Tim Ingold, The social relations of the hunter-gatherer band
Do hunters and gatherers live in societies? If so, do these societies possess common characteristics? Can people live 'socially' outside of 'society'? [11 mins.]
Michael curates today’s Social Science Files selection:
In his chapter On the social relations of the hunter-gatherer band, published in 1999, Tim Ingold wrote:
Do hunters and gatherers live in societies? If so, do these societies possess any common characteristics? In the history of anthropology, answers to these questions have turned upon the nature of a peculiar collectivity known as the band. In this chapter I review anthropological thinking about bands and band-living …
… I show how alternative characterizations of the band mirrored three different senses of society current in the discourse of Western modernity. Each of these characterisations has purported to provide the corresponding notion of society with a natural, essential, or “primitive” foundation. …
Society in the state of nature
Hunter-gatherers occupy a special place in the structure of modern thought, so special that had they not existed they would certainly have had to have been invented. From the eighteenth century to the present, the problem facing modern thinkers has been to reconcile the thesis that the human is but one species of many, with the conviction that, alone among animals, human beings have progressively raised themselves above the purely natural level of existence, and, in so doing, built themselves a history of civilisation.
The solution has been to distinguish two axes of development and change: the biological and the cultural. Along the first axis are placed those changes that, ever since Darwin, have allegedly linked our ape-like ancestors, through various hominid grades, to human beings of an anatomically “modern” form. Along the second axis are placed those changes that led from the earliest fully human ways of life to modern science, technology, and civilisation, apparently without entailing any significant further change in the biological form of the species.
The intersection of these two axes constitutes a point of origin, from which history rises upon the baseline of an evolved human nature. It was to characterise the condition of humanity at the junction of evolutionary and historical change, that modern thought posited “the hunter-gatherer”. History, by the same token, came to be viewed as a process where human beings, through their intellect and their labor, gradually assumed control both over the nature around them (conveyed by the notion of domestication) and of their own inner nature (conveyed by the notion of civilisation).
Just as the hunter-gatherer was positioned at the fulcrum between evolution and history, so the band was located on the fulcrum between nature and society. For an anthropology bent on discovering the “elementary” foundations of human sociality, stripped to its barest essentials, there seemed to be no better way than through the ethnographic study of the modes of association of contemporary hunters and gatherers. “The conditions of life contingent on hunting and gathering,” as Peter Wilson has put it, “indicate a minimal sociology, suggesting what is absolutely necessary and sufficient for the survival and well-being of a human society” (1988).
The notion of society, however, has no fixed, unitary meaning; it has been pulled this way and that within a discourse in which it has been variously contrasted to such terms as individual, community, and state.
To cut a long story short, the recent history of ideas has bequeathed to us three different and apparently quite contradictory notions of what a society is. All three are situated within a long and continuing controversy among Western philosophers … In one sense, also the oldest, society stands for the positive qualities of warmth, intimacy, familiarity, and trust in interpersonal relations which are also summed up in the concept of community. But while … society and community have come to mean much the same thing, namely a group of people bound by shared history, language, and sentiment, in others, society stands opposed to community, connoting the mode of association of rational beings bound by contracts of mutual self-interest … rather than by particularistic relations like those of kinship, friendship or companionship. In yet other contexts, transactions based on self-interest are conceived as the very antithesis of the social. Here, society connotes a domain of external regulation—identified either with the state or, in polities lacking centralised administration, with comparable regulative institutions—which curbs the spontaneous expression of private interests on behalf of public ideals of collective justice and harmony.
To each of these three senses of “society” there corresponds a particular discourse on the hunter-gatherer band. In each case, the burden of this discourse is to establish the “naturalness” of society in the sense implied by it.
In the following sections I shall consider the significance of the band, as, first, an elementary form of community; second, an outcome of strategic interaction; and third, an egalitarian social structure.
[Argument 1]
Communism, familism, and reciprocity
Taken in the first sense, the essence of band society is said to lie in the intimacy, conviviality, and familiarity inherent in what anthropological literature has conventionally called “face-to-face relationships”.
Lewis Henry Morgan, describing the domestic arrangements of certain native North American peoples (whose mode of subsistence, in fact, combined hunting and gathering with cultivation), had spoken of a “communism in living” (1881). By this he meant the pooling of effort and sharing of produce that were the natural concomitants of living under one roof. Morgan’s idea inspired Marx and Engels to characterize the original state of human society as one of “primitive communism”. Many subsequent commentators have followed this lead. Yet the notion of communism, removed from the context of domesticity and harnessed to support a project of social engineering for large-scale, industrialised states with populations of millions, eventually came to mean something quite different from what Morgan had intended: namely, a principle of redistribution that would override all ties of a personal or familial nature, and cancel out their effects.
As Elman Service (1966) pointed out, the communism of hunter-gatherer societies, if we can call it that, is embedded in relations of immediate kinship. Essentially “familistic”, it has its counterpart even in modern states with industrial capitalist economies, as seen in the sociality and redistributive practices of family and close friends. For Service, family and society in band societies are effectively coterminous, whereas in states, “society” is identified, if anything, with the framework of public institutions that partition and envelop the innumerable little domains of “private” family life. As, in the course of social evolution, societies increase their scale and level of integration, so families grow smaller, and family relations become increasingly removed from social relations. “If we compare comparables”, Service observes, “we find the primitive band of thirty to sixty persons larger, to be sure, than the family in urban America, but it is still a family and it is still a very small-scaled society, as societies go” (1966).
