1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number i, February I988? I988 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved OOII-3204/88/29oi-0002$2.75 Two major questions present themselves in the social anthropology of hunter-gatherers. These questions do Some Major Problems not overtly shape the studies of researchers in the area and probably need not even be explicitly posed.2 Rather, they could be seen as problems constitutive of the anin the Social thropology of hunter-gatherers, problems that necessarily come to be posed in respect of it if only from outside Anthropology of the discipline. I have the feeling that the intellectual value and general interest of research on hunter-gatherer societies lie in our capacity or potential for scientifically Hunter- Gatherers' answering these questions. The first question arises from the fact that huntergatherers appear to be the most ancient of so-called primitive societies-the impression that they preserve by Alain Testart the most archaic way of life known to humanity, that characteristic of the whole of the Palaeolithic. I am not saying that hunter-gatherer societies are the most ancient, merely that they appear to be so-that they evoke What is the relationship between the present-day hunter-gatherer the societies of the Palaeolithic. Every question necesstudied by anthropologists and the societies of the Palaeolithic? sarily arises initially at the level of appearances, and it is And how is the articulation between the economy of these soci- the business of science to criticise these appearances. eties and their other aspects to be conceived? In attempting to The first question may therefore be formulated thus: answer these questions, this article takes into account a further problem, that of the uniqueness of Australian Aboriginal social Given the appearance of similarity in terms of life-style, organization. technology, etc., between existing3 hunter-gatherer societies and those of the past, how should one conceive of ALAIN TESTART is Directeur de Recherche, deuxieme classe, of the relation between them? the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (mailing ad- This question is an evolutionary one, and I know that dress: Maison des Sciences de l'homme, 54 boulevard Raspail, many of my colleagues will not concern themselves Paris Cedex 6, France). Born in 1945, he was educated at the Ecole National Superieure des Mines de Paris (dipl6me with it, for anti-evolutionist feeling has been intense for d'ingenieur, i968) and at the Universite de Paris VII (doctorat de most of this century, particularly in France, and to a troisieme cycle en ethnologie, 1975). His research interests are th large extent remains so. Therefore it is necessary here to social organization of the Australian Aborigines, the social an- say a word about evolutionism and in its favour. In its thropology of hunter-gatherers, and symbolism. His publications minimal form, evolutionism appears to me to consist, include Des classifications dualistes en Australie: Essai sur l'evolution de l'organisation sociale (Paris and Lille: Editions de 1 once it has been recognized that social forms change in Maison des Sciences de l'homme and Lille III, 1978), Les chas- the long term, in an investigation of the general characseurs-cueilleurs, ou l'origine des in6galit6s (Paris: Societe ter of that change and of the laws, if any, that govern it. d'ethnographie [Universite de Paris X, Nanterre], i982), Essai sur Such an inquiry cannot but be legitimate, and it is astonles fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs (Paris: EHESS, Cahiers de l'homme, i986), and L ishing that scholars, and not the least eminent, such as communisme primitif, I, Economie et id6ologie (Paris: Maison Radcliffe-Brown in certain of his writings (I968[I95.2: des Sciences de l'homme, i985). The present paper was submitte II5), have supposedly been able to found the scientific in final form I9 VI 87. standing of social anthropology on the a priori rejection of all evolutionary concems. I lack the space here to develop this argument (but see Testart I985c, i987b); I will say only that one should not confuse the undeniably outdated evolutionist schools of the igth century with a careful modem inquiry based on the considerable findings of prehistoric archaeology and embarking on what I would call a "reasoned evolutionism." Among the errors of earlier evolutionism could be cited the particular theses of the different igth-century schools, most of them untenable; the methods adopted by the evolu- i. Translated by Roy Willis. 2. Posed at the Chicago symposium of I966 and aired in Man the Hunter (Lee and DeVore i968), they seem to have been less prominent in the course of the four intemational conferences huntergatherers held in Paris, Quebec, Bad Homburg, and London between 1978 and I "Existing" in the sense of the "ethnographic present" or what prehistorians call the "sub-present," that is, those societies capable of being treated anthropologically or ethnohistorically and broadly observed from the 17th or i8th century up until our times. I
2 2 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number I, February 1988 tionists, particularly the abuse of the notion of "survival," which was applied willy-nilly to different institutions without asking why and in what context a past institution could survive and be integrated as a living element into a new structure; and the general philosophy governing evolutionary inquiries, including the outdated idea of moral progress and the concept of social evolution on a biological model. Here was an ensemble both odd and obsolete. For a better understanding of the difference between these old evolutionist positions and those currently possible, we may return to the question: What is the relation between existing and former hunter-gatherer societies? Writing at the tum of the century, Sollas (I9II:382 et passim) replies without more ado to this question with the statement that the Tasmanians are a people of the Eolithic, the Australians "Mousterians of the Antipodes," the Bushmen Aurignacians, and the Eskimo Magdalenians. He identifies the one with the other, purely and simply. It is evident, however, that the Eskimo are not Magdalenians any more than other existing hunter-gatherers are prehistoric peoples. There can be no question of repeating such naive statements today. The anti-evolutionists could well reply that the two series of peoples compared by Sollas are separated by at least io,ooo years. But anti-evolutionism4 contents itself with asserting this difference, as much in space as in time-a viewpoint that prevents comparison of peoples with obvious similarities. In other words, between a simplistic evolutionist position that claims to identify past cultures with those of the present and the opposite position that restricts itself to observing difference and rejects even the idea of comparison, there is an intermediate and more subtle position that takes account of both evident differences and apparent similarities. This contention may seem trivial to some, but it is still heresy to others. The relation between existing and past huntergatherer societies is problematic, and it is our job to construct a conception of it. The answer to the question cannot be other than complex, and the two extreme responses I have evoked both err by excess of simplicity, the first because it does not see this relation as problematic and the second because it denies the existence of any such relation. Both evade the problem, which is in what respects existing hunter-gatherer societies are continuous with those of the past and in what respects they are different. The second question arises from our speaking of hunter-gatherer societies, that is to say, of an ensemble of societies grouped in the same category because of the similar appearances of their subsistence techniques and their economies. This assumes first of all that peoples as different and widely separated one from another as the Australian Aborigines and the Inuit (Eskimo) can be profitably compared: what is in question is thus initially the possibility of a social anthropology notwithstanding cultural differences (in the sense of cultural anthropology). Further, these societies are grouped in terms of techno-economic level, and this presupposes that their technological and economic characteristics are relevant for the description and understanding of them. The underlying question is how one is to conceptualize a possible articulation between the economic aspect of a society and its other aspects. During the past few decades there have been many discussions on how hunter-gatherers should be defined. Here I take it as obvious that hunter-gatherers are by definition people who hunt and gather and do other things like hunting and gathering. However, what does it mean to hunt and gather? It could mean to exploit resources the reproduction of which one does not control as one does in agriculture and/or stockkeeping. If the relevant criterion is absence of domestication in respect of subsistence, it would seem necessary to include all who depend for subsistence upon wild resources, whether fishing, collecting, or gathering. Finally, if this technical definition appears a good one it is not because of a materialism that I believe should be a question rather than a doctrine but rather because it allows the explicit formulation of one of the questions that give the study of hunter-gatherers its interest: Is there a relation, and, if so, how should it be expressed, between the techno-economic level of a society and the various aspects of its social organization? This definition seems a good one (although it should be emphasized that any definition is inevitably provisional) because it does not evade the problem as would a definition in purely social terms,5 which would mix in the very moment of its utterance terms referring to technical activities ("huntergatherers") with social forms. In the same way, adherents of "cultural ecology" long used the term "band society" in reference to hunter-gatherers when instead it should have been asked to what extent these societies were in fact organized into bands. This question was no doubt posed, but it would have been better to avoid a terminology that tended to obscure it. 4. Such a position has recently been forcefully reaffirmed by Schrire I shall now briefly outline the evolution of what seem (i984). When she makes herself the advocate of archaeology and to me to have been the major problematics of the anethnohistory, above all in respec to southern Africand Australia, thropology of hunter-gatherers starting with Childe's two immense regions that have been little investigated from these points of view, I can only applaud, but I am unable to follow her concept of the "Neolithic Revolution" (I :34; when she appears to oppose history and evolutionism. The ques- 1953:43; I964:65; I96l:7I; etc.). The tion that arises is rather that of knowing whether, on the basis of a choice of such a point of departure may seem surprising better knowledge of particular histories, one can discern more general evolutionary tendencies. If the crucial question to be posed to an evolutionism I call reasoned consists in identifying the relations 5. As proposed by Ingold (ig8oa:74). Correlatively, an archaeologist (necessarily historical) between existing and past societies, that specializing in the Middle East, Ducos (I 976:148), proposes a socioevolutionism incontestably counts archaeologists and ethnohisto- economic definition (in terms of property) of the domestication of rians among its principal supporters and audience. animals.
3 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers 3 in that Childe was not an anthropologist and did not claim to be one. Moreover, his main field of study was the Neolithic; he had little to say about the Palaeolithic and was consistently reticent about the social characteristics to be attributed to hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless, I believe that his concept of the Neolithic Revolution lends strength and relevance to the category of huntergatherers, which can be envisaged only in its opposition to the category of agro-pastoralists. Two points should be emphasized: (1) Childe conceived of this opposition as both diachronic and synchronic, and it is thus capable of organizing data from both prehistoric archaeology and ethnography. (2) Conceived diachronically, it translates as a major historic rupture comparable in importance, according to Childe, to that constituted by the Industrial Revolution in modem times. This, grosso modo, is the grand conceptual framework within which the idea of hunter-gatherers has evolved.6 Childe has been much criticised for his notion of a Neolithic Revolution. It has been argued that the process involved was extremely slow and not the sudden rupture suggested by the term "revolution," that his materialism is somewhat mechanistic, etc. But these reproaches from prehistorians have to do with the way of conceiving this Neolithic Revolution as a historical process; it is always a matter in these debates of describing or reconstituting this process, its explanation, its causes, etc. I am not competent to discuss these criticisms (which, insofar as I can judge, appear well founded), and I do not see the necessity to do so because in my view Childe's main contribution is hardly that of having attempted to imagine a process but of having thought of a conceptual opposition. What he bequeathed to later researchers was not so much a reflection on the way in which one type of society succeeds another as the very idea of a global and radical opposition between two major kinds of socio-economic organization. He was in fact the first to propose a definition-or at least to see the implications of a definition-of the Neolithic as an epoch characterized by sedentary agriculture; correlatively, the Palaeolithic is defined by a hunter-gathering economy. By so doing, it could be said, he achieved, in the field of prehistory and, more generally, in anthropology, an epistemological rupture or break7 in relation to three igth-century approaches to the difference between these epochs: (i) a naturalistic approach, in terms of which the succession of the two stages of the Stone Age is seen as being like that of two geological eras (glacial/ which Palaeolithic and Neolithic are defined as the Age of Worked Stone and the Age of Polished Stone,9 and (3) an alimentary approach that goes far beyond the confines of prehistory which classifies peoples according to what they eat and is expressed in the evolutionary sequence hunting, stockbreeding, agriculture. This last rupture is more difficulto define than the others, because here I am introducing a distinction not made by Childe himself, but it is decisive for all that. Childe undoubtedly interested himself in peoples' diets, and it was even one of his main preoccupations, but he was less concerned with what men ate than with the way they produced it and the repercussions of this production on society.'0 In his hands the distinction between Palaeolithic and Neolithic becomes an economic difference: the Neolithic is defined as a way of producing food following the domestication of plants and animals, implies a certain organization of production, and has certain consequences for demographic structure and mode of life. In the final analysis it matters little whether people eat curds or cereals; although Childe did not use these terms, it is economic structure that is in question. In thus defining the Palaeolithic and Neolithic in economic terms, he drew attention to the difference between two major kinds of society. For one thing, he discovered the social in the depths of prehistory, a discipline whose immediate data were of a geological or naturalistic order. But, by the same token, he be- queathed a continuing problem to social anthropology: if this opposition between two great categories of society defined by their economies is to have meaning and relevance, how should one think of each of these ensembles in all their social dimensions? What ties, what connections, what causal relations link the economy and other aspects of the social? The problem of the articulation between economy and society has been posed in an- thropology since the thirties, when Steward (I936, I955) attacked it in terms of a problematic that was to endure beyond Man the Hunter into the seventies. In adopting the notion of "band" already present in American an- thropology, Steward proposed a moderate and rather flexible but convincing enough integration of the known ethnographic facts. The American "band" more or less corresponded to what Radcliffe-Brown (I930-3i), referring to Australia, called the "horde": a fundamental group, residential and economic, endowed with a certain capacity for social and political integration. The "band post-glacial) characterized by different environments 9. These definitions are generally attributed to Lubbock in i865, and different faunas,8 (2) a technological approach, in although he in fact made use of the three criteria, including the economic one, to define and differentiate the two Stone Ages-a 6. One can see something like a hunting stage in Morgan's Ancient fact, moreover, recognized by Childe (i963[19511:.29). Childe's con- Society, but the opposition between hunters and agriculturalists tribution thus consisted essentially in underlining the central imdoes not figure there as a key opposition as it does for Childe. portance of a criterion already recognized before him, not of invent- 7. The expression "epistemological break" (coupure 6pist6mo- ing it. logique) is proposed by Althusser (i965:24) to designate one of the io. It was thus that he wrote (I963[I951I:33) to justify his key concepts of the epistemology of Gaston Bachelard. definition of the Neolithic: "Obviously the cultivation of edible 8. On this point Childe did no more than take up in his own way a plants, the breeding of animals for food, or the combination of both rupture already entrenched in prehistory, the existence, recognized pursuits in mixed farming, did represent a revolutionary advance in since the tum of the century, of a period called the "Mesolithic" human economy. It permitted a substantial expansion of populaafter the last glaciation and continuing the tradition of worked tion. It made possible and even necessary the production of a social stone. surplus...."
