I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
The Conquest of Granada (1670)
John Dryden (1631 – 1700)
English poet and playwright
Introduction
This is the second part in the
series of comparative analysis of hunter gatherers and agricultural societies
which will be focusing on socioeconomics. My other post laid out the empirical nature of the health nutrition of both societies
demonstrating that the diet of hunter gatherers was far more healthy and
diverse than that of agricultural societies. I qualified this by conceding
that, in theory, through modern medicine and preventative health we can offset
the harms of the Western diet to our Palaeolithic genome and this has
translated into higher life expectancy since the Renaissance for Europeans.
This post I will be looking at three areas – cooperation and egalitarianism;
labour and leisure; and peace and conflict – and providing analysis and comparison
between hunter gatherers and agricultural societies. In this post I aim to
address some misconceptions commonly found about hunter gatherer socioeconomics
in an empirical manner without making any serious normative value judgements. Let
us begin with some context to this interesting topic.
Hadza Bushmen of Tanzania having lunch
The State of Nature from Leviathan to Stone Age Economics
Throughout the history of
western philosophy the state of nature has been a central concept for
expounding and justifying various political, social, economic and moral ideals.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) was one of the first to
employ this though experiment in his book Leviathan
(1651) written during the English Civil War (1642–1651). In it he proposed
the necessity for an absolute monarchy and strong central government to
constrain and curb the brutish instincts of humans that are found in the
original position where there is no civil society. According to Hobbes, the
state of nature was marked by bellum
omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all) and that there was:
No Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no
account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all,
continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Indeed this perspective of the
state of nature by Hobbes has been one of the prominent interpretations for humanity’s
instincts and has been employed by various political philosophers and national
leaders to justify certain policies throughout history. Yet, in 1689, the
English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704) offered and expounded a
fundamentally different perspective on the state of nature. In Two Treatises of Government Locke argued
for democratic governance in opposition to Hobbesian absolute monarchy and came
to a conclusion about the state of nature:
The state of nature has a law of nature to
govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all humankind,
who will but consult it, that being all equal and interdependent; no one ought
to harm another in his life, health, and liberty. The natural state is also one
of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has
more than another. It is evident that all human beings – as creatures belonging
to the same species and rank and born indiscriminately with all the same
natural advantages and faculties – are equal amongst themselves.
Indeed, this interpretation of
the state of nature as being far from the Hobbesian struggle lead to various
characterisations of those living in the state of nature as being “noble
savages”. This concept is commonly associated with the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712 – 1778), but interestingly the first use of the term appears in
1670 in The Conquest of Granada, a
play by English poet and playwright John Dryden. Certainly, Rousseau took on
board this concept and in his Discourse
on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men (1754) he states:
I know that civilized men do nothing but boast
incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains. But when I see
barbarous man sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for
the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost
it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads
against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked
savages scorn European voluptuousness.
When the British explorer
Captain James Cook came across Australia he was of a similar opinion to Rousseau.
In the entry of 23 August 1770 into the Journal of H.M.S. Endeavour, Cook opinionated:
The natives of New Holland may appear to
some to be the most wretched people of earth, but in reality they are far happier
than we Europeans, as they are wholly unacquainted with the superfluous conveniences
so much sought after in Europe. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed
by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes
them with all things necessary for life, they covet not magnificent houses, household-stuff.
In short they seemed to set no value upon any thing we gave them. This in my
opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessities of life
and that they have no superfluities.
It must be noted that Hobbes,
Locke and Rousseau all lacked any empirical evidence to substantiate their
claims of the original position and state of nature of humankind and even Cook
lacked the thorough methodology to make such empirical claims. Indeed, it is
contested to weather Hobbes even proposed his Leviathan as the reality of the state of nature or rather proposed
it as a philosophical though experiment. Either way, with the wax and wane of
colonialism and the decline of racist anthropology, by the 1960s a number of
anthropologists were conducting ethnographic fieldwork in some of the last hunter
gatherer societies in existence. A prominent radical anthropologist was Marshall
Sahlins, now Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Chicago. In 1974 he wrote The
Original Affluent Society in Stone
Age Economics arguing that hunter gatherer societies were actually affluent
insofar as their material expectations closely matched their means to obtain
those expectations and they had limited wants and unlimited means. As stated:
Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per
capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to
examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter and
gatherers in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To
accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present
human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants
and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
This concept of the Original Affluent Society seriously
challenged the orthodoxy of the time of Hobbes in political and social
philosophy and of Homo economicus in
classical economic theory. It is with this context that I shall begin my
analysis of the empirical evidence from the archaeological and ethnographic
records of hunter gatherer societies – the state of nature.
