Return of the Hunter-Gatherers

 RETURN OF THE HUNTER GATHERERS?

Anthropologists have distinguished two different cultural forms in human civilization that appear to have an evolutionary sequence. The earliest, often called "Hunter Gatherers" (HG), is characterized by a nomadic existence in which the group hunts game and gathers roots and naturally occurring plants as their food supply. These cultures have strong communities, religious rituals focused around the magic of the hunt, and the behavior of the animals hunted, with a strong emphasis on intuition and/or chance. There is a lack of  hierarchical political organization and separate bands deal with each other with distrust, except under special circumstances. Many have rituals of intense emotional ecstasy, sometimes chemically induced, alternating with periods of quiet rest. They have been labeled "Dionysian."

The alternative form of social organization is agricultural (A). The development of a planned, harvested foodsupply has several implications for social organization. It is no longer necessary to roam seeking game when a local plot of land is sufficiently productive. Awareness of planting seasons using astronomical observations becomes important  to maximize the growing season. Social organization benefits such societies by providing increased labor and the capacity for irrigation and tools for agricultural activities. Such societies often develop hierarchical political organizations and complex differentiated social roles within the hierarchy. These serve the function of protecting the agricultural lands from outsiders, and providing organizational support for the larger communal needs of irrigation, etc. The political head of such cultures is often also identified with the religious or spiritual head since the dependence on the seasons and other phenomenon of the natural world is  crucial to agricultural societies. The religious orientation of such societies tends to be focused on the land, with a sacrificial and supportive relationship to a higher Deity  to maintain the productivity.  This form of organization has been called “Apollonian”

Diamond, in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, puts forward the thesis that there are certain features of agriculturally organized societies which eventually allow them to overpower and dominate hunter gatherer societies. He cites examples from a number of situations, including European conquest of Indian and other native peoples in the 18th and 19th Century as support for his thesis.

Contemporary social organization in developed countries continues to follow this agricultural model. Political units, educational units, and social support systems are often land-based, to geographic markers. In most countries, voting is organized around geographic regions. Most countries also organize their educational functions around geographic domains.  By 1940, less than half the counties in the United States had agriculture as their primary source of income, and certainly by the year 2003, a much smaller percentage of counties are primarily agricultural in nature.  Which means that there is no absolute basis for maintaining this organization.

 Industrialization and Trade complicate this anthropology view.   There is evidence of active trading patterns in ancient cultures. Much of the dissemination of traditional technologies and inventions occurred through trading patterns. It requires some agricultural development to free up enough population to produce the various goods necessary to accomplish trade, so trade is dependent on the formation of a prior agricultural organization. Predominant trading countries develop from regions in which the agricultural pattern has been established. Trade also enables sharing of agricultural production.

Industrial development is different.  Freeing up resources in a society for the production of tools and machines presupposes the ability to feed the society, and exempt individuals from the daily activity of hunting and gathering or growing.  (In the Pacific Northwest, there was adequate available free time for fairly sophisticated development of the production of various goods and equipment. In that society, artistic creativity and the design of everyday objects became a significant part of the culture of the society.) The highly organized agricultural societies of Europe and North America went on to develop the full industrial revolution of the 18^th-19^th  Century. It is also interesting that the early development of industrial production depended on power sources, particularly water and rivers, in some ways similar to agriculture. As the result, early industrial development was locally based and locally controlled. Even in the somewhat complex industrial society of the 20th Century, certain features  remain.  Detroit has been identified as the “motor city”, due to its concentration of production of motor vehicles in the United States, though this production is distributed over a much wider area, and the localization of executive and management groups in the automotive industry in Detroit is an anachronism,  sustained by attachment to the "fertile soil" for the development of ideas.  Industrial development within agricultural societies uses an agricultural conceptualization of production, including "seasons" of new products, and other features, though the actual  production do not depend on seasonal variation.

Trends in the late 20th Century suggest that this preeminence of the agricultural model and the values associated with it are waning. Freidman’s book, The Lexis and the Olive Tree, the common interests across geographical boundaries s stronger than the interests or needs within a local geographical area.  At other times the traditions and interests of the local area tend to challenge or predominate.  An inconsistent change from a localized agricultural production to a different non-local one is inconsistent. Businesses have increasingly become global as opposed to national. This is true for large multi-national corporations, but equally for smaller organizations and even for some farm-production companies whose market now extends far beyond their local region. France has recently been criticized by the World Trade Organization for its protectionist stance toward its farm industry and an attempt to maintain the economic viability of its local farming against outside pressures from lower-cost producers. When migratory labor from other countries is necessary for farm production in certain areas of the United States it creates the  paradoxical situation of a nomadic group of people providing agricultural services without any direct equity or historic connection to the land on which they are working. An historic example of this phenomenon is the use of slave labor in the Southern United States and Caribbean and Latin America for the development of agricultural production in those new areas. The various revolutions and political reorganizations in these different regions have left a wide range of solutions. In some cases, there is an agricultural-like commitment of the original slaves to the agricultural land that they have worked, while in other places they have been displaced off the land into the general society.