4 4 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number I, February I988 level of organization" was the social form held to corre- fishers' constituting a category distinct from that of spond to the hunter-gathering economy. This is-oi hunter-gatherers (Murdock I968a:i5). Neither of these was-the key concept of the anthropology of hunter- solutions includes the idea of a specific articulation begatherers. tween economic form and social form, because at pre- That Childe said but little, as I have remarked, about cisely this point recourse is had to a criterion extemal to the relation between the economy and the rest of society the economic structure, either ecological or alimenamong hunter-gatherers may be because of his unhappy tary."1 awareness of the inadequacy of his thinking on the sub- 2. Vis-a-vis Soviet anthropology and prehistory, the ject. One cannot propose a Neolithic Revolution or a presence in Siberia, of inegalitarian hunters and fisherrupture that separates two major ensembles unless the folk poses a problem similar to that of the Northwest phenomena on each side of the divide can at least for the Coast. This problem has been obscured for a long time most part be thought of in the same terms, and Childe by a purely technological conception of the Neolithic, was too well acquainted with the ethnographic data not principally defined by the use of pottery and polished to know that no such unification is possible. There are, stone: hence all the Siberian hunter-gatherers are exin particular, societies of the Northwest Coast of North cluded from the Neolithic category (Mongait I959:83- America that constitute an enormous challenge: lacking 87; Okladnikov i962:273-74; et al.; but note some difagriculture or stockbreeding, these societies are never- ferent approaches since the seventies, such as that of theless quasi-sedentary and strongly inegalitarian Khlobystin, cited by Howe I976). (Childe I954:4I-42). Childe was greatly preoccupied The question is thus a double one. On the one hand, with the archaeological data from Lake Baikal and from one has to decide whether to recognize, within the large certain European sites, where again the grave goods class of hunter-gatherers (defined as peoples not practisof simple hunter-gatherershow that their societies ing domestication), different categories; eventually this were inegalitarian (I963[I95i]:82-86). He nonetheless question implies another on the periodization of prehisadhered to what might be called the "surplus argu- toric time. On the other hand, the question is that of the ment": that in the absence of food production, the econ- idea of an articulation between economy and society: omy of hunter-gatherers is too weak and undeveloped to how to understand tne fact that hunter-gatherers held to yield a surplus and thereforeconomic inequalities can- be exceptional, if indeed they possess the same econnot emerge. Childe appears to have maintained this line omy, have been able to construct such different sociof reasoning until the end of his life (I954:4I-48), and eties. It is to answer this double question that I have put yet he was obliged to recognize the existence of in- forward the concept of "storing hunter-gatherers,"'2 a equalities among certain hunter-gatherers. If one cannot category arising from recognition of an economic struceven say of these societies that they are always egalitar- ture characterized by (i) an economic cycle based on ian (i963[195i]:85-86), what can one say about them seasonal and massive storage of staples and (2) some anthat is general? nual planning of the economy, implying a certain rigid- Childe was too great a thinker to have recourse to ity of behaviours and strategies. As the broad outlines of expedients to rid himself of this embarrassing problem. this thesis have already been laid out in the pages of this It was in fact crucial for his thinking, because one can- journal (Testart i982b), I return to it here only to show not affirm the validity of an opposition between two how it relates to the problematic just outlined and to terms when one of them is itself a problem. One could indicate how it may be improved upon. recognize the diversity of Neolithic societies once they Conceived in economic terms, this proposed solution had emerged from their common source, but what was shatters the supposed unity of hunter-gatherers in that one to make of these hunter-gatherers, themselves so these terms do not lead to domestication; the solution diverse? This is why it can be said that, despite the mod- consists in redefining the economic categories and disest place of hunter-gatherers in Childe's writings, the question posed by such exceptional hunter-gatherer soi i. Some discordant voices made themselves heard from the sixties cieties as those of the Northwest Coast haunts his entire in relation to California, which posed a problem similar to that of work. the Northwest Coast. These critics contested, with reason, the It equally haunts the anthropology of hunter- universality of the "band" model and established that the Indians of California, the most numerous of the hunter-gatherers and gatherers. In this respect it is extremely interesting-at among the most important for their cultural achievements, could an epistemological level-to see how this unresolved in no way be simply set aside as "exceptional"(bean and Saubel question provoked a regression to an earlier problematic: ig6i:2,37; Kunkel 1974:8; Bean and Blackburn 1976; et al.). I. In American anthropology informed by the theory I 2. Although the idea appeared in two preliminary articles (Testart of the "band," the question takes the following form: 1979a:IoI-3; 1979b), it was not fully developed until my book (I982a). Since the publication of this work, numerou studies of How is it possible that the societies of the Northwest "exceptional" hunter-gatherers have appeared, among which could Coast are organized not at the band level but at that of be cited a collective Japanese publication (Koyama and Thomas the chiefdom? Two answers were proposed during the 198I) with the significant title Affluent Foragers that traces a very fifties and sixties. According to one, it is exceptional interesting parallel between aboriginal Californiand the Japan of the Jomon epoch; some works on the Northwest Coast, emphasizecological conditions that account for the exceptional ing such exceptional aspects as slavery (Mitchell and Donald I985) character of these societies (Steward I 955:175; Service or the potlatch (Mauze I986); some studies of the Eskimo of northi962:47; et al.). According to the other, it is a matter of westem Alaska (Burch I986); etc.
5 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers 15 tinguishing others that are more precise and relevant. and provides the economic basis on which the first But this economic solution also appeals to the other ap- statelike societies can develop. The "Neolithic Revoluproaches (ecological, technological, alimentary) and per- tion" conceived by Childe as the ensemble of the radical mits a restoration of the factors implicated by these ap- changes introduced by the adoption of agriculture is thus proaches to their proper place as secondary ones, not exploded in space and time along two axes, geographical stripped of relevance but drawing their meaning from and historical. Rather than a refutation of Childe's their interaction with economic structures. Thus the views, the proposed model consists, in a sense, of its economic structure based on storage presupposes four generalization. conditions for its realization, two ecological and two The main interest of the new model is that it allows us technological: resources have to be (i) abundant and (2) to paint a picture of social evolution that is much more seasonal, and there must be techniques for (i) the acqui- satisfying than a simple succession from Palaeolithic to sition of large amounts of resources and (2) their preser- Neolithic. This picture is more complex not only in that vation and long-term storage. Thus not only environ- it reveals a rupture that had not been apparent before and mental and technological factors but also the alimentary in distinguishing two ruptures where only one had been one become subordinated to and integrated with the eco- seen but also, while recognizing the existence of a major nomic structure. From simple considerations of the time line of development, in drawing attention to regional required to preserve resources it is apparent that it was modalities of evolution. To me it appears neither rigorrelatively short when it came to vegetables (the products ously unilinear nor, properly speaking, multilinear. of gathering) and fish and very great for meat; it follows That said, we now come to the second major question that this storage economy could come into being only posed at the beginning of this article, that of the relafor those who were principally gatherers and/or fishers tions between economy and society. How does the prorather than hunters. posed model allow us to respond to this question? It This solution evidently leads to rejection of the idea of could be said to have been especially designed to take a "Neolithic Revolution" and the related idea of a radi- account of certain social characteristicso surprising for cal separation between hunter-gatherers and agro- hunter-gatherers that they had been called "exceppastoralists. Or rather it results, within Childe's own tional": their sedentary character and the profoundly inproblematic, in displacing the locus of the problem: it egalitarian nature of their society.13 Conceived in ecoreplaces the opposition between hunter-gatherers and nomic terms, it must appeal to a certain concept of the agro-pastoralists with another that is more relevant but relation between economy and society. Correlations bestill conceived in terms of economic structure. Not only come evident between economic structure and storage, is the previous category of hunter-gatherers irremediably sedentariness, and socio-economic inequality. These split into two irreducible categories but also the hunter- correlations are satisfying and allow us to envisage the gatherers I have called "storers" are seen to have the category of storing hunter-gatherers as an autonomous same economic structure as cultivators of cereals, the and properly constructed one solidly anchored in empirformer doing with wild resources (products of gathering, ical fact and quite distinct from the other category of fishing, etc.) exactly what the latter do with domes- hunter-gatherers characterized more classically by ticated ones. Here again the new model allows us to nomadism (a mobile life-style) and the egalitarian nature integrate the criterion of domestication as a secondary of their society. The idea of eventual causal links befactor. Where wild resources are not both abundant and tween the correlated elements is, however, at least in an seasonal, the introduction of adequate resources domes- important part, a problem. It is understandable that ticated by man and transplanted into the environment groups should practice intensive storage of their main is an indispensable precondition for the realization of food resources to provide against the season of scarcity the economic structure of storage. The model thus al- and also that they should be sedentary or nearly so lows us to view agriculture not as an economic factor of throughouthis season, since the accumulated reserves radical or universal importance but as a technological render unnecessary any migration in search of food. This factor that becomes decisive only under certain environ- connection between economic form and "residence patmental conditions. Agriculture becomes one of the tech- +.*-"//e ein 01"V%l an %"A ii 14 T+ p*n%w s^e1p, eon +,- Am.,.rp, nological preconditions of the economic structure. En- 13. I leave to one side a third characteristic of these societies, their visaged in historical perspective, the invention of high demographic density, which is much less pertinento the agriculture loses the radical importance that it had for discussion here. Childe and has to be resituated among the ensemble of 14. This does not mean that intensive food storage is the only inventions marking the final Palaeolithic and Meso- means for hunter-gatherers to become sedentary or that it is the lithic. Agriculture thus occupies a much more modest only factor that can explain the condition of those that are sedentary. I have always acknowledged at least three other factors (Tesposition in relation to the origin of the economic struc- tart I98I:I84-87; i982a:28-30) that combine in different degrees ture based on storage, but once this has been established, in each case: (i) the development of effective means of transport, it reassumes its historical importance as the sole factor such as sledges and draught and pack animals; (2) the possibility, capable of developing to the limit certain tendencies mainly realized in northern Eurasia (a point rightly emphasized by Watanabe I983), for that had the group to appeared earlier, in split into sub-groups, one of particular with the storage- which remains stable while others go on periodic expeditions; based structure: it allows the intensification of produc- (3) the existence of non-seasonal, abundant wild food resources tion in a way not realizable by simple hunter-gatherers that are concentrated in a limited area. Intensive storage (as I have