Cooperation and Egalitarianism: Equity, Gift Economy and Challenges to Homo economicus
Inequality is not an intrinsic
or natural feature of human societies – the social, political and economic
organisation of hunter gatherers, from the Hadza to the Inuit, inevitably tends
to be that of egalitarianism. This fact comes down to a number of factors
spurring it on: ecological constraints necessitating equity for the group, the
natural selection of cooperative and prosocial behaviours, but also through
cultural constructs and social networks to maintain, facilitate and enforce
equality. Cooperation is fundamental in these hunter gatherer societies, and as
a David Attenborough documentary
shows, it is possible through cooperation that 3 Dorobo hunters of Kenya can
scare off 15 hungry lions from a recently deceased game and go home with free
meat to feed the tribe. Indeed James Woodburn, Emeritus Professor of
Anthropology at the London School of Economics, states that hunter gatherers
are “aggressively egalitarian” because this egalitarianism is a necessity for
their survival. Some of the most profound examples of altruistic
punishment of freeriders occur in these hunter gatherer societies, and some
of the most profound examples of how cooperative
and prosocial behaviours are incentivised are found in hunter gatherers
societies. Recent
ethnographic research and statistical modelling – published in Nature by a
team of anthropologists and statisticians from Harvard University, University
of California at San Diego and University of Cambridge – has uncovered the networks
of cooperation of the Hadza in Tanzania and how cooperators cluster
together in order to outcompete freeriders and egotists and how these networks
are found in modern social interactions (Coren
L. Apicella of Harvard University explains it here). Hunter gatherers
are profoundly the antithesis to Homo economicus
– their society is
based on the gift economy where there is complete communal sharing of
resources and selfishness is fundamentally taboo and dominators are abhorred.
The market economy is a myth
when it comes to the subsistence gift economies of hunter gatherers, as John M. Gowdy, Professor
of Economics and Social Sciences at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, shows
in the Cambridge
Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Among the Hadza people of Tanzania there
are elaborate rules to ensure that all meat from a hunting expedition is
equally shared. Hoarding, or even having a greater share than others, is
socially unacceptable and egotists are punished. Apart from personal items,
such as tools, weapons, or jewellery, there are sanctions against accumulating
possessions, not least because the nomadism of hunter gatherers makes possessions
a nuisance. Gowdy proposes that the study of the state of nature, that of our
first way of life as hunter gatherers, offers fundamental challenges to the economic
orthodoxy of the neoclassical and neoliberal philosophy of Homo economicus:
- The economic notion of scarcity is a social
construct, not an inherent property of human existence.
- The separation of work from social life is not a
necessary characteristic of economic production.
- The linking of individual wellbeing to
individual production is not a necessary characteristic of economic
organization.
- Selfishness and acquisitiveness are aspects of
human nature, but not necessarily the dominant ones.
- Inequality based on class and gender is not a
necessary characteristic of human society.
There has been extensive
ethnographic research on the socioeconomic structures of hunter gatherers around
the world and the majority of evidence suggests that there are indeed profound
egalitarian. In Egalitarian
Societies, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute, Woodburn lays
out the social and economic organisation and structures of hunter gatherer
societies that are egalitarian. These societies (such as the Mbuti of the
Congo, the !Kung of the Kalahari, the Hadza of Tanzania, the Batek of Malaysia,
the Paliyan of South India, the Awá-Guajá of Brazil, the Aeta of the Philippines,
and Mardu of western Australia) display profound social, economic and gender
parities which are maintained by cultural constructs to enforce and coerce
egalitarianism and social networks of clustering cooperative and prosocial
behaviours. Woodburn establishes four key characteristics of such immediate
return societies that are conducive for egalitarianism:
- Social groupings are flexible and constantly
changing in composition.
- Individuals have a choice of whom they associate
with in residence, in the hunting and gathering food quest, in trade and
exchange, and in ritual contexts.
- People are not dependent on specific other
people for access to basic requirements.
- Relationships between people, whether
relationships of kinship or other social exchanges, stress sharing and
mutuality not involving long-term binding commitments.
The equality found in these hunter
gatherer societies is achieved through direct individual access to resources;
through direct individual access to means coercion and means of mobility which
limit the imposition of control; through procedures which prevent accumulation
and impose sharing; through mechanisms which allow goods to circulate without
making people dependent upon one another. With these value systems of
non-competition, egalitarian hunter-gatherers limits the development of social
stratification and in principle extend equality to all.
