statement. Hunter-gatherers have their own versions of patriarchy and xenophobia and slavery and racism too
The argument that agricultural societies have it worse off usually has less to do with their oppressiveness and more to do with bad nutrition, the prevalence of diseases in more tightly packed societies (particularly once domestication of animals begins) and the physical effects of a narrower range of, and more repetitive, activities.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:54 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Clawsoon, I think there's something to your theory about Christianity, but I'd maybe reverse the causality and say that European feudalism recreated what was originally an urban Roman phenomenon in it's own image. Christianity in Europe became so thoroughly adapted to the feudal order that it was difficult to think of organising religous institutions in any other way. There were occassional breakout attempts like the mendicant orders (which I guess you could think of as religious hunter-gatherers of a sort), but eventually they were tamed by a system where power and funding were all attached the agricultural economy. We even have weird holdovers from this in rural Scotland where it's pretty common for a church to own a patch of farmland nearby which they rent out to cover some of their expenses.
My guess is that when missionaries went abroad they didn't really know how to do church in any other way than the feudal-parish model, so they were enthusiastic allies of colonial administrators who were forcing indigenous people into feudal arrangements for reasons of their own. I'd go so far as to say that a lot of European churches never really figured out a way of doing Christianity that wasn't in some way tied to land and agriculture, which is why urbanisation (and a couple of World Wars) has effectively killed off regular church attendance in Europe. America did create a new model, the suburban church/megachurch which is why church attendance has lasted longer there.
posted by nangua at 8:55 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
My guess is that when missionaries went abroad they didn't really know how to do church in any other way than the feudal-parish model, so they were enthusiastic allies of colonial administrators who were forcing indigenous people into feudal arrangements for reasons of their own. I'd go so far as to say that a lot of European churches never really figured out a way of doing Christianity that wasn't in some way tied to land and agriculture, which is why urbanisation (and a couple of World Wars) has effectively killed off regular church attendance in Europe. America did create a new model, the suburban church/megachurch which is why church attendance has lasted longer there.
posted by nangua at 8:55 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
This is all intensely relevant to my current half-finished novella. This kind of thread is why I love you all.
posted by signal at 9:26 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
posted by signal at 9:26 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
jb -- a physical anthropologist put it to be slightly differently. They pointed to intelligent life as the experiment that might be failing.
posted by constraint at 12:53 AM on March 7
A paleoartist I follow online likes to say that leaving the ocean may have been a big mistake.
posted by jb at 9:50 AM on March 7
posted by constraint at 12:53 AM on March 7
A paleoartist I follow online likes to say that leaving the ocean may have been a big mistake.
posted by jb at 9:50 AM on March 7
You don't just get to go off and live in a society of one family, humans can't generally survive that way.
Depends on the circumstances -- the Pintupi Nine survived as a family in isolation for a couple of decades after the other Pintupi had either been pushed or left the traditional lands and life. You do need to make contact with other families for marriage purposes, but the ability to take off and survive on your own does mean you have the option to link up with a different set of people than the ones that might have been trying to oppress you.
In general, hunter-gatherer societies have limited ability to support specialists, so it's difficult to have a group of people that are enslaved to do just a subset of skills and aren't allowed to know enough to survive on their own. It's not impossible, of course, someone already mentioned the Haida.
posted by tavella at 10:09 AM on March 7
Depends on the circumstances -- the Pintupi Nine survived as a family in isolation for a couple of decades after the other Pintupi had either been pushed or left the traditional lands and life. You do need to make contact with other families for marriage purposes, but the ability to take off and survive on your own does mean you have the option to link up with a different set of people than the ones that might have been trying to oppress you.
In general, hunter-gatherer societies have limited ability to support specialists, so it's difficult to have a group of people that are enslaved to do just a subset of skills and aren't allowed to know enough to survive on their own. It's not impossible, of course, someone already mentioned the Haida.
posted by tavella at 10:09 AM on March 7
Do individual lives get worse under agriculture? I doubt you can make such a blanket statement. Hunter-gatherers have their own versions of patriarchy and xenophobia and slavery and racism too, all the ways to oppress individuals are human phenomena - not the result of settling down to grow crops.