6 6 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number i, February I988 certain major characteristics of what Durkheim's fol- in that it does not allow a choice between two converse lowers would have called "social morphology": stability conceptions of the causal link. According to one of and concentration of the population in villages during these, it is the storage-based economy that, by generatthe season of scarcity, which is also the time of leisure, ing material riches within the society, gives rise to inthe season when ceremonies occur, etc. But the other equalities; the technological and economic organization connection, between what I have been calling the "eco- is the ultimate cause of social forms. According to the nomic base" and the development of socio-economic in- other, it is, on the contrary, the social forms that proequalities, is far from clear. The central idea (far from the voke the transformation in the material basis of the socionly one, but I simplify) is that the massive stockpiling ety; thus one could imagine, for example, that individof staples constitutes the material base for a possible uals or groups socially dominant by virtue of a hierarchy development of socio-economic inequalities. The key to (which would then be envisaged as the initial cause) dethe problem and the whole ambiguity of the formulation termined a certain intensification of production and turn on the use of the adjective "possible." It has two favoured the production of durable goods of which they senses. According to the first, the transition from an were the principal beneficiaries through their dominant economy of nomadic hunter-gathering to an economy position and that would allow them to ensure (or reinbased on storage permits (renders possible) the develop- force) their domination of an enlarged material base. Seement of socio-economic inequalities to the extent that ing no way of deciding in favour of one or the other of the bulk of the production is thenceforward transformed these arguments equally compatible with my ap- (by techniques appropriated and accumulated differen- proach,'6 I have avoided choosing between them. Withtially by individuals or by groups). Let it be understood out being able to identify precisely the causal connecthat there may be socio-economic inequalities outside tion between economic form and social form, the theory the storage-based economy, but these can only become inevitably leaves unanswered the question that has significant on the basis of such an economy: in concrete every right to be posed. It identifies a certain articulation terms, whereas a man socialized among nomadic between economy and society, but it is a weak articulahunter-gatherers could at the most accumulate some tion. I leave my criticism there, because there is another stone axes, feathers, furs, and other items valued by the that is much more decisive. culture, enjoy great prestige, accumulate wives, and dis- In the process of this general reorganization, the locus pose of the best portions of game that he was obliged to of the problem has been displaced: it is not the agriculredistribute in the absence of the practice of preserva- tural revolution that represents the major break among tion, the same man could, among storing hunter- societies but the adoption of an economic structure of gatherers, control a considerable mass of foodstuffs which the central feature is storage. It accounts much either as a private owner or as the head of a group. In the better than Childe's conceptualization for the distincsecond sense of the word "possible," the development of tion between egalitarian and inegalitarian societies: the inequalities is not ineluctable: it is only a possibility appearance of inequalities is in large part tied to storinherent in what I have called the economic base, and I age.'7 This reorganization, which I have already indiwas somewhat surprised to discover in each case study cated as lying entirely within the framework of Childe's of storing hunter-gatherers the presence of marked in- problematic, thus takes account of a very important asequalities. I have even asserted that this possibility is pect of society, but it has nothing to say on its other subordinated to certain social conditions, that it cannot aspects-kinship, social organization, and the symbolic be realized as long as food sharing is the rule and requires dimension, all matters that are the peculiar concerns of the appearance of a kind of private property in foodstuffs social anthropology. or control by the collectivity through a privileged indi- Nomadic hunter-gatherers, although they can be globvidual who is socially invested with a pre-eminent right ally characterized as egalitarian, exhibit enormous difover the management of the stores. (These two divergent ferences in terms of social organization. Nothing is more possibilities seemed to me to have been realized grosso striking in this respect than the peculiar position amidst modo, the one in California, the other on the Northwest this great class of nomadic hunter-gatherers occupied by Coast.) Australia. Here are what I see as the three major distinc- This is a complex argument that has not always been tive traits of Australian societies: understood,'5 and it conceals a fundamental ambiguity i. Unilinearity. With two or three doubtful excep- conceived it, integrated into a cyclical economic structure) entails sedentariness, but sedentariness does not entail storage. The ques tion here is only storage as I have defined it (i.e., simultaneousli intensive, seasonal, and providing the group with essential nutri tion during the whole season of scarcity) and not the more limitec storage, less systematic and directed to other ends, that is prac tised, more or less, by all hunter-gatherers (Testart i982a: I985a; Bahuchet and Thomas I985; Ingold I985; et al.). I 5. For example, the otherwise moderate criticism of me by Cauvix (i985:17 n. 8), according to which I suppose a private appropriatiol of stocks, can only be the result of a superficial reading of my book i 6. The original attempt by Legros (i982) to develop a theory of the origin of inequalities on a social base sprang from an argument of the second type; as he now sees it, his approach is not incompatible with mine (personal communication). 17. I have never claimed that this was the only factor. It would not apply to cultivators of cereals and hunter-gatherers in regions favourable for the establishment of a storage-based economy, i.e., regions in which the two environmental conditions for this economy are realized. I have indicated the limits of this approach in showing that the storage factor probably played no part for cultivators of root crops (Testart i982c).
7 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers 7 tions, all the more or less well-known Australian tribes cases. The situation in the Canadian interior is more (among the 500 on the continent at the time of coloniza- complex: unilinearity combined in varying measures tion) possess a clan organization and may be matrilineal, with totemism and with organization into two or three patrilineal, or both.'8 phratries is found among the southern Algonkin and 2. Binarity, a dualist schema in both social organiza- among the western Athapaskans, but these two cases tion and the system of representations. It suffices here to occur on the margins of the region and in contact with recall the very complex game played out in Australia cultivating and/or storing peoples, as if the nomadic between moieties that may be patrilineal, matrilineal, hunter-gatherers were reproducing in their society the or, again, endogamic (generation levels). These opposi- salient features of their powerful neighbours. In brief, tions combine in the diverse systems of sections and unilinearity, dualism, and totemism are the general sub-sections and in the semi-moieties, systems exclu- characteristics of Australian societies; conversely, in the sive to Australia. Other types of dualist organization in- other hunter-gatherer societies which, however, seem to clude those connected with the division of moieties into possess the same type of economy, these characteristics phratries in the north and other oppositions not reduc- are rare.2" How can one account for such a radical difible to the preceding ones in the southeast.'9 ference? 3. A classificatory mode of thought that classes to- To my way of thinking, this problem is the major one gether men and things. The social frameworks that di- facing the anthropology of hunter-gatherers. It can be vide members of society by clan and class, moiety, sec- formulated as follows: what purpose does it serve to retion, etc., also serve as classificatory schemas for the tain a category of hunter-gatherers, defined as they are whole of Nature, with the result that each social seg- by a similarity in way of life or in elementary economic ment (clan or class) corresponds to one or several animal behaviour, if this category remains powerless to resolve species or some natural phenomenon. This is totemism, the major problems of social anthropology? What is the nowhere so well developed (and so multiform) as in Aus- point of an anthropology of hunter-gatherers if it has to tralia. remain aloof from all the questions that have concerned Unilinearity is associated with kinship terminological social anthropology from its beginnings? All the subjects systems such as the "bifurcate merging" ("Iroquois," in I have touched on in connection with the comparison Murdock's terminology), unless there is terminological between the Australians and other hunter-gatherers are differentiation between the two cross-cousins. More- par excellence the classical topics of the discipline as over, Australian social organization determines classes they have emerged through works that are historic landthat have sometimes been called "matrimonial"; ex- marks: that of Morgan, whose major interest was clan ogamy is expressed by a prohibition against marrying organization and kinship systems, that of Durkheim, into the same class or a prescription of marriage into who was more interested in totemic phenomena and another. modes of classificatory thought, and finally that of Levi- The phenomena I have just enumerated are solidly Strauss, in connection with exogamy and matrimonial characteristic of Australia and virtually absent among systems. other nomadic hunter-gatherers. Let it be emphasized How is this problem posed in the anthropology of that I have excluded the storers from the comparison hunter-gatherers as it has developed since Steward, because they belong to an altogether different economic through the works of Service, Leacock, Damas, Lee, and category. For the same reason, I exclude "mounted" others, and found its classical expression in the sixties hunter-gatherers such as the Plains Indians, because with the publication of Man the Hunter? The key conthey are as much stockbreeders as hunters, and the trop- cept by means of which the social organization of ical peoples of Africa and Asia, because they subsist as hunter-gatherers is approached and characterized is that hunter-gatherers only through their ties with neighbour- of the "band." It is an ambiguous concept: in the first ing agro-pastoralists in what seems to me a veritable place it has a residential sense, designating a group of inter-ethnic division of labour.20 The remaining hunter- persons who live together, share a camp, and perform gatherers are divided between several major culture re- more or less the same economic tasks, but it also refers gions of which the most important are, in addition to to a minimal political unit. By reason of this very ambi- Australia, southern Africa, southern South America, the guity, it has seemed capable of providing a link between Great Basin, and the interior of Canada. None of the economic base and social forms and consequently has features observed in Australia is found in the firs three given rise to impassioned debates. Service (i962, i966), generalizing the already old ideas of Radcliffe-Brown on the Australian "horde," maintained that the local group I8. There are also clans formed on a local or conceptual basis, without a strictly unilineal composition, which it is out of the had to be patrilocal for purely material reasons, roughly, question to examine within the framework of this article. let us say, because of the organization of labour; there- I 9. This last point is important because it shows that the principle fore it was not hard to see in patrilineality the social and of binarity is not limited to the classical and recognized forms of ideological translation of the patrilocal composition of social organization, such as sections, sub-sections, etc. (Testart 1980). 2o. Hunter-gatherers of this category present a number of distinctive features that I have sought to enumeratelsewhere (Testart I98I:I88-203). the Whl hi ITIAITA i TAT a no lno "Ar%w TAhlr 2i. One arrives at the same sort of result by taking the kinship systems into consideration (Testart I985 b: ).
