Mobilität als Strategie und Ressource – Das Beispiel von Jäger-Sammlern und Hirtennomaden

Abstract

The so-called primitive societies, such as nomadic cultures and hunters-gatherers, successfully employed mobility as a strategy for sustainably exploiting extensive geographical areas, or even as a resource in itself. Likewise, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, our immediate ancestors utilized mobility in the form of migrations to take advantage of horizontally dispersed resources. Yet today, mobility itself has become a type of behavior that indiscriminately devours all kinds of resources. Supported by numerous examples from the field of ethnology, the present study shows how certain subgroups of the human species succeeded in controlling both man and the environment through mobility. Taking the form of both regional and long-distance migrations, this type of mobility was one of man's many strategies to survive in a fickle environment. In pre-modern societies, mobility was a key component of the group's survival strategy. The success of this type of survival hinged on the ability of the species' subgroups to incorporate man's domination of nature into society at large. This system of survival operated primarily according to the imperative or central category of reducing risk (safety first principle, risk-avoiding strategy). This is inseparably bound up with two other categories: the leisure preference and underproductivity, by which is meant the under-exploitation of an ecological niche's carrying capacity. A mere reading of the lessons history has to offer us is not likely to result in a reorientation of our behavior. More promising towards that end, however, would be a thorough understanding of the strategies employed by the human race that have enabled it to evolve successfully without destroying its basis of survival. Up until the dawn of the modern era, mankind's mobility remained confined to the main categories of subsistence economies in many societies. Then, as it began to free itself from these constraints, mobility took on more dangerous aspects, and is today a problem that demands our immediate attention.