That Service’s concept of familism failed to take root in anthropological discussions of band society was due in part to an attractive alternative formulation offered by Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins viewed the sharing of effort and resources in the hunter-gatherer band as a prototypical instance of what he called generalised reciprocity (1972): a kind of give and take characterised by diffuse obligations to help others who may be in need, regardless of the specific balance of account, of how much has been given or received, by whom, in the past.
Sahlins contrasted this with balanced reciprocity, in which every gift anticipates an equivalent return, and negative reciprocity, characterized by persistent and underhand attempts to get something for nothing. Sahlins’ aim, in setting up this continuum of reciprocities from generalised to negative, with balanced at the midpoint, was to establish a systematic correlation between the quality of reciprocity obtaining in a given relationship and the social distance between the parties. This distance was reckoned in terms of a model of society envisioned from the vantage point of a particular individual as a series of ever-widening social sectors in which he or she is perceived to belong: household, lineage, village, tribe, etc. (1972, also 1968).
Although at first glance, Service’s familism and Sahlins’ generalized reciprocity seem much the same (both echoing Morgan’s “communism in living”), there is, in fact, an important difference.
While Sahlins draws his examples freely from societies of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, and pastoralists, his general theory of reciprocity appeals to a segmentary or “tribal” model of society, attributed in the main to agricultural and pastoral peoples. According to this model, the elementary units of society are autonomous and discrete households, each centered on the relations between husband and wife, and between parents and children. As a relatively self- sufficient unit of production and consumption, every household enjoys immediate access to its own means of subsistence. Thus, the agricultural household has its cultivated fields, and the pastoral household its flocks and herds, islands of “domesticated” resources over whose yield it has the prior claim. Acts of reciprocity are then conceived to inhere in distributive relations between these household units, in more or less inclusive sectors of the wider society.
On the other hand, for Service the essence of the hunter-gatherer band lies in the extension of familial relations which, in other societies, are internal to the household, across the entire community. Such a society is not internally differentiated by boundaries of segmentary exclusion into relatively close and relatively distant sectors, nor is access to the resource base divided between its constituent units. The band is conceived as one big household, whose members enjoy unrestricted use of the resources of its country and who labor in common to draw a subsistence from them.
Thus, contra Sahlins, sharing in a hunter-gatherer band is not generalised reciprocity at all. For far from overriding the limits of domestic self-sufficiency, it is underwritten by a principle of collective access. On these grounds, Price (1975) has argued that sharing and reciprocity should be clearly distinguished: the former is the “dominant mode of economic allocation” in band societies, whereas the latter is the dominant mode in tribal societies.
The band, in short, is no mere collection of domestic units, each of which places its own interests before those of the collectivity; rather, it is an “intimate social group…small in scale and personal in quality” (Price 1975). The internal cleavages of the band (most apparent in times of crisis, whether caused by food shortages or interpersonal conflict) are not, then, between families, but between men and women, and between generations.
Behind these debates lurks the issue of the status of the nuclear family as a fundamental building block of human society. One view, going back to Engels, holds that the minimal domestic unit in the original band society, comprising a couple and their children, had not precipitated out, as a separate proprietorial interest, from the larger, band-wide household; thus, rather than being primarily husbands and wives, parents and children, people were brothers and sisters, of both older and younger generations. It was supposed that within this band-household, men and women played as complementary roles: men sharing the hunting; women collectively bringing in the gathered produce, preparing the food, and carrying out other aspects of housework.
The alternative argument maintains that the nuclear family, integrated by a division of labor between husband and wife, is the basic unit of production and consumption in every human society, and that the band is an aggregate of such units bound together by ties of reciprocity. “There can,” claims Fried (1967), “be no disputing the significance of the nuclear family as the main component of the band”. This is the assumption behind Sahlins’ (1972) assertion that every primitive economy, hunting and gathering included, is underwritten by what he calls a “domestic mode of production”.
There is, however, a third alternative, which is to suggest that the band is neither a single unit of householding, nor an aggregate of such units, but is rather formed of two relatively autonomous domains of production and consumption, respectively male and female. What we might recognize as “families” are then constituted at the multiple points of contact between these domains, through relations of exchange involving food and sex. In many societies, for example, a husband’s first obligation is to provide meat for his wife’s mother, who will share it with her daughter. The latter, in turn, will provide her husband both with a share of gathered produce and with sexual favours. As for children, they share in what their mothers have collected, and take meat from anyone who has it. …
… The studies reviewed above all trace the essence of human sociality to the familiarity and mutual concern generated through prolonged living at close quarters. For other writers, however, band organization is the result of strategic decisions made by individuals or families in the interests of survival and reproduction under particular environmental conditions. …
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
[The chapter will be continued soonish for Argument 2 and Argument 3 and the author’s own Argument 4 … in this well known often cited classic Encyclopedia.]
The Source has been:
Tim Ingold, ‘On the social relations of the hunter-gatherer band’, in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, edited by Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly, Cambridge University Press 1999
A few other recent exhibits on foragers, hunter-gatherers:
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