8 8 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number i, February I988 rather astute, it had to be admitted that it was incompat- able requires more lengthy discussion. Let us say for the ible with the ethnographic data. Numerous researchers sake of brevity that the characterization of a form of (Turnbull, Lee, et al.) in effect criticised Service's model society as orga-nized into bands seems to me a characteriby showing that the local group was by no means pat- zation by an extremely weak social form, for the band as rilocal but, on the contrary, fluid and flexible in compo- it has been redefined following the critique of Service's sition. suggestion is not strictly speaking anything more than a Paradoxically, the most powerful criticism was to rather diffuse local grouping and, at most, a form of orcome from Australia, where there developed from the ganization of labour. It was possible to maintain the beginning of the fifties a great controversy about local band as the general form of hunter-gatherer societies organization: A. P. Elkin, R. Berndt, L. Hiatt, and numer- only because it had been emptied of its content,24 i.e., of ous other researchers rejected22 Radcliffe-Brown's model the sense it had for Steward or Service, who envisaged it of the horde and showed that, despite a relatively rigid as a principle capable of explaining other aspects of socisocial organization into patrilineal clans, Australian lo- ety. Finally, 25 it is extremely doubtful if one can characcal groups were extremely variable in composition and terize a type of society through considerations drawn the principles of their recruitment corresponded with solely from residential and work groups; it is a little as if criteria other than clan affiliation. After that, hope was one were to characterize capitalist societies by the comabandoned of finding a simple correspondence between position of towns or the size of factories. Such an apthe organization of bands and of clans: the social edifice proach is bound to leave out what is most typical of the seemed more than ever irremediably split between two society, i.e., its characteristic social relations. Thus, to levels ordered by different principles and oriented to- return to our problem, one cannot help wondering, in wards different ends. But from another perspective Aus- relation to Australia, why kinship relations are so imtralian studies legitimated a unitary view of hunter- portant there. This is really a question about social relagatherers, since, apart from the fact that some possessed tions, namely, Why do these assume in Australia the clans and others did not, all possessed the same local principal or predominant form of kinship? organization into bands of flexible and changing com- In formulating these criticisms of the anthropology of position. Such seems to me to have been the state of hunter-gatherers and of the cultural ecology within the the question as it emerged from a reading of Man the parameters of which it is situated, I am conscious of Hunter. their extreme severity. I offer them only because I know But such a view of things cannot satisfy us, for at least how much we owe to the works just cited: the recognitwo reasons. The first derives from its setting aside of tion of the 'determining role of gathering, largely due to some of the major problems of social anthropology. To the work of Lee; the concomitant abandonment of the the question "Why, alone among hunter-gatherers, do old idea that hunters lived on the verge of famine and the the Australians have clans?" it has no answer except slicytlu -nrnuvoctiue creneraliza_tin-n of t1his idean hv perhaps that this clan organization is a superficial phenomenon, something like an epiphenomenon, relating as secondary phenomena the innumerable variations of social orto a hard-to-explain superstructure while the band or- ganization. In proposing to see in the horde the principal phenomeganization represents the profound reality of the social non, Radcliffe-Brown set himself against the whole tradition of the 23 organization. The second reason this view is unaccept- first period of Australian anthropology, which gave primary attention to the social variations on the theme of moieties, sections, or matrilineality. The same desire to discover the universal beneath 22. This very important controversy, which I do not hesitate to say the social variations is found with Steward when he proposes the has shaken the foundations of Australian anthropology, has not "family" and the "band" as the two primary levels of social integraperhaps received all the attention it deserves outside Australia. In tion. In Radcliffe-Brown and in Steward-and I have emphasized effect it implies the general conclusion that a group, in this case the the historical parallelism between their concepts of "horde" and Australian patriclan, may be linked (sentimentally, religiously, "band"-is concealed the same desire to minimize the importance etc., and even in a certain way economically, as I have maintained of social organization, in all its specificity and in all its variations, on the basis of certain facts rarely taken account of [Testart in favour of conceptsupposedly more universal, such as the family I978: I48-50]) with the land even without its members' residing on and the band. And I would add: concepts as vacuous as the family this land. and the band. It therefore does not strike me as surprising that after 23. A historical point, with epistemological implications, would 50 years of thinking about the band this approach still has nothing not seem out of place. Radcliffe-Brown's concept of the "horde," to tell us about social organization-because the notion of band generally attributed to his I930-3I article, was in fact much ear- was put forward precisely to legitimate this deficiency. It goes lier; the idea that the local group is patrilocal appears in turn-of- without saying that I consider such an approach an epistemological the-century works such as Howitt (I904), and Durkheim's whole error, our principal task being to take account of the specificity of explanation of sections rests on Howitt's idea just as later Levi- different forms of social organization and not of the claimed, Strauss's was to rest on Radcliffe-Brown's. But Howitt accorded ghostly universality of band or family. only minor importance to local organization; in the tradition of 24. The term "band" has also tended to fall into disuse. Leacock Morgan, his whole interest lay with moiety organization and mat- and Lee (i982:7-9) still employ the term band societies as a synrilineality, which he considered antecedento patrilineality. Rad- onym for "societies of hunter-gatherers" in order to connote colleccliffe-brown, in taking up the idea of patrilocal group, changed its tive property, etc., but there is hardly any more question of a meaning entirely: this group is presented as the basis of all Austra- specific organization in bands as the key organizational form of lian social anthropology, it becomes the universal foundation, a hunter-gatherers. Significantly (see n. 23), Burch (i986) proposes stable grouping present everywhere in Australia, a reality that is replacing the word "band" with "local family." simultaneously economic, political, and social (Radcliffe-Brown 25. This last aspect of the critique is developed elsewhere (Testart thought it exogamic), around which could thenceforth be situated I985b: chap. I).
9 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers I 9 Sahlins with his notion of the "affluent society"; the rc evaluation of the role of women; the idea that we ar dealing with hunter-gatherers and that environmentr factors (in particular the latitude) are primarily responsi ble for the relative importance of the two branches of hunter-gatherer economy; etc. All this is apparent i Man the Hunter and several subsequent works (amon them Lee I979) and marks the high point of a school c thought that turns away from kinship, symbolism, an other subjects of classical anthropology but represents theoretical advance of the first importance in the dc main of the economy, precisely the domain that classi cal anthropology had neglected. This observation bring us back to our problem of the considerable social diffei ences that exist between hunter-gatherers. This is c course the question of a possible articulation betweei economy and society, posed anew, and also a matter c bringing together two areas of study (or, as I would rathe say, two theoretical approaches) that are unaware c each other. Once again, we find that on similar ecc nomic bases there arise complex and very different cor structions having to do with kinship and symbolisnr There can be no question of doubting the reality of thes differences or of minimizing their importance: they ar related to the domains most studied by anthropolog since its beginnings. Suspicion falls rather on the prem ises of the problem, on the very idea of a similarity be tween the economy of the Australians and those of othe nomadic hunter-gatherers, because the study of th, economy has always been the poor relation of our disci pline. It is therefore the other line of research, that o cultural ecology and Man the Hunter and, in more re mote fashion, that of Childe, that should be followe despite my criticisms, which are intended less to limi their scope than to deepen their concerns. To explicate the Australian case, let us begin by set ting aside the idea of environmental determinism, be cause the range of variation in Australia is very wid (desert, tropical, Mediterranean, etc.) and corresponds i part to what we find in southern Africa. On the othe hand, we find significant differences between Australiai hunter-gatherers and others with regard to two orders o phenomena: I. Hunting techniques (I summarize Testart I985b ). Australia is the only region peopled solely b' hunter-gatherers that does not possess the bow and ar row. Furthermore, it is not merely the instrumenthat i unknown but the very principle of using the elastic en ergy stored in a curved piece of wood: thus we do no find the musical bow or the bow trap or spring trap ii Australia. Other lacunae in the Australian technologica ensemble are the absence of instruments using kineti( energy, such as the bola and the lasso, of weapons usinj compressed air, such as the blowpipe, and of poisonec darts and the very weak development of trapping tech niques. 2. The capacity, depending on environmental condi tions, for adopting an agro-pastoral economy (I sum marize Testart i98i:203 -II ). In America, it is appareni that the hunter-gatherer regions are those ill suited tc agriculture. For North America Kroeber (I939) showed long ago that the geographical limits of Indian maize cultivation corresponded very closely with natural limits of rainfall and sunshine. Hunter-gatherers thus existed in the New World only where agriculture as traditionally practised by the Indians was impossible. Nevertheless, the immense plains of the Pampas and the Canadian forests were propitious for stockraising; in particular, the caribou hunted in Canada is an animal of the same species as the reindeer of Siberia, which has been domesticated. This is a general difference between the Old and the New World, where stockraising, even when it was possible, has been only slightly developed. In view of these differences between the two continents in traditional techniques and economic orientations, we can say that hunter-gathering occurs in America only where agriculture and stockraising, to the extent that they have been practised and developed on this continent, are impossible. I believe a similar point could be made about the Bushmen (or San) in relation to the Hottentots (or Khoi-Khoi), stockbreeders with whom they were coupled within a single vast cultural region: hunter- gatherers seem to have lived only where there was an absence of year-round surface water, in the central and southern Kalahari, in the deserts of Namibia, on the Cape Province plateaus-in other words, where stockbreeding as practised by the Hottentots was impossible. In both America and Africa, hunter-gatherers seem to have occupied only residual regions where the domestication of plants and animals as traditionally developed by neighbouring agro-pastoralists was impossible or, at least, impracticable by reason of natural factors such as cold and drought. We find nothing of the kind in Australia, where prehistoriansuch as White (I97 1:i85) and Golson (I972:387-88) have shown that the horticulture practised in New Guinea could easily have been introduced into tropical northern Australia. Here there is no ecological reason for the persistence of a hunter- gatherer economy, simply a cultural barrier. These differences are important precisely because they concern this techno-economic level that appears so similar from one hunter-gatherer society to another. Nevertheless, they are not decisive. As a matter of fact, we do not know how to interprethem. It is out of the question to have recourse to any form of technological determinism, first of all because it is difficulto see how a social structure could be consequent on such simple technological facts as I have put forward. To put it crudely, the use of the bow seems as compatible with exogamy and totemism as with any other social form. It might be objected that these simple technological facts may be embedded in a broader technological context, more complex and structured, that is yet to be discovered and that this would represen the only correct level on which to seek an explanation. Certainly, but there are also other arguments against technological determinism. The technical data are difficulto explain as a first cause. We have to admit that the technological develop- ment of a society is blocked or favoured by the environment in which it finds itself: now, in the Australian case
10 IO 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number i, February I988 it is clear that it is not the natural environment that and/or the other moiety, affines and not kin of the huntprevents the adoption of the bow or of horticulture but ers. These latter receive lesser portions or even, in some the social environment, and we are sent back to social cases, nothing at all. This difference can be summarized conditions as the determining causes of the diffusion of as follows: Except in Australia, the distribution process techniques. As a last attempt to save the idea of a tech- begins with those who have taken part in the hunt; in nological determinism, I have mentioned the possibility Australia, it begins elsewhere, and this "elsewhere" is that our technological facts belong to a larger ensemble. denlned by the complex play of several binary opposi- This is in fact what we find: in respect of hunting as well tions (between alternate generations, between kin and as horticultural techniques,26 Australia appears a back- affines) inherent in the kinship system and social organiwater in relation to the possibilities offered by neigh- zation (moieties, sections, etc.). bouring peoples with whom there is contact, pos- These results are extremely important, for the followsibilities that are undoubtedly compatible with ing reasons: conditions of the natural environment. One could say, in i. This difference between the Australians and other summary, that in Australia we find a cultural ban on nomadic hunter-gatherers is equally an economic differtechnological innovation, but at this point we reverse ence. the scholarly reasoning about the connections of cause 2. It is related not to techniques, the mode of adaptaand effect: far from being determining, the technological tion to the environment, or anything else of this nature facts seem determined. but to a difference in the social form of production-a We are thus sent back to something other than the difference in structure. In Australia, the product escapes techno-economic domain, without knowing what that the producer (the game escapes the hunter) to the benefit "other" is. We can clearly see different social forms in of another who disposes of its distribution. Australia and elsewhere, but we do not see how these 3. The social form of production peculiar to Australia differences can allow us to explain the observed differ- presupposes precisely the intervention of the social ences in techniques and economy. Why is this? Evi- forms that appear to constitute the specificity of Ausdently because these forms-clan organization, exog- tralia: the other is effectively defined only by the operaamy, totemism, etc.-are non-economic, having no tion of a social organization that divides the members of effects whatever on production. This indeed seems to be society into several classes (marriage classes, moieties, the problem, but, given anthropology's traditional ne- sections, etc.) that are distinct and opposable in terms of glect of the study of economic structures, can we be several major oppositions (between moieties, between certain about it? Well, comparative study of the various generations, between kin and affines, etc.). forms of game-sharing systems among hunter-gatherers 4. Finally, and most important, all these social forms has demonstrated that they can be divided into two ma- apparently serve to uphold a single law: exogamy dejor categories (I summarize Testart I985b:53-96; i987a). crees that a man may not dispose sexually of the women Everywhere apart from Australia there is always, as a of his own clan: totemic prohibitions enjoin the nonresult of complex procedures that vary greatly across consumption of an animal of his own totemic species cultures, one individual among those who have contrib- unless there is a prescription to reproduce the species uted to or participated in some fashion in the success of symbolically for the benefit of other clans;28 gamethe hunt (through having sighted the game, brought it sharing systems prevent the hunter from disposing of an down, provided the decisive weapon, etc.) who is consid- animal he himself has killed. One may no more dispose ered the owner of the game taken, presides over its dis- of one's game than of one's totem or one's sisters. Contitribution, and is entitled to the best of it. An initial guity (between hunter and game, between totemist and distribution occurs among the participants in the hunt, totemic species, between brother and sister) always and it is only secondarily that the pieces are redistrib- translates as an advantage for others. It seems hardly uted outside the circle of hunters, particularly to their necessary to say that drawing a parallel between exkin.27 In Australia, while forms of sharing differ sig- ogamy and totemism is not new; what is new is discovnificantly from one region to another, those who have ering that the same law present in these two classical priority rights to game and ideally preside over its distribution are other than the participants in the hunt, typically of the other generation from that of the hunters 26. To which one could add the techniques of preservation (by drying and smoking) of animal flesh which, though known and practised in funerary rites during the treatment of the corpse, art used very little to preserve game or fish for food (Testari I982a: ). 27. Let us note in passing the extremely important result that kin. ship has only a secondary place among these hunter-gatherers. It is entirely different among the Australians. In particular, it follows that not only the form (the terminological system) but also the role of kinship cannot be the same for the one as for the other (Testari i985b:23 I-47). domains of anthropology also structures material production. This law according to which one may not dispose of what is one's own (or what one is "closest" to) seems to me to represent something like the principle of intelligibility of Australian society conceived as a whole.29 At once social schema and schema of thought, it applies to 28. I merely mention in passing a subject of much controversy that deserves much fuller development (Testart i985b:s ). 29. This law also holds in Australia for certain well-known aspects of ritual: one does not initiate the young of one's moiety, who must be initiated by the other moiety; the same for funerary practices, etc.
