[D66] anthroencyclopedia.com

[R.O.]

https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/hunting-and-gathering

Thomas Widlok
University of Cologne
Initially published 18 May 2020
http://doi.org/10.29164/20hunt

Abstract

Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a 
living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from 
human origins to the present. Correspondingly, there has been a lot of 
anthropological attention devoted to hunting and gathering with an 
initial confidence that one could directly observe human nature by 
studying hunter-gatherers. More recently, however, anthropologists have 
grown cautious not to draw analogies between present-day 
hunter-gatherers and those of the distant past too quickly. They also do 
not focus on hunting and gathering as isolated activities, but rather on 
the socio-cultural formations that have been found to be associated with 
them. Despite considerable regional diversity, there are recurrent 
themes in hunter-gatherer ethnography that show shared patterns beyond 
the ecology of foraging. Prominent is the notion of hunter-gatherers 
being ‘originally affluent’ with a relatively low workload. 
Hunter-gatherers have also been associated with a high incidence of 
gender and age equality, due to levelling practices such as sharing. 
Most hunter-gatherers live in very small groups, characterised by 
multirelational kinship ties. They often have distinct forms of 
environmental perception, and it has been suggested that they display a 
high degree of playfulness in ritual affairs. They therefore provide 
comparative insights in a wide-range of domains far beyond the 
activities of hunting and gathering.


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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the 
University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of 
Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University 
Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). 
He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The 
situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, 
Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok at uni-koeln.de