Ethnographic research on the Mardu
people in Western Australia by Robert Tonkinson, Emeritus
Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia and author of The Mardu
Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert,
shows similar structures and characteristics. The potential for
inequality in Mardu society is submerged due to the considerable weight of an
ethos and praxis of mutual aid and a notable stress on individual autonomy. Relationships
that are structurally asymmetrical, as is the case between most adjacent
generational members, have both parties appealing to the same imperative,
namely of nurturance, reciprocity, and to assert equality of responsibility. The
ecological constraints, such as unreliability of rainfall, are fundamental for
such social and economic organisation. The dominant cultural logic – which
favours permeable boundaries, a decidedly regional world view, and strong
stress on interdependence rather than competition – is thus underlain by an
ecological imperative. Whilst individual autonomy is stressed, egotism by
individuals is not tolerated. Selfishness and egotism are considered Gurndabarni, or shameless, and the group
will outcast individuals that abuse the ethos of mutual aid. Much time is spent
together, in family groups and as parts of multifamily bands whose members camp
in close proximity to one another. In these domestic situations, there is not
gender dominance of the males over the females due to the norms of kinship that
significantly constrain behaviour after being enculured from a young age.
The distain for arrogance is
also observed with the !Kung. !Kung groups are typified by strong and continual
socialisation and enculturation processes against hoarding and against displays
of arrogance and authority. The proper behaviour of a !Kung hunter who has made
a big kill is to speak of it in passing and in a deprecating manner; if an
individual does not minimise or speak lightly of his own accomplishments, his
friends and relatives will not hesitate to do it for him. As Richard B.
Lee, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology of University of Toronto, stated in
The
!Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (1979):
None is arrogant, overbearing, boastful, or
aloof. In !Kung terms these traits
absolutely disqualify a person as a leader and may engender
even stronger forms of ostracism.
Another trait emphatically not found among traditional camp leaders is a desire
for wealth or acquisitiveness. Whatever their personal influence over groups
decisions, they never translate this into more wealth or more leisure time than
group members have. Their accumulation of material goods is never more, and is
often much less, than the average accumulation of the other households in the
camp.
Comparatively, every single
agricultural society throughout history until modernity, from Ancient China to
Tsarist Russia, have been totalitarian, fascist or authoritarian and based on
profound social stratification and hierarchies of power. Private property,
competitive trade, asymmetrical access to resources, and formalised rules led
to the formation of classes. The philosophies of nationalism in ancient
civilisations (or namely its abuse by leaders and the upper classes) and
individualism in modern nation states completely disregarded the common good
and egalitarianism became impossible. The development of agricultural societies
placed new barriers between individuals and flexible access to resources,
because trade often siphoned resources away, because some segments of the
society increasingly had only indirect access to food, because investments in
new technology to improve production focused power in the hands of elites so
that their benefits were not widely shared, and perhaps because of the outright
exploitation and deprivation of some segments of society. The clear class
stratification of health in early and modern civilizations, and the general
failure of either early or modern civilizations to promote clear improvements
in health, nutrition, or economic homeostasis for large segments of their
populations until the very recent past all reinforce competitive and
exploitative models of the origins and function of civilized states.
Labour and Leisure: Hunter Gatherers as the Original Affluent Society
There has been an immensity of
ethnographic research showing that the average weekly working time for a hunter
gatherer is far less than their horticultural, pastoral, agricultural and early
industrial counterparts. Indeed this may seem counterintuitive for a hunter and
gatherer to have an easily life in terms of labour and leisure, but there is
substantial energy expenditure involved in non-hunter gatherer economies. The
seasonal nature of harvesting, the susceptibility to pests and plagues, the
grounds for epidemics, and the incentive for conflict over land all contribute
to offsetting the benefits of surplus and the division of labour that
agriculture yields. Whilst hunter gatherers are subject to episodic patterns of
starvation due to natural disasters and limited ability to store food, these costs
are offset by their nomadic mobility to search for new food sources and
natural resources. The BBC documentarian Bruce Parry found out this leisurely
existence when he
lived with Babongo people of Gabon. Indeed, the Hadza are ingenious
survival experts when it comes to their harsh environmental conditions and yet
they still manage to live an affluent life when all their material wants easily
met. A BBC documentary by Ray Mears
shows the rather straightforward
life they Hadza people have. The !Kung people are another profound example
of the effectiveness and ease of hunting and gathering. As Yehudi Cohen, Emeritus
Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, points out in Man in Adaptation: The Cultural Present and
the Biosocial Background (1974):
In all, the adults of the camp worked about
two and a half days a week. Since the average working day was about six hours
long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen, despite their harsh environment, merely
devote from twelve to nineteen hours a week to getting food. Even the hardest
working individual in the camp, a man named Oma, spent a maximum of 32 hours a
week in the food quest.