11 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers I II Totemic representations Prohibitions and prescriptions organization Sexuality 2 Exogamy Hunting production Social form of production Technical development of production FIG. I. Hypothesis on the relationship between the economic and other aspects of society. I, provision of the framework (categories of kin, matrimonial classes, etc.) in terms of which the common principle or law for structuring the various domains of society is defined; 2, isomorphism (structuring by a common principle); 3, determination or causal relationship. at least three domains: sexuality, including matrimonial exchange and the production of children; an important ideological sector, totemism, in which men think and mime on the ritual plane their imaginary relation with Nature, which they eventually reproduce symbolically; and an important sector of the economy, the hunt. Between these three domains it is vain to ask which determines the other. Instead of seeking a causal relation between them, I shall speak of "isomorphism." Where does all this leave the question of articulation between the economic and the social? It is clear that the privileged aspect of the problem, in which everything is interconnected, cannot be other than the form or the social structure of production. On one side we see an isomorphism between the economic domain and domains of the social, including that of representations; this common structure presupposes the existence of well-defined social forms constituted by the diverse aspects of social organization that divide the society into marriage classes and into distinct categories of kin (fig. i). So much for the social side. What about the other side, the economic? How are we to conceive the connec- tion between the social structure of production and the technical development of production? It seems impossible to elicit the complex social construction I have just outlined from the technical facts; I have already admitted this. Neither can there be any question of isomorphism: the technical facts form a system, but they cannot be ordered within a structure analogous to that which I have put forward. From another side, I have already expounded the reasons that led me to believe it was social factors that influenced technical development to the extent of eventually blocking it, but this idea must remain vague in that I have yet to discover the social form that has such an effect on production. One such has been mentioned so far, and there is good reason to believe that it is indeed the social structure of production that determines technical development. That is just about as far as my reasoning has gone, although I have to admit that I do not find it entirely satisfactory. The capture of game occasioning no advantage, either material or moral, for the hunters (they derive no pres- tige from it and do not oversee its distribution), there is no incentive for them to increase labour productivity, to experiment, or to adopt new and eventually more efficacious techniques. This explains the weak development in Australia (compared with other hunter-gatherer societies) of the weaponry and techniques of hunting. On the other hand, the fact that no one appropriates the prize in no way prevents hunters from cooperating in collective hunts; on the contrary, among other hunter-gatherers the principle of appropriation of game by one of the hunters can only give rise to conflicts with other members of the hunting group when it comes to deciding who has rights and particularly who is the owner. Without in any way reducing the size of the hunting group, this principle has the effect of causing each hunter to rely more on his own skill and the efficacy of his weapons than on the help of others. This is clearly not a question of the size of the group but rather one of the relative weighting, within forms of hunting that may be collective, of the factors of cooperation and efficacy of weapons. This relation is inverted in the case of Aus- tralia and of the other hunter-gatherers because the different social structures of production favour conversely
12 I2 j CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number I, February 1988 recourse to one factor or the other. We thus find that in what the Australian archaeologists call the small-tool Australia, while the range of hunting weapons is oddly tradition (three items that were unknown in Tasmania, restricted, on the contrary all forms of collective hunting probably the most conservative part of the Australian are represented, including the use of barriers, surprising ensemble since the island became separated from the indeed in a country where the fauna is so sparse and continent by the Bass Strait). The economy remains a ungregarious. hunter-gatherer economy. The major technological char- To summarize, then: The discovery of a social struc- acteristic is rejection-of the bow, of horticulture, of ture peculiar to Australia, inherent in the economy but equally connected with all social domains, has allowed us to account for a certain number of facts relating to hunter-gatherers. Can these facts 'be placed in a diachronic perspective? In other words, can this new view of things lead us to a new concept of evolution? I think it techniques for preserving meat, etc. Structures and social forms analogous to those observed in Australia were probably present in Palaeolithic societies. This is only a hypothesis, but it does allow us to account for the very slow technological development of the Palaeolithic. We cannot, however, assert that these forms and structures can, for reasons I would call a priori in that any attempt were the only ones. to theorize about an object of scientific study implies certain hypotheses on the laws of its movement. The equipment of an Australian hunter is, as we have already observed, notable for certain deficiencies. There 2. Everywhere else, new social structures appeared with or after the end of the Palaeolithic.30 I cannot give either the exact date or the reasons for these changes, but I see them as mutations, structural ruptures, that are is no cultural or archaeological evidence of regression. unlikely to have occurred suddenly and were probably The technical level attained by Australia as regards the weapons and other implements, of hunting is thus slightly but significantly inferior to that attained in the other regions of hunting and gathering; it seems as if the the result of a slow transformation that affected not isolated elements but global totalities. The result of these mutations was the development of the productive techniques of the society, among the techniques of food Australian condition perpetuated an earlier technologi- preservation and the beginning of domestication. This cal stage. This hypothesis, which is at the very most reasonable on the basis of the ethnographic data, can become condevelopment attained different levels according to environmental conditions; sometimes it led to agriculture, sometimes to a sedentary hunter-gathering economy vincing only if underpinned by data from prehistoric based on storage. Where the environment or the state archaeology. It appears that the results of a study of of technical development made these types of econthese data (Testart I985 b: I3I-56), diverse and fragmen- omy impracticable or impossible, societies remained tary as they are, allow us to propose two general conclu- nomadic hunter-gatherers. This hypothesis accounts for sions: (i) during the greater part of the Palaeolithic and our earlier observation that nomadic hunter-gatherers until the very end of the Upper Palaeolithic, weaponry remained such, outside Australia, only where the enviremained rudimentary, particularly as regards throwing ronment precluded the adoption of a storage economy or weapons, the use of spears being attested in the Upper of an agro-pastoralist economy as it was practised in the Palaeolithic but the harpoon, spear-thrower, aind bow not being evident before the Magdalenian and Mesolithic; and (2) the most widely accepted and bestfounded hypotheses about prehistoric hunting have recourse to cooperation as a decisive element in its success. Archaeological data are always subject to revi- sion and subtle reinterpretation, and these conclusions should therefore be taken as provisional and regarded with extreme prudence. Nonetheless, they appear to bear witness to the same inverse relation between weapons and cooperation as I have proposed for Australia. All this would seem to support the idea that Australia in some sense perpetuated the technical stage of the Palaeolithic. To this hypothesis I would add another resulting from my earlier reflections, namely, that technological development is determined by what I have called the social structures of production. Here, then, is how I see things: i. The social structure of production peculiar to Australia determined no significant development of productive techniques beyond what they had been in the Palaeolithic. At the most we can record the adoption of the spear-thrower, the semi-domestication of the dog (the economic imnortance of which is contestedi. and region. Perhaps I should emphasize here that my argument inverts the current notion that an earlier condition is best-preserved in an unfavourable or degraded region, an argument that is simplistic in that it envisages the society as all of a piece, overlooking the possibility of lack of correspondence between social form and eco- nomic level. In fact, the hunter-gatherers of the degraded regions tell us nothing about past social forms, because whatever social forms may have existed among huntergatherers they could not, given the unfavourable environment, have been translated into anything other than a hunting-and-gathering economy; they are just as likely to be the expression of the greatest novelty. If we seek to know about the past, a field of study that has never 30. These forms that are present among hunter-gatherers other than those of Australia remain to be enumerated. I have done no more than characterize them in a very cavalier fashion, in contrast to those of Australia. There is evidently much material for research here. Such research should also be decisive because the theoretical proposition that I have put forward in respect of Australia cannot be considered valid unless it can be generalized. Its validity thus depends, for us, on the possibility of eventually theorizing the San, the Athapaskans, the Algonkin, etc., in the same terms as the Australians, in terms of social forms, social structures of production, isomorphism, etc.