Yes, in the physical sense; people had more work, worse food and more disease. As AdamCSnider notes, there is research to show that ancient agriculturalists were in general shorter, less healthy and had lower life-expediencies that contemporary foragers.
It also changes from place to place and time to time among agriculturalists - this news article describes recent research showing how average heights in England went up and down with climate, access to clean(er) water, and nutrition. (Notably, again "progress" isn't always progress for most people - English heights were lower during the industrial revolution (c1700-1900) than they were in the centuries before (c1400-1700) due to increased labour, reduced nutrition, etc.)
But from what I recall of my agrarian studies, studies of foragers find that they almost always work fewer hours and have better health than traditional agriculturalists (that is, farmers not using modern industrial farming techniques) - and that's really significant, considering that in most of the world, foragers have been excluded from the more productive environments by agriculturalists and into less productive environments like deserts, mountains, tundra, etc., and still do better.
Article seems to treat hunter/gatherer and nomadic as if they were one thing, which bothered me a bit -- what about nomadic pastoralists? What about Roma/Travelers? What about settled hunter/gatherer groups?
It's simplifying for the sake of a general audience. As you note, not all foragers are nomadic, and not all agriculturalists are completely settled. In addition to nomadic and transhumant pastoralists (who I would count as a kind of agriculture/husbandry even if they aren't literally farmers), there are semi-nomadic farmers like those who practice swidden agriculture (the polite/more accurate term for traditional slash-and-burn farming), and lots of settled foragers, especially in places with rich resources (like the Pacific Northwest in North America). The Natufian culture in the Levant consisted of settled hunters and gatherers who were the ancestors of later Neolithic farmers in the area. One theory of the origins of early agriculture is that this settled community may have somewhat forced into agriculture by the changing climate of the Younger Dryas Period (~12,900 to 11,700 years before present or ~10,900 to 9700 BCE).
Given what we have learned about the non-progress that was the agricultural revolution, it does make more sense if some of the first farmers were responding to push factors, rather than pull factors. However, once farming gets going, it can sustain larger and denser populations from the same land. That's not to say that foragers couldn't have large-ish populations, but farmers had even larger, and in most regions were able to push out foragers by sheer numbers. There are exceptional regions, of course; pastoralists, not farmers, dominated the Eurasian steppes. But animal husbandry (and wagons to carry water, supplies) still out competed foraging in terms of population and power.
About the Roma: they aren't a separate society, they are (or were, in many places) a nomadic part of an otherwise settled society and were integrated (unequally) into that society as migrant labour, peddlers, etc. So if you are thinking of them in socio-economic terms, you need to think about how they live in relation to the majority population.
A couple of vague impressions I have which might support this: The hunter-gatherer societies I know about which had the most slaves and the worse forms of slavery were also the densest and most settled hunter-gatherers, groups like the Haida and Tlingit of the PNW.
Yes, the Pacific Northwest is always the notable exception to a lot of general statements about foraging - the marine resources are just so rich that they could sustain massive societies without farming. (Notably, a lot of that area isn't exactly great for farming - I don't know what the Haida Gwaii are like, but the north end of Vancouver Island is classic Canada: rocks and trees and water.) There's also a good book called Games against Nature about the precolonial history of the Nunu living in and around the swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River - they had very dense populations based on fishing and developed a hierarchical society where elites controlled weirs and access to fishing rather than agricultural land. The nearby agriculturalists actually had less hierarchy than the fishers, because land was more plentiful than the fishing access, and so the elites had less of a monopoly on the access to the means of production.
