Critical Trends in the Study of Hunter-Gatherers

Abstract

Hunter-gatherer were authorized in anthropology by Lee & De Vore's imaginative combination of evolutionary and ecological adaptationist concerns in the Man the Hunter volume (108). While recent reviews of hunter-gatherer studies (16, 23) have explored significant substantive issues, they have not considered the importance of the category itself in the formulation of anthropological research and theory. A major theme of this review is that the questioning of the category hunter-gatherer-rooted in varied responses to the evolutionary/ecological paradigm that constituted it-has been central to much contemporary work. Current writing about hunter-gatherers can be understand in terms of four categories of critique (or attack) on the original paradigm of hunter­ ways of life. I characterize the four broad theoretical orientations as (a) optimal foraging theory (or socioecology); (b) historicist (or ethnohistori­ cal) approaches; (c) sociology in the Marxist and structuralist tradition; and (d) humanistic approaches. In the latter, grab-bag category, I include those emphasizing hermeneutic and meaningful interpretation of in­ sider's views, reflexive works, and the advocacy research of political engage­ ment often undertaken on behalf of hunter-gatherers. Given good reviews of optimal foraging theory (23, 52, 112, 159, 181), I focus on categories b, c, and d. Their joint critical stance towards single archetypes for hunter-gatherer society suggests that the comparative method be considered an enduring problem in anthropology, a problem particularly marked in the very constituting of the category hunter-gatherer. For archeologists and social anthropologists, the category hunter­ gatherer as an evolutionary/ecological type had defined a shared area of