13 T E S TAR T Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers I I3 seemed dishonourable to any discipline other than social warning against searching for any simple causal relation anthropology, the point of departure should be hunter- among these domains, he immediately proceeds to degatherers in favourable regions, hunter-gatherers who might not have been such and probably remain such only by reason of restrictive social forms that for them are quite possibly a distant and glorious heritage. clare that "it is clear that the privileged aspect of the problem, in which everything is interconnected, cannot be other than the form of the social structure of production"-which does not follow logically and is even directly contradicted by what precedes. Elsewhere, after suggesting a correlation between low development of techniques and cooperative efforts in food producing as characteristic of the Upper Palaeolithic, he adds to it a Comments second hypothesis on the determination of technological developments by the "social structures of production," a quite separate hypothesis with no link to the statistical BERNARD ARCAND correlation and one that seems to make little sense Departement d'anthropologie, Universite Laval, Cite universitaire, Quebec, P. Q., Canada GiK 7P4. 24 viii 87 given that these unspecified "structures" are now plural. The article testifies to the intellectual honesty of a writer who wishes to respect the ethnographic facts he knows well. The problem arises from his adherence to a rather monolithic theoretical framework that seems quite incapable of dealing with these facts. At worst, This article is probably best understood as part of a much broader enquiry. It follows Testart's rather massive and scholarly research in the literature on huntergatherers and represents perhaps something of a pause, an efforto reconsider some fundamental theoretical issues, that might ideally lead to a better tomorrow. The questions addressed here should concem all those interested in hunter-gatherers (I could hardly claim otherwise, since I raised the same points at the international conferences on hunting and gathering societies in Quebec in I980 and London in I986). Does the category "hunter-gatherers" make any analytical sense? or Why should grouping people on the basis of their mode of extracting food from nature inform us about the nature of their societies? Is there any meaning in using this category beyond its obvious contrast to "agro-pastoralist" and "industrial" societies? Testart has already of- fered a major contribution to these questions with his convincing argument on the importance of food storage, which can generate radical social differences between societies otherwise equally based on hunting and gathering. He told us then that the concept of a Neolithic Revolution is inadequate in that there are often no sociologically significant contrasts between some societies of this may even be damaging, as when the model fails and for lack of a better way out we are told that Australians suffered from a "cultural barrier" and that other huntergatherers have had "restrictive social forms." This hardly seems the way to restore evolutionism to respectability. Testart appears obsessed with drawing a causal link between economy and social organization. His knowl- edge of the ethnography forbids any such straightforward relation, hence his numerous hesitations and claims that the issues are far from settled. At the same time, he frequently refers to "determination," which in this article runs every conceivable way to and from technology, environment, structures of production, subdivisions of society, etc. But he wants to remain faithful to the model, and this leads him even to suggest that if societies with similar economies have generated different forms of social organization, it is probably because their economies were never really similar. This is the kind of argument enjoyed by harsh critics and the kind of which Baudrillard wrote, some i 5 years ago, that it reminded him of Baron Munchausen trying to extricate himself hunter-gatherers and some of the societies producing from quicksand by pulling his own hair. One is left with food by cultivating. Recognizing the importance of food the impression that the search can only be endless and storage was undeniably a step forward in refining the the only way out would be for Testart firs to reconsider problem at hand. Unfortunately, much of the present his deeper conviction of the existence of separate levels article can be seen as taking us a few steps back. of society, the "economic form" and the "social form," The argument is difficul to follow and often down- which can usefully be correlated. right confusing. Each time Testart leads us to under- Testart's earlier research has significantly modified stand how diverse and complex the reality of hunter- our ways of looking at hunting-and-gathering societies. gatherers really is and how any generalization can only It should be obvious by now that the present article has be partial and simplistic, he himself, after a brief mo- not impressed me to the same extent. Yet, through his ment of doubt and hesitation, leaps back to an interpre- uncertainties, his doubts and even anxieties, which are tation that we thought had died with the French school never really helped by resorting to too narrow and simof historical materialism of the past two decades. This ple a model of human society, he may well be approachmakes for some rather blatant contradictions. For ex- ing a rather promising reformulation of his original quesample, after telling us that in Australia game-sharing tion: Has anthropology itself become the determining procedures are coherent with totemic organization and factor behind the categorization of people on the basis of exoaamv (the contrary would have surnrisedl and after their economic and/or social organization?
14 I4 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number i, February I988 TIM INGOLD Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester MI3 9PL, England. 24 VII 87 I share Testart's view that the anthropological study of hunting and gathering societies rests on the premises that such societies are essentially comparable and that some relationship exists between those of the ethnographic present and those of the more or less distant past. And I agree that to justify these premises, we are called upon to specify in what this relationship consists and to demonstrate that there is more in common to societies of hunters and gatherers than the mere fact that their members spend much of their time hunting and soned" evolutionism, which apparently consists in noting that between present and past hunter-gatherer societies there exist both similarities and differences. But like the evolutionism of an earlier anthropology, the object remains a comparative one: to establish certain essential types of society and to arrange these types in some (not necessarily unilinear) order of progression. Whatever the validity of this kind of exercise, it is quite definition in purely social terms, which would mix... terms referring to technical activities ('hunter-gatherers') with social forms." I challenge him to demonstrate that the distinction between domesticated and wild resources can be made without implicating social relations. As he well knows, both Ducos (1978:54) and I (Ingold ig8ob:133; i986b:133, 233) have argued that domestication carries an essential connotation of social appropriation. Testart is surely deceiving himself if he thinks that in speaking of hunting-and-gathering as the exploitation of non-domesticated ("wild") resources, he is referring only to the technical and not to the social aspect of practical activity. Where I have elsewhere defined hunting-and-gathering as the practical concomigathering. I cannot, however, go along with his reformu- tant of a system of collective appropriation (Ingold lation of these crucial problems, which seems to me to I980a; i986b:222-42), I have not mixed the social with put the clock back rather than forward. the technical but merely given explicit recognition Testart begins with a defence of what he calls a "rea- to the fact that it is the social form of appropriation and not the morphology of the objects appropriated that characterizes the productive practice. Eliminate this social component of production and hunting-and- gathering reverts to predation-and-foraging, strictly comparable to the extractive behaviour of nonhuman animals. If the meaning of the technical remains unclear in Testart's account-referring interchangeably to the activity different from attempting to document, from ethnohis- (e.g., "hunting-and-gathering") and to its instruments torical and archaeological evidence, the actual connec- (e.g.,"bows and arrows")-the meaning of the economic tions between particular societies as unique historical is still more obscure. Hunting-and-gathering has been entities. Yet Testart seems to think his evolutionism defined as technique, yet he goes on to speak of an econcovers that as well, maintaining in a footnote that the omy defined in terms of hunting and gathering. Unable relations and connections he seeks between present and to decide whether it is economic or only technical, Tespast societies are "necessarily historical." As I have ar- tart conflates the two: thus again, hunter-gatherer socigued elsewhere (Ingold i986a), both "history" and "evo- eties "are grouped in terms of techno-economic level." If lution" can be understood in at least two fundamentally there is anything more to the economy than the technidistinct senses, and whether the terms are identified or cal form of activity, Testart does not tell us what it isopposed depends on which of these senses one chooses not, that is, until the closing passages of his paper, when to adopt. But in asking "in what respects existing he suddenly introduces the "social form of production," hunter-gatherer societies are continuous with those of which governs "an important sector of the economy: the the past" it will not do to interpret continuity at one hunt." moment as formal similarity and at the next as unbro- Evidently, this social form is integral to the economy ken genealogical connection. The confusion is as ele- and in no sense technologically determined. Has Testart mentary, and as damaging, as that between analogy and just discovered what many economic anthropologists homology with regard to biological species. (including students of hunting-and-gathering) have been Turning to the second major question, whether hunt- saying for the past 2o years? If so, it is not apparent from ing-and-gathering societies have enough in common to the preceding pages, in which the key problem is rerender them comparable at all, Testart rephrases it by peatedly phrased as one of identifying "the causal conasking whether any relation exists, and if so of what nection between economic form and social form," as kind, "between the techno-economic level of a society though the one were wholly external to the other. So it and the various aspects of its social organization." I wish may be, if the economic is reduced to the technical. But to make three comments about this formulation. The that can hardly be squared with Testart's final restatefirst concerns the characterization of hunting-and- ment of the problem, where it appears as one of conceivgathering as technique, the second its conjunction with ing the connection, within the domain of the economy, economy in the hybrid "techno-economic," and the "between the social structure of production and the third the dichotomy between the latter and "social or- technical development of production." And to return to ganization." my earlier point: if hunting-and-gathering is definitive of Testart recognizes hunting-and-gathering by "absence an economic form, and if the economy comprises both of domestication in respect of subsistence" such that social relations and techniques of production, why is nourishment is obtained from wild resources. He holds Testart so averse to introducing a social component into that this is a "technical definition" and prefers it to "a the very definition of hunting-and-gathering?
15 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers I 15 Having dealt with his two leading questions concern organization and the relation between bands and clans. ing relations between past and present hunter-gathere: Oblivious to the subsequent development of the debate, societies and within such societies between the eco Testart writes in a footnote that though it has "shaken nomic and social levels of organization, Testart proceeds the foundations of Australian anthropology" it has "not to rehearse two arguments that he has already presentec perhaps received all the attention it deserves outside elsewhere, concerning the significance of storage and the Australia." Within his peculiar time-warp, Radcliffeapparently unique features of Australian Aboriginal so Brown, Steward, and Childe are only just over the horicieties. As regards the storage argument, I can only re zon, the ink is scarcely dry on the ethnographies of 30 peat my previous accusation (Ingold i982) that Testar, years ago, and the signal advances in hunter-gatherer fails to show why practical storage, occasioned by th( ethnography and theory that followed the publication in non-concurrence of production and consumption sched I968 of the symposium volume Man the Hunter have ules, should lead to social storage, or the convergence o. yet to take place. Where the rest of us have moved forrights to resources upon a specific proprietorial interest ward since those days, Testart has gone into reverse. It is Likening storing hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, h( time he made it back to the future. now maintains that "the former [do] with wild resource! (products of gathering, fishing, etc.) exactly what the lat ter do with domesticated ones." This is a pretty strone DOMINIQUE LEGROS claim to make, and there seems no a priori reason tha- Concordia University, Sir George Williams Campus, we should accept it, rather than the contrary claim thai 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, Montreal, Que., storing hunter-gatherers treat their harvested resource! Canada H3G im8. 26 VIII 87 exactly as "nomadic" hunter-gatherers treat unhar. vested ones. The ethnography can be read either way. Testart's work on hunters and gatherers, of which the When it comes to Australia, though not a specialist, ] present article is the most recent development, leaves have my doubts about the accuracy of Testart's gross me with two contradictory feelings. One is of total intelcharacterization of Aboriginal economy and society. His lectual excitement: his critique of the concept of the rendering of totemism, for example, is more redolent of Neolithic Revolution is a masterpiece of epistemology, modern French than of traditional Aboriginal thought, and it de facto imposes an entirely new way of looking at more informed by a reading of Durkheim and Levi- cultural evolution. I am not exaggerating, for an ap- Strauss than by contemporary ethnography. On the sub. proach which demonstrates the flaws in concepts as baject of kinship and descent: cases of non-unilinearity sic as that of the band and of the Neolithic Revolution is seem to represent more than "doubtful exceptions" (see, bound to be both strongly contested by some and enthufor example, Layton [I983] on the Pitjantjatjara); indeed, siastically endorsed by others, leading to a revamping of the contrast between unilineal and non-unilineal sys- the field. My other feeling is mixed. The present formutems may constitute an important axis of variation in lation of Testart's rethinking of the process of cultural Australia, as it does elsewhere (see, for example, Stuart evolution and of the relationships between economic, [I980] on the comparable cases of the Yahgan and the social, and cultural apparatuses is still not bold enough Ona of Tierra del Fuego). It is decidedly odd that in set- and seems to me to constitute a retreat from the headting up a distinction between Australian kinship sys- way he made in his book Le communisme primitif tems and those (for example) of the Canadian interior, (i985 b). As I said to him in the conversation he refers to, Testart makes no reference to the work of Turner (e.g., it is not that our ways of thinking are totally incompatin Turner and Wertman 1977:96-Iio), who has already ible but that a renewal of the field requires us to distance done this with rather greater sophistication and with the ourselves still further from the classical anthropologists' advantage of a first-hand knowledge of both ethno- conception of society. In other words, I go along with the graphic regions. Lastly, I object to Testart's negative critical part of his work and less with his counterprocharacterization of Australian Aboriginal technology in posal in this short article. In abbreviated form, here are terms of its deficiencies. The idea that Australia has my reasons: "perpetuated an earlier technological stage" is preposter- First, there is the lesser problem of storers and inequalous, given that many essential elements of the Aborigi- ity. Testart takes the position that there is a qualitative nal toolkit (not found in Tasmania) were introduced as a difference in inequalities between nomadic hunterresult of outside influences no more than 5-6,ooo years gatherers and storing sedentary hunter-gatherers. Alago. By any standards, Aboriginal technology is quite though he is not too explicit about it, his reasoning elaborate, especially if one includes the knowledge that seems to rest on the idea that among nomadic hunters is just as vital as material equipment in the effective inequalities exist only in the domain of prestige items, procurement of subsistence. Technological inferiority among which-it appears from his phrasing-are insuperiority is notoriously hard to gauge, but had Testart cluded women, while among storers the inequalities are chosen to emphasize the principles that Aboriginal in the spheres of production and food consumption as hunter-gatherers do utilize rather than those they do well as in that of prestige goods. However, this idea is not, he might have come to different conclusions. erroneous. As fieldwork among Tutchone Athapaskans In the I950s, an important debate emerged among stu- in the Subarctic (see Legros i98i, I982, i985) has shown dents of Australian Aboriginal society about local group me (unexpectedly, for I thought I had embarked on the
