Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research

Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research
Author: Linda J. Ellanna
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000324850

Hunter-gatherer research has experienced enormous expansion over the past three decades. In the late 1950s less than a score of anthropologists were actively engaged in issue-oriented studies of foraging populations. Since then, the number of active researchers has grown into the hundreds.This book offers the most up-to-date anthology of papers on hunter-gatherer research and contains possibly the most comprehensive bibliography on hunter-gatherers ever published. It will be essential reading for all students of hunter-gatherer societies.

Hunter-Gatherers

Hunter-Gatherers
Author: Catherine Panter-Brick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2001-03-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780521776721

This 2001 volume is an interdisciplinary text on hunter-gatherer populations world-wide.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers
Author: Vicki Cummings
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1361
Release: 2014-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191025275

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

The Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers

The Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers
Author: Vicki Cummings
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1780932022

A basic introduction to key debates in the study of hunter-gatherers, specifically from an anthropological perspective, but designed for an archaeological readership.

Us, Relatives

Us, Relatives
Author: Nurit Bird-David
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520966686

Anthropologists have long looked to forager-cultivator cultures for insights into human lifeways. But they have often not been attentive enough to locals’ horizons of concern and to the enormous disparity in population size between these groups and other societies. Us, Relatives explores how scalar blindness skews our understanding of these cultures and the debates they inspire. Drawing on her long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers, Nurit Bird-David provides a scale-sensitive ethnography of these people as she encountered them in the late 1970s and reflects on the intellectual journey that led her to new understandings of their lifeways and horizons. She elaborates on indigenous modes of “being many” that have been eclipsed by scale-blind anthropology, which generally uses its large-scale conceptual language of persons, relations, and ethnic groups for even tiny communities. Through the idea of pluripresence, Bird-David reveals a mode of plural life that encompasses a diversity of humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared life. She argues that this mode of belonging subverts the modern ontological touchstone of “imagined communities,” rooted not in sameness among dispersed strangers but in intimacy among relatives of infinite diversity.

Man the Hunter

Man the Hunter
Author: Richard Borshay Lee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 974
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351507451

Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.

Hunter-gatherers in a Changing World

Hunter-gatherers in a Changing World
Author: Victoria Reyes-García
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319422715

This book compiles a collection of case studies analysing drivers of and responses to change amongst contemporary hunter-gatherers. Contemporary hunter-gatherers’ livelihoods are examined from perspectives ranging from historical legacy to environmental change, and from changes in national economic, political and legal systems to more broad-scale and universal notions of globalization and acculturation. Far from the commonly held romantic view that hunter-gatherers continue to exist as isolated populations living a traditional lifestyle in harmony with the environment, contemporary hunter-gatherers – like many rural communities around the world - face a number of relatively new ecological and social challenges to which they are pressed to adapt. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are increasingly and rapidly being affected by Global Changes, related both to biophysical Earth systems (i.e., changes in climate, biodiversity and natural resources, and water availability), and to social systems (i.e. demographic transitions, sedentarisation, integration into the market economy, and all the socio-cultural change that these and other factors trigger). Chapter 10 of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers
Author: Richard B. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 578
Release: 1999-12-16
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780521571098

Hunting and gathering is humanity's first and most successful adaptation. Until 12,000 years ago, all humanity lived this way. Surprisingly, in an increasingly urbanized and technological world dozens of hunting and gathering societies have persisted and thrive worldwide, resilient in the face of change, their ancient ways now combined with the trappings of modernity. The Encyclopedia is divided into three parts. The first contains case studies, by leading experts, of over fifty hunting and gathering peoples, in seven major world regions. There is a general introduction and an archaeological overview for each region. Part II contains thematic essays on prehistory, social life, gender, music and art, health, religion, and indigenous knowledge. The final part surveys the complex histories of hunter-gatherers' encounters with colonialism and the state, and their ongoing struggles for dignity and human rights as part of the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples.

Hunter-Gatherers

Hunter-Gatherers
Author: Robert L. Bettinger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1991-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780306436505

Hunter-gatherers are the quintessential anthropological topic. They constitute the subject matter that, in the last instance, separates anthropology from its sister social science disciplines: psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. In that central position, hunter-gatherers are the acid test to which any reasonably comprehensive anthropological theory must be applied. Several such theories-some narrow, some broad-are examined in light of the hunter gatherer case in this book. My purpose, then, is that of a review of ideas rather than of a literature. I do not-probably could not-survey all that has been written about hunter-gatherers: Many more works are ignored than considered. That is not because the ones ignored are uninteresting, but because it is my broader purpose to concentrate on certain theoretical contributions to anthro pology in which hunter-gatherers figure most prominently. The book begins with two chapters that deal with the history of anthro pological research and theory in relation to hunter-gatherers. The point is not to present a comprehensive or even-handed accounting of developments. Rather, I sketch a history of selected ideas that have determined the manner in which social scientists have viewed, and thus studied, hunter-gatherers. This lays the groundwork for subjects subsequently addressed and establishes two funda mental points. First, the social sciences have always portrayed hunter-gatherers in ways that serve their theories; in short, hunter-gatherer research has always been a theoretical enterprise. Second, these theoretical treatments have gener ally been either evolutionary or materialist-or both-in perspective.

Information and Its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands

Information and Its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands
Author: Robert K. Hitchcock
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2011-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 193877020X

Information and its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy. The fundamental goal of the volume is to bridge disciplines and subdisciplines, open discussion, and see if some common ground-either theoretical perspectives, general principles, or methodologies-can be developed upon which to build future research on the role of information in hunter-gatherer bands.