But in most places, foraging requires more space per person than agriculture, which is how agriculture makes it more likely to develop denser populations (and eventually towns, cities, specialization, etc.).
posted by jb at 10:46 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
Yes, in the physical sense; people had more work, worse food and more disease. As AdamCSnider notes, there is research to show that ancient agriculturalists were in general shorter, less healthy and had lower life-expediencies that contemporary foragers.
It also changes from place to place and time to time among agriculturalists - this news article describes recent research showing how average heights in England went up and down with climate, access to clean(er) water, and nutrition. (Notably, again "progress" isn't always progress for most people - English heights were lower during the industrial revolution (c1700-1900) than they were in the centuries before (c1400-1700) due to increased labour, reduced nutrition, etc.)
But from what I recall of my agrarian studies, studies of foragers find that they almost always work fewer hours and have better health than traditional agriculturalists (that is, farmers not using modern industrial farming techniques) - and that's really significant, considering that in most of the world, foragers have been excluded from the more productive environments by agriculturalists and into less productive environments like deserts, mountains, tundra, etc., and still do better.
Article seems to treat hunter/gatherer and nomadic as if they were one thing, which bothered me a bit -- what about nomadic pastoralists? What about Roma/Travelers? What about settled hunter/gatherer groups?
It's simplifying for the sake of a general audience. As you note, not all foragers are nomadic, and not all agriculturalists are completely settled. In addition to nomadic and transhumant pastoralists (who I would count as a kind of agriculture/husbandry even if they aren't literally farmers), there are semi-nomadic farmers like those who practice swidden agriculture (the polite/more accurate term for traditional slash-and-burn farming), and lots of settled foragers, especially in places with rich resources (like the Pacific Northwest in North America). The Natufian culture in the Levant consisted of settled hunters and gatherers who were the ancestors of later Neolithic farmers in the area. One theory of the origins of early agriculture is that this settled community may have somewhat forced into agriculture by the changing climate of the Younger Dryas Period (~12,900 to 11,700 years before present or ~10,900 to 9700 BCE).
Given what we have learned about the non-progress that was the agricultural revolution, it does make more sense if some of the first farmers were responding to push factors, rather than pull factors. However, once farming gets going, it can sustain larger and denser populations from the same land. That's not to say that foragers couldn't have large-ish populations, but farmers had even larger, and in most regions were able to push out foragers by sheer numbers. There are exceptional regions, of course; pastoralists, not farmers, dominated the Eurasian steppes. But animal husbandry (and wagons to carry water, supplies) still out competed foraging in terms of population and power.
About the Roma: they aren't a separate society, they are (or were, in many places) a nomadic part of an otherwise settled society and were integrated (unequally) into that society as migrant labour, peddlers, etc. So if you are thinking of them in socio-economic terms, you need to think about how they live in relation to the majority population.
A couple of vague impressions I have which might support this: The hunter-gatherer societies I know about which had the most slaves and the worse forms of slavery were also the densest and most settled hunter-gatherers, groups like the Haida and Tlingit of the PNW.
Yes, the Pacific Northwest is always the notable exception to a lot of general statements about foraging - the marine resources are just so rich that they could sustain massive societies without farming. (Notably, a lot of that area isn't exactly great for farming - I don't know what the Haida Gwaii are like, but the north end of Vancouver Island is classic Canada: rocks and trees and water.) There's also a good book called Games against Nature about the precolonial history of the Nunu living in and around the swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River - they had very dense populations based on fishing and developed a hierarchical society where elites controlled weirs and access to fishing rather than agricultural land. The nearby agriculturalists actually had less hierarchy than the fishers, because land was more plentiful than the fishing access, and so the elites had less of a monopoly on the access to the means of production.
But in most places, foraging requires more space per person than agriculture, which is how agriculture makes it more likely to develop denser populations (and eventually towns, cities, specialization, etc.).
posted by jb at 10:46 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
Clawsoon, I think there's something to your theory about Christianity, but I'd maybe reverse the causality and say that European feudalism recreated what was originally an urban Roman phenomenon in it's own image.