16 i6 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number I, February 1988 study of an egalitarian society), when individuals in a tive techniques. Following Balibar (in Althusser and nomadic society take many wives it is, in a case like the Balibar 1970), who is himself in part following Marx, I Tutchone, not for prestige reasons alone but for the work think that what productive techniques determine is not output they represent. Similarly, when they capture whether a surplus will be extracted but only the social members of their society, female or male, and make form in which a surplus may be extracted. In other them their slaves, it is to make them work at productive words, like Engels (in Marx and Engels 1970:487), I take tasks. Moreover, and more important, the same Tut- the minimal position that "we make our history ourchone case study demonstrates on a factual basis that selves, but, in the first place, under very definite asnature provides human beings with "stores" of food sumptions and conditions." A stratified structure is a "preserved live," such as year-round productive fishing possibility that some people may succeed in instituting holes, beaver colonies, etc. Even though such sites may have very low productivity by any standard, they take on tremendous importance when they are too few to feed the total population and no other resources are available. They may thus be, as among the Tutchone, very valuin any economic context. Its form will simply vary according to the sort of production techniques which are in place. While this thesis fits the ethnological and the archaeological record best, some anthropologists may object that it makes the emergence of social inequalities able "stores" which some subgroups appropriate as pri- (note that I am not saying the form or the volume of vate property by controlling access to the locations where they are available. In fact the "store" analogy was spontaneously made by a bilingual informant in atsurplus extraction) depend on the simple initiative of some subgroup in a society. However, I do not see why this should not be so. After all, when traditional cultural tempting to explain to me in 1972, long before Testart's evolutionists link evolution to initial changes in producthesis, the importance of such sites in the Tutchone past. As it can be demonstrated that the proximity of Northwest Coast society had nothing to do with these tion techniques, where do these changes come from if not from the will of some individuals in society? Are not new production techniques just as much a product of the phenomena, one has to conclude that a nomadic hunting minds of some human beings thinking and planning and and gathering economy, and quite a poor one at that, others resisting the change as new social or cultural inprovides just as many opportunities for the development stitutions? of inequalities and of a "storage economy" as a sedentary The second point is more conceptual. Since I have alhunting economy in a rich environment. If one argues ready elaborated this point in two articles (Legros 1977, that there is a difference of volume between the social Legros, Hunderfund, and Shapiro 1979), I will only sumsurplus appropriated by the Tutchone elite and that accumulated by the elite of a Northwest Coast society I marize. Two types of causality are at work in any society. The first may be called synchronic causality. It will agree, but a simple difference of volume in surplus refers to the interdependence between an already conextraction does not make a structural difference. In- stituted economic system and the sociocultural appaequality is not a matter of surplus volume but one of ratuses which insure its maintenance or reproduction structural relationships between the various compo- over time. The second may be termed diachronic causalnents of a society. In consequence, I think it far more ity. It refers to the matter that leads to the emergence of productive to take the position that all societies of hunters and gatherers have provided possibilities for the development of social inequalities in the full sense of the term; that all have had the potential for a "storage economy" of one kind or another; that in some societies poorly endowed in natural foodstuffs the volume of surplus extracted has necessarily remained quite low; that in other societies living in richer environments the volume of extraction has become much larger; and that in still other populations, not so well endowed with readily available natural food resources but well located for the development of horticulture or agriculture, surplus extraction volume has become quite large since the domestication of plants and/or animals. Since it is recognized, on the other hand, that societies of hunter-gatherers did not have to institute inequalities, and in fact some did not, but many obviously did at some point in the past with or without a rich environment, with or without the adoption of agriculture, and since it is evident that some groups in rich environments did not move toward stratification and that some who adopted agriculture did not institute inequalities, it seems to me that there is no point in trying to link the adoption of nonegalitarian structures to particular kinds of ecology and/or produc- structurally new social facts. When we are dealing with human societies, any economic system is necessarily both and immediately a technological and a social phenomenon with rules for controlling labour, means of production, and the products of labour-rules which may or may not be egalitarian. Any society may include several socioeconomic systems as just defined, even a society of nomadic hunters and gatherers (see Legros 1978 for an Inuit group and Testart i985b: for Australia, where the rules for apportioning products of the hunt and products of gathering as well as other spheres seem to have been different). Hence, questions of causality can never be posed in terms of an interrelationship between the overall economy of a given society and the totality of its sociocultural apparatuses. On the synchronic plane, causality is a question about how each of a society's economic systems is synchronically interrelated to some of its superstructural apparatuses, each constituting in the process a given mode of production in the extended sense of the word. On the diachronic plane, causality is a question of how disparate elements stemming from one or several of the economic systems and/or sociocultural apparatuses may by chance offer the building blocks for a new socioeconomic structure
17 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers 17 and of whether opportunities thus offered are taken by at least some of the social actors making history themselves under the constraints and potentials of their milieu. I do not see why cultural evolution should be any less chancy and yet rule-governed than biological evolution. To sum up, my dissatisfaction with the present state of the reconstructive part of Testart's article is that it remains embedded in the questions of traditional cultural evolutionism, which, as raised, are unanswerable; that it keeps the whole society as the unit of analysis when the dissecting of societal wholes into component parts seems a more heuristic approach for understanding cultural evolution; that it nowhere attempts to construct concepts of modes of production which in the long term would allow for a finer and much different probing of the ethnographic record. However, the critique bears only on the present article as it stands and only on what I call its reconstructive part. In the first place, Le communisme primitif utilizes in part the much more productive theoretical framework that I am referring to, and I strongly recommend it for the advances it makes (in fact, I am surprised that we do not yet have an English translation). His present reversion to the theoretical framework of traditional cultural evolutionists may have been intended to provide his CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Anglo-Saxon audience with a mode of thought it is generally more familiar with, but it takes away too much of the sharpness of his own previous terms of analysis. In the second place, but just as important, my critique in no way diminishes my admiration for his present debunking of the Neolithic Revolution concept. text of hunter-gatherer societies. (In addition, Cohen distinguishes between hunter-gatherers and hunter- gatherer-fishers and discusses the question of the Neolithic transformation.) The major problem with Testart's treatment of hunter-gatherers, in my opinion, is his dichotomous conception of economy and social organization. On the one hand, this necessarily leads to (social or economic) determinism; on the other, it reduces man's complex relation to nature to labour or instrumental action, social relations mainly being viewed as relations of the labour process. What we need for the conceptualization of "primitive" societies (and not only these) is an ap- proach which allows us to get detailed information on the main relationships of man-to nature (the labour process being only part of this), to the Other, and to the Self. Between these relationships there is a specific articulation, since they are based on a common principle, which in the case of hunter-gatherers without storage may be generally characterized as solidarity and communication between man and man as well as between man and nature (Linkenbach I986). For each society the specific modes of relationship and their articulation must be formulated so that possible differences between societies will become apparent (for example, the role of women and their level of autonomy seem to be different in Inuit and!kung societies). In addition, the possibility of appropriation of surplus as a precondition of social stratification and inequality seems to be only one aspect of the explanation of evolutionary processes. Above all, it implies a negation of the principle of solidarity and thus a change in consciousness. In his analysis of the Australian Aborigines, Testart tries to isolate an interpretive logic, "at once social schema and schema of thought": the rule of not disposing of what is one's own, which applies to the three ANTJE LINKENBACH domains of sexuality, totemism, and economy. In my Reichensteinstrasse 48, 6903 Neckargemuind, Federal opinion he does not consistently develop this really im- Republic of Germany. i9 viii 87 portant idea. He is presenting a key concept of Australian culture, and it would be interesting to relate it to Social anthropologists still call "hunter-gatherers" a these societies' concept of nature. The classification of large number of societies that show great similarities in "men and things" in "totemism" is based on a specific the labour process and whose economy is characterized world view that denies essential barriers between man by the non-existence of cultivating techniques and and nature (Levi-Strauss I962). stockbreeding and therefore represents a low level of Finally, Testart presents the hypothesis of a similarity technological development. To Testart this grouping between Australian Aborigines and Paleolithic socieseems unsatisfying and leads to what he calls the two ties. For him, the reason for technological stagnation lies major questions in the anthropology of hunter-gatherers: in the social conditions of Australian society, which althe relation between economy and society, as well as the low no advantage for the hunter from the capture of existence and conceptualization of socio-cultural differ- game. In my opinion one should be careful in assuming a ences among hunter-gatherers, and the possibility of an profit-oriented logic, which can easily become a conanalogy between hunter-gatherers of today and of the stant element in human history. Moreover, to claim or past. Obviously, these are problems in the discipline, but deny an analogy between hunter-gatherers of today and I think we have to admit that nowadays most social of the past is always a question of one's conception of anthropologists are aware of them, especially of the first. history. If one sees history only as a history of progress, Even Testart recognizes this, and I wonder why he does societies that "lack" innovations (new technologies or not mention the work of, for example, Cohen (i968), aspects of social stratification) seem stagnant and there- Fried (i967) and Godelier (1973a, b), who discuss evolu- fore comparable to societies of the past. But we must tionary problems as well as problems of the articulation bear in mind that man's inventiveness is not confined to of economic and sociocultural phenomena in the con- those dimensions which seem significant to us (Levi-
