Hunting and Gathering Societies: Fourth International Conference

Abstract

By all accounts one of the most successful and important anthropological conferences ever held was Man the Hunter (see Lee and DeVore I968). The Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, held at the London School of Economics September 8I3, I986, was planned with this conference in mind, as a twentieth-year stock-taking. Yet, while Man the Hunter was perceived as a one-shot evaluation of the prehistoric, recent, and present condition of the world's hunting societies, the I986 conference is clearly part of a series generated by the renewal of interest which followed the (First) International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies held in Paris in I978.2 The Paris conference was convened to explore in a global way the foraging life-style, with emphases on kinship and symbolism as well as on economic activities. All sessions were plenary, and the proceedings had a formal character due in part to the presence of microphones between each two participants. The Second International, held at Quebec in I980, was organized differently, with two sessions running concurrently almost throughout the conference, and as a result failed either to build a consensus or to polarize participants along any overall theoretical lines. The Third, in Bad Homburg, in I983, was very small by the standards of the others and emphasized historical studies.3 The Fourth, planned and organized by James Woodburn (London School of Economics), Tim Ingold (University of Manchester), and nine other U.K.based anthropologists, was designed to take account of the best features of the earlier meetings and to cover both topics of ongoing interest generated by the earlier ones and new areas of interest, especially those traditionally associated with anthropology in the United Kingdom. In the egalitarian spirit of hunter-gatherer society, the organizers also sought to bring together established and younger scholars on an equal basis. Most of the II4 participants made presentations (some jointly), and the programme included 76 papers, two films, and three concluding addresses. The conference opened with a session on comparative studies. Alain Testart (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme) introduced the topic of sharing, which was to be a major focus throughout the conference. He proposed a distinction between societies in which game is shared out by the hunter (e.g., the Inuit) and those in which it is shared out by a second party (e.g., the Australian Aborigines) and argued that the mechanisms of distribution in each case account for differences in kinship and other aspects of social structure. The model was challenged on ethnographic grounds by some of the Australianists present but provided a baseline for much discussion. Other papers in this session dealt with more specific comparisons, notably in the classification and explanation of the diversity of settlement patterns, and with the management of risk. Of the latter, that of Robin Torrence (University of Sheffield) provoked the first of the many significant arguments between the archaeologists and the social anthropologists present. Torrence, herself an archaeologist, implicitly equated with material culture and put forward the idea that a focus on the avoidance of risk rather than on the opposition between material and social factors in production should bring archaeological and social anthropological interests together. Robin Ridington (University of British Columbia) challenged this view of technology, both in discussion and in his own paper, given later in the symbolism session. He defined technology as an aspect of knowledge, based on the possession of artifice rather than artifacts. Session 2 dealt with rights and conflict and generated many more debates over definition. Nicolas Peterson (Australian National University) stressed demands and obligations to share. Ingold challenged this in discussion, saying that what Peterson was talking about was not sharing at all but tolerated scrounging as described by primatologists in studies of chimpanzees. Taking up this point, Fred Myers (New York University) claimed that Peterson's paper was actually about exchange, and in his own paper on the Pintupi he argued that exchange is a more complex notion than is connoted by the simplistic (and implicitly ethnocentric) phrase property rights. Ian Keen (University of Queensland) and Howard Morphy (University of Oxford) explored the relations between ideology and religious in their papers on the Yolungu, and no doubt this theme will be taken up again when the Fifth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies meets in Australia in I988.4 Of the nonAustralianist papers in the session, that of Richard Lee (University of Toronto) was also of potentially seminal interest.5 Reflecting on primitive communism, he urged a return to that concept, if not that life-style, as a key to understanding the present and future condition of mankind. Distinguishing sharply between primitive and rev-