Conversely, the agricultural
process is a long and labour intensive one: the land must be cleared and the
crops must be planted, irrigated, tended to, protected from pests, harvested
and transported, processed and stored and then prepared for consumption.
Animals as cattle must be domesticated and reared, grazing grounds must be
cleared, cattle must be tended to and protected, herds must be culled, sheep to
be sheared, cows to be milked or butchered, and waste must be disposed of. The
amount of work per capita increases and the amount of leisure decreases with
the development of agriculture where inversely a subsistence labour intensity
is characteristically intermittent, a day on and a day off. Thus agriculture is immensely labour
intensive and agricultural land has diminishing marginal returns due to soil
depletion, water erosion and other environmental weathering processes. As Mark
Nathan, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New
York, notes in Health and the Rise of
Civilization (1999 Yale University Press):
The strategies that sedentary and civilized
populations use to reduce or eliminate food crises generate costs and risks as
well as benefits. These advantages may be outweighed by the greater
vulnerability that crops often display toward climatic fluctuations or other
natural hazards, a vulnerability that is then exacerbated by the specialised
nature or narrow focus of many agricultural systems. The advantages are also
offset by the loss of mobility that results from agriculture, the limits and
failures of various storage systems and the vulnerability of sedentary
communities to epidemic disease, raiding and sacking, and political
expropriation of stored resources.
Peace and Conflict: Mengalah
and Naklik or Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes
There are many perceptions of
violent intertribal warfare and brutish conflicts plaguing hunter gatherer
societies. Indeed, some hunter gatherer societies have been and are ones of
warriors (such as the Surma people of Ethiopia and their stick fighting, and
various Native American tribes), but the misperceptions stem from the
misunderstanding of what hunter gatherers are, what constitutes conflict and
violence, but also an inability to reflect on the history of violence in
agricultural societies. Douglas P. Fry, a Professor of Anthropology at Abo
Akademi University in Finland and the University of Arizona in America, has
done extensive research in cultural variations of conflict resolution and the
nature of peace and violence in societies around the world. His The
Human Potential for Peace: An
Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence (2006
Oxford University Press) challenges the flawed perceptions of the innateness
and inevitability of violence and warfare in our species and provides an
overview of the existence of peaceful societies throughout history. Fry argues
that the inevitability of conflict is real for all societies but that this does
not at all translate into violence and warfare, and that hunter gatherers have
some of the best examples of conflict resolution systems and norms of peace.
The Semai people, of the Orang
Asli hunter gatherers in the centre of the Malay Peninsula, are a profound
example of this. Their way of life is marked by the archetypal gift economy and
the dichotomy between public and private is non-existent. The Semai proverb “there are more reasons to fear a dispute
than a tiger” is the basis for their social interactions and all conflicts
and disputes are resolved through Becharaa,
a public assembly whereby justice is distributed through communal consensus.
The philosophy of Mengalah, or to
yield, is the norm with the Semai and, through the process of enculturation,
children are taught these principles of peace, cooperation and the preservation
of harmony. Overall, Mengalah manages
to manifest in Semai society as the complete absence of noncompetitive
children’ games, the essential absence of murder and rape, and the
characterisation of social interactions through mutual benefit.
Another hunter gatherer
society where violence is rare is with the Inuit. Jean L. Briggs,
Emerita Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, has
conducted an immensity of ethnographic surveys on the Inuit of the central
Canadian Arctic. In The Dynamics of Peace
in Canadian Inuit Groups in The Anthropology
of Peace and Nonviolence, Briggs examines the emotional, educational and
developmental processes of Inuit children in a society of contradictory
beliefs. Whilst a hunting and fishing people, values of nonviolence are equally
essentially in maintaining Inuit society. Briggs observed an essential lack of
interpersonal aggression, from pushing and shoving to even shouting. Children
are taught to internalise cooperative values, abhor interpersonal conflict, to
associate danger (environmental risks) with aggression (animal or personal
hostility), and to realise the possibility of revenge. Moreover, potentially
hostile requests are pacified through non-threatening jokes, the proposals of
commitments are frowned upon, conflicts are expressed through subtle hints and
people counterbalance escalated disputes with emphasised nurturance. The philosophy
of Naklik underscores Inuit social
interactions entailing the warm concern for the welfare of others.