18 i8 j CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number I, February 1988 Strauss 1972) and that the processes of historical chang( There is among [Aborigines]... a profound resistance need not be similar or even uniform in character. to crediting themselves with their own cultural achievements. All they will claim credit for is fidelity to tradition or, as they put it, for "following the Dreaming," the cultural features of human societies JOHN MORTON having been established entirely by the acts of myth- School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, ical beings who... are alone conceived of as active Sydney, N.S.W. 2IO9, Australia. io VIII 87 and creative, men being passive beneficiaries of unmotivated generosity. Testart has been masterfully and provocatively synthesizing data on hunter-gatherers for some time, and this If there is a technological conservatism in Australia, it is paper testifies once more to the breadth of his knowl- echoed loudly in the religious domain. edge. He is concerned with broad evolutionary questions In addition, and as Testart suggests, religion does not and their relation to social theory, but a good deal of the simply account mythically for the origins of economic paper approaches the specific question of the place of goods; it also in large measure takes credit for reproduc- Australian Aborigines in hunter-gatherer studies. I will ing them (though not directly in the case of technologiconfine my remarks to this latter issue, particularly to cal items). As Hamilton (I982:9I) notes: "within the Testart's conclusion "that Australia in some sense per- Aboriginal perspective 'religious' property has an aspect petuated the technical stage of the Palaeolithic." of 'economic' property, since reproduction of [totemic] Australian Aborigines have long presented a puzzle to species is held to depend on human actions over certain anthropology: why do they have such elaborate religious objects, jealously guarded and kept from all but their practices and social forms when other groups, apparently owners, at certain places from which all but the owners with similar levels of techno-economic organization, do are excluded." Through "increase rites" each "local not? Testart suggests that we should first consider that group was believed to perform an indispensable eco- Aborigines appear to have been technologically conser- nomic service not only for itself but for the population vative and that this conservatism takes the form of a around its borders as well" (Strehlow I970: IO2). Though "cultural barrier" which prevents the adoption of new the issue is more complicated than I can spell out here, economic strategies in otherwise favourable conditions. this reproduction for others is closely tied to restrictions In coming to grips with the why of this situation, he on the consumption and use of one's own totemic states that we may be mistaken in thinking that Austra- species. lia's elaborate social and religious systems have no ef- Participation in "increase ritual" and similar cults is fects on production. To the contrary, meat sharing, for largely restricted to senior men, and the usual prerequiexample, can be shown to be intimately connected with site for participation, initiation, is also the precondition moiety and generation distinctions, with the injunction of marriage. After initiation a man's "marriage must on a hunter to give up his produce for "the benefit of conform to the laws of his group; a perverted desire for another who disposes of its distribution." Moreover, this women who are forbidden to him is one of the greatest injunction is part of a generalized principle of "surren- bars in his struggle and search for further knowledge and der": "one may no more dispose of one's game than of the power that comes with wisdom" (Strehlow I947: one's totem or one's sisters." The elaborate social and II2). Thus, another level of Testart's "isomorphic" orreligious dimensions of Aborigina life thus appear to be ganization, marriage, is also closely related to the religoverned by a single "principle of intelligibility," with gious domain. Economy, religion, social organization, three diverse domains-economy, kinship, and reli- and even technological innovation all fall within the gion-brought together in "isomorphism." Testart ad- ambit of the Dreaming for Aborigines. mits, however, that he does not quite know how to place We should not underestimate the practical signifithis isomorphism in an explanatory context. All that he cance of the Dreaming: it is not some rarefied philosophwill venture to say is that the rule of giving up game for ical system or something that is "just symbolic." others to distribute means that the hunter receives no Testart's three "isomorphic" levels are very much pracmaterial or moral advantage from increasing production tically integrated. For example, hunting in Central Ausand labour input and that there is therefore "no incen- tralia is closely tied to the later stages of initiation, tive... to experiment or to adopt new and eventually when groups of initiates are sent away to kill game and more efficacious techniques." bring back meat to exchange for secret knowledge re- Conservatism is indeed a feature of Australian soci- vealed to them by the elders in secret/sacred acts. "It is eties, and it was precisely in relation to the techno- with meat that the old men have to be 'loosened,' so that economic field that Strehlow (I947:35) observed that they will reveal their great tjurunga [sacred objects, "all occupations originated with the totemic ancestors; verses, etc.] which they are clutching so tightly" and here the native follows tradition blindly: he clings to the primitive weapons used by his forefathers, and no thought of improving them ever enters his mind." Similarly, Maddock (I970:I77-78) has observed in the context of an analysis of myths of the origin of fire that (Strehlow I97I:677). These prestations are part of a general scheme of appropriation whereby young hunters normally present game to older men in the band. This often takes the form of bride service: as a young man, a hunter is likely to be living with and working for his
19 TESTART Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers Ii father-in-law (cf. Peterson I978), who also invariably ha! a key part to play in his ritual career, particularly a: circumcisor. Gifts, especially of game, that flow from < novice to his circumcisor are "partly a recompense foi the ritual services that have been rendered to the boy': [patri]lodge and partly an anticipatory payment of hi: bride-price" (Meggitt I962:308). It is only after initiatior and marriage that participation in "increase ritual" oc curs, and such participation represents an identificatior of ritual actors with ancestral beings and their authorit3 (Morton I987). This is a brief picture of a complex situation, but it i: sufficiento highlight a problem with Testart's analysis Australian hunters do indeed accrue advantages, boti "material" and "moral," from their capture of game However, these are not direct, and it remains true tha hunters do not get prize cuts of meat or the prestige tha comes from "ownership" and distribution of game Rather, returns have to be measured in terms of accesl to human resources and religious knowledge: "Wealti in the Aboriginal social formation is assessed in terms ol control of the reproductive and productive capacity oi women and the religious property" (Bern I979:I23). Ir fact, the situation is yet more complex. Valued resource, are not simply constituted by women and sacred knowl edge: they also consist of all the social relations tha are created through marriage and all the territorial ac cess that comes from being attached to different places through knowledge of the Dreaming, sacred stories, songs, and objects always being associated with specific sites in the land. Aboriginal religion in this way "sym bolically constitutes the society as a structure of repro duction" (Myers I986:228), creating and re-creating ties between people, between "countries," and between the two. There is thus a great deal at stake in hunting: the ability of hunters to fulfil obligations to old men is inextricably bound to their general life prospects. Hunting tc some extent determines with whom and where one may live, that is to say, the access one has to labour and land. At the very least, then, any "cultural ban on technological innovation" is unlikely to stem from a lack of inter- est in the products of hunting (cf. Sackett I979), and the roots of conservatism have to be sought elsewhere. Most of the examples I have drawn on here are from Central Australia, arguably the most conservative part of the continent. But such conservatism is a corollary ol the strength of attachment to the tenets of the Dreaming. "Western desert people," for example, "are known throughout Australia for their conservatism and the strength of their adherence to the Law [Dreaming]"(My- ers I986:297), and it was the same pride in and devotion to the Law that caused Levi-Strauss (I966:89) to remark that Aborigines sometimes appear to be "real snobs." But the key point (Levi-Strauss I966:89, my emphasis) is that Australian societies have probably developed in isolation more than appears to have been the case elsewhere. Moreover, this development was not undergone passively. It was desired and conceptualized, for few civilizations seem to equal the Australians in their taste for erudition and speculation and what sometimes looks like intellectual dandyism, odd as this expression may appear when it is applied to people with so rudimentary a level of material life. Conservatism is not only a matter of inertia: it is also commitment to "social organization and marriage rules [that] require the efforts of mathematicians for their interpretation" and to a "cosmology[that] astonishes philosophers" (Levi-Strauss I966:243). The incentive to invent and reproduce inventions stems from a sense of scarcity, and in spite of the popular image of Australia as an arid, unproductive land, there is no evidence whatsoever of Aborigines' having taken on a view of their country as unproductive. To the contrary, Aboriginal people view the land as wholly fertile, often waxing lyrical about its productive virtues, especially in myth. It may well be that to us "Australia appears a backwater in relation to the possibilities offered by neighbouring peoples with whom there is contact," but to Aborigines themselves it is no such thing. WVhen it comes to considering conservatism, this latter view is all-important, since any "cultural barrier" to innovation is matched by the high value placed on the status quo. In Australia, there have been severe limitations on possible challenges to this high value, since inter-group contact has been restricted to an island that afforded few areas ecologically ripe for techno-economic development and few sustained contacts with peoples of "superior" ability. On the other hand, if Australia has developed less than any other part of the world in terms of the cultural appropriation of nature, it has developed far superior methods for dealing with other key factors of production-access to labour and land (or, in the Aboriginal idiom, access to people and country). The adaptive value of Aboriginal social and religious organization is rarely underscored in hunter-gatherer studies, mainly because of the latter's abiding concern with techno-economic development. Testart is not especially guilty of ignoring the significance of the social and religious domains: indeed, he has often been at pains to draw attention to them. This particular paper, however, will contribute, perhaps unintentionally, to a certain myopia. Aboriginal ethnography testifies time and time again to the importance of people and place as resources, yet technology still holds pride of place in the general field. I have attempted to counteract that view because an overemphasis on technology tends to lead to the notion that this is the only kind of development worthy of study. However, to say that a society or culture is conservative is to say no more than it does not develop in a particular way. Conservatism in Australia is indicative of a "coldness" (L6vi-Strauss I967:46-47) that describes not lack of development but a particular kind of development-a way of abolishing "the possible effects of historical factors on... equilibrium and continuity" (Levi- Strauss I966:234). The Law that applies in Australia is based on the dictum "once a precedent; twice a tradition" (Myers I986:285). Development is here a case of
20 20 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number I, February 1988 adapting to novel circumstances and giving those adaptations the weight of authority which comes from an eternal Law, enforced by men identified with it. It is important to understand that Aborigines have been constantly modifying their social and territorial relations. These can change very quickly, and Aboriginalists themselves are only just becoming aware, particularly through the documentation of land claims, of the disjunction that often exists between people's assertions about their occupation of a territory and the historical record. In the former case, people tend to say that, because the Dreaming is "forever" and they now have the religious knowledge for particular places, they and their ancestors have always been at those places. In short, they are as reluctant to allow history into their myths as we are to allow myth into our histories. However, in giving techno-economic development pride of place in hunter-gatherer studies we are surely mythicising people to a grand degree. Hunter-gatherers are more remarkable for the way they allocate natural resources (the land and its products) through social relations which have as their basic "materialist" teleology the reproduction of people, not goods. Testart may be correct in seeing Aborigines as representing a picture of "a distant and glorious heritage": this is indeed how they see themselves. But to concen- trate only on the nature of "restrictive social forms" is to draw attention away from the genius of those forms in dealing with historical contingency. Let it be said that Aborigines may be the closest thing living to "natural man," but only if it is simultaneously recognised that "natural man" has a culture which is largely in accord with what he is rather than what he will become. Aborigines, having perhaps more than anyone restricted the expansion of cultural forces of production, have also developed to the greatest degree the means for managing natural contingencies (as opposed to cultural ones, which call more and more upon technological inven- tion). The vagaries of demography and the environment are with each Aboriginal generation subsumed under the rubric of the Dreaming, in a scheme which is fundamentally religious and "world-accepting"(cf. Stanner I963) and whose general principles have stood the test of time. One senses that if hunter-gatherer experts spent as much time classifying modes of mythical consciousness and religious artefacts as they do technological items, the reconstruction of the past might be considerably en- hanced. Moreover, this is perfectly possible, because the study of transformations over space is on an equal footing with the study of transformations over time (Levi- Strauss I966: ). There is no history without myth, just as there is no myth without history. NICOLAS PETERSON Department of Prehistory and Anthropology, Australian National University, G.P. O. Box 4, Canberra, A.C. T. 260I, Australia. I7 viii 87 It has long been argued that Australian Aboriginal societies are unique. In the igth century this uniqueness was unproblematic and accounted for by an evolutionary paradigm that saw Aborigines as transitional beings on the bottom rung of the human ladder. Their ethnographic interest arose from the fact that they were thought to open a window onto the origins of religion, marriage, and property. With the demise of the evolu- tionary paradigm, the world at large lost interest in Australian ethnography and left it to regional specialists. The claim of uniqueness emerged again at the Man the Hunter conference in I966, when Murdock, in discussing whether hunter-gatherers are a cultural type, commented: "The Australian evidence, however, makes this seem dubious. I suggest that we recognize the near uniqueness of Australian social organization and pay more attention than before to attempts to explain their sharp divergence from similar societies elsewhere in the world" (i968b:336). Instead of being bilateral with a prominent nuclear family, said Murdock, the Australians are unilinear, largely characterised by double descent, and have residence rules that are overwhelmingly patrilocal and polygyny in a more developed form than is found among other hunter-gatherers. The Australians also posed problems for Woodburn's (I980) dualistic classification of hunting and gathering societies into immediate- and delayed-return, since they had most of the features of immediate-return societies but uncharacteristically protracted marriage contracts that led him to classify them with the delayed-return societies. For Testart it is unilinearity, pervasive dualism, and multiplicitous forms of totemism that mark out the Australians. Generally, then, the problem is that the Australians' elementary forms of religious and social life are nothing like as elementary as once thought: indeed, one wellknown anthropologist remarked at a recent conference that Durkheim should have written about the people he worked with for really elementary forms. What is the reality of this perceived difference? Undoubtedly there are some unique aspects to the Australians' situation: principally their occupation of an entire continent for a long period of time with minimal external contact. But is this sufficiento account for the perceived difference, or are there distinctive principles underlying Australian social life? Could it not be that the way we have constituted and reconstructed Aboriginal life is part of the problem? The basic ethnographies of Aboriginalife were carried out in the heyday of structural-functionalism by anthropologists working with Aboriginal people who had given up the hunting-andgathering life to live in settled communities of one kind or another. The normative focus of structural-functionalist accounts was thus reinforced in two ways: residence and land-use practices had to be reconstructed, with the result that common strategies and particular periods of the life cycle were emphasised by informants and converted into rigid rules by ethnographers; and the variability of social practices across the continent was frequently elided so that the difference, for example, in polygyny rates between the desert and northern Australia was obscured in the creation of an Australia-wide norm. These points having been made, the distinctiveness is not dissolved, but is it a quantitative or a
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