Well, I can tell you that Genesis and the Pentateuch in general is biased in favour of hillmen and pastoralists over lowland farmers - because the Israelites were hill people, of course. There's a great bit in Genesis where Abraham and some others from the Judaean hills are described as being successful in battle against powerful kings from far off Mesopotamia where the weak cities of the plains (like Sodom and Gomorrah) had failed.
posted by jb at 10:52 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
Well, I can tell you that Genesis and the Pentateuch in general is biased in favour of hillmen and pastoralists over lowland farmers - because the Israelites were hill people, of course. There's a great bit in Genesis where Abraham and some others from the Judaean hills are described as being successful in battle against powerful kings from far off Mesopotamia where the weak cities of the plains (like Sodom and Gomorrah) had failed.
posted by jb at 10:52 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
Yeah, when I finally got around to starting to read Sapiens, after years of hearing it lauded, I was dumbstruck at how terribly bad it was, and couldn’t get more than about a chapter into it.
Repeated assertions by Harari of things that he dropped in as if they were facts, and as if he was the first person to have the insight to point them out. No references to the many people who’d discussed these ideas before; no acknowledgement that they were actually debatable concepts and not stone cold certainties. This idea that hunter gatherers are a “primitive” social structure that belong way back on a narrow linear development, and that modern industrial/post-industrial society is the inevitable, much-improved evolution, was the point where I finally put the book down.
I only have a 30-year-old undergraduate degree in social anthropology, and even I can see how narrow and reductive that is.
He seemed totally blind to the idea - which seems obvious to me - that maybe there’s not a single continuum of social development, but rather a scatter-gun of different social models that are adapted to different circumstances, geographies and histories.
He also assumes without question that we’re capable of fully understanding the entire universe of knowledge, concepts and relationships that made up any given hunter-gatherer society, evaluating them objectively, and realising they’re “worse” or “more primitive” than ours. When in reality so much of other cultures’ worlds - from knowledge of the natural world to belief systems, social structures, communication systems - are likely opaque or invisible to people not living within them. When we look at them and see them as lesser, or more simple, it’s not because they’re a simple people, it’s because we’re missing so much as outsiders - our comprehension is stunted and incomplete.
I’m infuriated and astounded that it was such a best-seller. It’s like someone trying to write an anthropology 101 primer, having never read a word of anthropological writing.
posted by penguin pie at 4:45 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]
Repeated assertions by Harari of things that he dropped in as if they were facts, and as if he was the first person to have the insight to point them out. No references to the many people who’d discussed these ideas before; no acknowledgement that they were actually debatable concepts and not stone cold certainties. This idea that hunter gatherers are a “primitive” social structure that belong way back on a narrow linear development, and that modern industrial/post-industrial society is the inevitable, much-improved evolution, was the point where I finally put the book down.
I only have a 30-year-old undergraduate degree in social anthropology, and even I can see how narrow and reductive that is.
He seemed totally blind to the idea - which seems obvious to me - that maybe there’s not a single continuum of social development, but rather a scatter-gun of different social models that are adapted to different circumstances, geographies and histories.
He also assumes without question that we’re capable of fully understanding the entire universe of knowledge, concepts and relationships that made up any given hunter-gatherer society, evaluating them objectively, and realising they’re “worse” or “more primitive” than ours. When in reality so much of other cultures’ worlds - from knowledge of the natural world to belief systems, social structures, communication systems - are likely opaque or invisible to people not living within them. When we look at them and see them as lesser, or more simple, it’s not because they’re a simple people, it’s because we’re missing so much as outsiders - our comprehension is stunted and incomplete.
I’m infuriated and astounded that it was such a best-seller. It’s like someone trying to write an anthropology 101 primer, having never read a word of anthropological writing.
posted by penguin pie at 4:45 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]
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Thanks for posting this, it is an interesting article to read.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:04 PM on March 6 [16 favorites]