It can be seen that the
majority of peaceful societies through history and around the world of been
hunter gatherers. The Encyclopaedia of
Peaceful Societies collated by a team of anthropologists from the United
States provides a systematic overview of the existence and nature of peaceful
societies through history and around the world. Identified are twenty five
peaceful societies where war and violence are essentially absent and twenty of
these societies are indeed hunter gatherer societies. This comes down to the
socioeconomic organisation of these societies as well as the cultural norms
that are taught to children and enforced through various measures.
Comparatively, agriculture fundamentally incentives and leads to warfare. With
the first cities thanks to agriculture came the first standing professional
militaries to protect land and trade routes and to expand land due to
population growth, along with an immensity of other social and economic issues.
The Agricultural Path to Warfare
Every agricultural society
from the ancient civilisations to the modern nation states have been to war on
large scales – from the Peloponnesian War to the Saxon Wars, from the Crusade
to the Mongol conquests, from the Thirty Years War to the American Independence
War, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War, and from the First World War
to the immensity of civil and ethnic conflicts in Africa and Asia. Overall, far
from being the Hobbesian Bellum Omnium
Contra Omnes, many hunter gatherer societies are far more likely to be
peaceful and some display profound norms of this, such as Semai Mengalah and Inuit Naklik.
Conclusion
Thus, the state of nature is
not as brutish or as poor as Hobbes proposed in 1651. Indeed, whilst living as
a nomadic foraging might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it does indeed seem that
is one of less work, less violence and more social and economic equality – not that
these traits are normatively good or bad. Empirically, the average person in a
hunter gatherer society would have more access to food, have to work less and
have more leisure time and be subject to less violence than the average person
in an agricultural society throughout history. Hunting and gathering has all
the strengths of its weaknesses. Periodic movement and restraint in wealth and
adaptations, the kinds of necessities of the economic practice and creative
adaptations the kinds of necessities of which virtues are made. Precisely in
such a framework, affluence becomes possible. Mobility and moderation put hunters
and gatherers ends within range of their technical means. An undeveloped mode
of production is thus rendered highly effective. The hunter gatherers life is
not as difficult as it looks from the outside. Indeed the higher level of
inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be completely better-off
than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure
quantity of people alive goes way up, as per Derek Parfit’s repugnant
conclusion along the lines of the Malthusian growth model.
Even if the Hobbesian Leviathan
was accurate in being the life in the state of nature is brutish and poor, what
does that make the life in the state of agricultural based societies? The
archaeological and palaeopathological evidence shows that life expectancy in
the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Middle Ages, and Early Modern period right
up until the Renaissance and scientific revolution was far less than that of
hunter gatherers. Indeed, the Swedish life expectancy
in 1750 was on par with hunter gatherers around the world.
The Swedish Life Expectancy of the 1750s and
Hunter Gatherer Life Expectancy
Life in agricultural societies,
from the Neolithic to early modern history (and still for developing nations) was
a plagued, unfair, chronic, violent, and politically exploited existence. It
has only been with the scientific revolution and the spread of liberalism and
civil rights have agricultural based societies been able to match the health
and socioeconomic benefits of hunter gatherers.
The only reason agriculture
has become dominant through history is because of the massive capacity for reproduction
of the human species it allows. Natural selection does not care about the
social, economic or indeed medical realities an organism exists in – all it
cares about is replicating and thanks to agricultural surplus this can take
place. Population density dramatically and exponentially grew with the
invention of agriculture during the Neolithic transition, and yet was marked by
lower life expectancy than those living in the Palaeolithic hunter gatherer
subsistence. Agriculture does indeed have benefits, but these benefits are largely short term. Even if you reject the normative position taken by Jared Diamond
in describing agriculture as the worst invention in human history, his analysis in Guns, Germs and Steel as to how agricultural societies dominant others is still completely valid. But
just because agricultural societies have been the dominant and yielding the
largest populations, it does not necessarily make them the best empirically to
live in. Natural selection does not care about subjective wellbeing or the
socioeconomic conditions an organism lives in and agricultural societies,
whilst producing massive inequalities and health hazards, enabled the human
species to exponentially grow. Indeed hunter gatherers would have all taken the
step to agriculture if their environmental conditions allowed.
--
Tasman Bain is a second year
Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) and Bachelor of Social Science (International
Development) Student at the University of Queensland. He is interested
evolutionary anthropology, public economics and philosophy of science and enjoys
endurance running, reading Douglas Adams, and playing the glockenspiel.
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