Along with the change from local distribution to wider distribution in industrial production comes an increased emphasis on marketing. At first, this can be seen as simply an effort to expand trade and distribution of locally produced goods. In recent years, marketing in the broader sense has taken on a dominant role in business to direct the process of production and design of business activity, rather than serving it. This observation is not intended as a value judgment, but an accurate description of shifts in the current orientation of manufacturing and some other elements of the economy. Marketing resembles hunting more than it does agriculture. Each encounter in the marketing process represents an event with economic potential which is immediate, though some planning and organization is involved, as in hunting. Marketing does not depend on season factors except where established holidays (i.e., Christmas and Easter) drive it. Marketing often carries with it as in the case of real estate or large capital expenditure a "big kill" mentality in which a few successful sales ("kills") are sufficient to maintain the hunter-marketer and/or the associated organization for the entire year. This is especially true in certain sectors of the financial industry; investment banking shares more similarities with hunting than it does with the long-term view of nurturing or developing a product.

Do these factors, a) decline in local factors in society in production and labor, and b) marketing as a driving force in capitalist market economies, change the culture to one favoring "hunter gatherers"? It seems unrealistic to use descriptors from archaic society to describe the more complex evolution of the contemporary economic scene. However, it is interesting to notice that some of the features of organization that are traditionally seen in hunter-gatherer societies are re-emgerging. Some characteristics include: 1)An increasingly nomadic existence in which primary connection with a specific area of community or land is lost. This includes both legal and illegal immigration, and the tendency for next-generation family members to be widely distributed within a country. 2)An decreasing attachment to a lifelong commitment to a specific work environment, whether this be the land or corporate work environment. 3)Increasing emphasis on immediate economic compensation in encounter-based events, rather than a cycle of agricultural or industrial production. In order to control inventory, supply chain procedures for rapid manufacture of equipment respond to the sale of the equipment. This produces a whole new direction in which the rate and direction of the production process is  responsive to the marketing event. The role of labor, human services, in the economy becomes more event based than agri-cycle labor. 4)Decreased commitment to religious and spiritual-based activities which focus on a traditional time-bound seasonal view of religion.  There is a malaise about this loss of commitment to traditional spiritual/religious activities which are replaced by more personal and ecstatic forms of observance. 5) The commitment to a primary social group ends with the loss of local lifestyle.  Identification with the large company has also been eroded.  The immediate social group where the person is located becomes a source of reference, the family continues to be another, and there is confusion about one’s primary commitment.

September 11th (2001) challenged the country to look at its primary values. An interesting response sometimes heard was that the heroism of those fighting in World War II was echoed in the heroism of the Fire Fighters and Policemen who were involved in rescue efforts. (Many of these public workers live in close-knit family oriented communities which maintain the qualities of a local, family culture more than  the rest of the country.) When American citizens went to fight in World War II, they were clear about the "home land", the land where they came from, that they were defending, the family that they were defending, and a particular image of the United States that they were defending. By contrast, the "Department of Homeland Security" attempts to activate this image of local values that no longer exist.

The US must develop a new cultural image of  living together. This involves the complex process of living together at the daily level over time, and cannot be generated on a conscious rational basis. We can examine the basic human values that must be addressed  in order to make this new culture viable and stable. Prominent among these is a basis for human affiliation and support.   Creating support systems not based on agricultural locality is a problem.  This is well documented in Bowling Alone.  We struggle in our current culture to find ways to define these non-family support groups and it is clear that a way of doing this is necessary since the family is rarely accessible on a day-to-day basis due to our Nomadic nature. Television, media and other other surrogate experiences do not provide the real human contact that is essential, but have begun to be used as substitutes with unknown consequences.  It is worth mentioning in this regard that the use of Internet and telephone contact can facilitate family connection, but it appears that humans require ongoing face-to-face interaction to build a full sense of social and emotional support. This problem has been exaggerated by two and half years of relative isolation in the covid pandemic, which has intensified the problems of direct contact, and shifted the country even more toward "remote interaction".  This cannot be the realistic solution by itself. 

It is a failure of imagination to think that we can go back to the agriculturally grounded social system that was prevalent in the United States before World War II. Current trends suggest an evolution toward a more hunter gatherer style of society, but realistically, beyond the characteristics that we share with that more traditional society are a variety of other characteristics in our world that bear no resemblance to that of hunter gatherers, including global communications, marked diversity of population, etc.  What is needed is an evolving social dialogue that examines the areas in which we are failing to integrate our culture. In this process,  perhaps we can develop a new consensus culture which  benefits from an understanding of the unmet human needs and the task of the social system to find new solutions for them.