Man the Hunter

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Man the Hunter ("Man as a Hunter") was the title of a four-day scientific conference that was held in 1966 at the University of Chicago on the way of life of earlier and present hunter-gatherer cultures (compare horde society ). It is considered to be trend-setting for the following decades of ethnology , anthropology and paleoanthropology and their merging in cross- cultural social research . The event was initiated by Richard Borshay Lee (* 1937) and Irven DeVor (1934–2014), and its organizers included Claude Lévi-Strauss , Lewis Binford and other scientists who were in the early stages of their research. As a guiding spirit can Sherwood Washburn , the mentor of Devor be understood; Today he is regarded as the “father of modern primate research ” and at the beginning of the 1960s he realigned all of anthropology. DeVor had moved to the University of Chicago because of his science approach. The conference took place in the 75th anniversary of the University of Chicago and was sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research .

program

The conference program and its focus can be reconstructed from the conference proceedings , which appeared two years after the conference. The introduction argues for the urgency of the topic: contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures were faced with a variety of problems even then and had no interest representation . The following sections deal with the investigation methods of field research (I), the economic systems (II) and the social and territorial structures of various such ethnic groups (III) in individual investigations . The fourth part deals with marriage rules and life patterns of the Aborigines . The fifth part, on demography and population ecology, examines the possibility of obtaining statements about population development in prehistory from the data of recent cultures and specific health statistics. The following two sections deal specifically with prehistoric hunter-gatherer cultures and the importance of these ways of life for hominization . The last section is entirely reserved for Claude Levi-Strauss' lecture on the concept of primitivity , which until then had shaped the view of hunter-gatherer cultures.

classification

Meetings of the International Conference
on Hunting and Gathering Society (CHAGS)
Surname year place
Man the Hunter 1966 University of Chicago
CHAGS 1 1978 Maison des Sciences de l'Homme , Paris
CHAGS 2 1980 University of Laval , Université du Québec
CHAGS 3 1983 bad Homburg
CHAGS 4 1986 London School of Economics
CHAGS 5 1988 Northern Territory University , Darwin
CHAGS 6 1990 University of Alaska Fairbanks
CHAGS 7 1993 Russian Academy of Sciences , Moscow
CHAGS 8 1998 National Museum of Ethnology , Osaka
CHAGS 9 2003 The University of Edinburgh
CHAGS 10 2013 University of Liverpool
CHAGS 11 2015 University of Vienna
CHAGS 12 2018 Universiti Sains Malaysia
CHAGS 13 2022 University College Dublin

Man the Hunter was one of similar events in which the new generation of scientists tried to find a new order for their subject after the World War. In the early 1960s, anthropology and ethnology stood in the tension between anthropological research on the two main characteristics of kinship and ecological relationships, while the sister discipline archeology was increasingly interested in collecting cross-cultural ethnographic data in order to better understand archaeological records. Last year there had been the Conference on band organization in Ottawa , and a few months later the Conference on cultural ecology , but Man the Hunter was the first to attract the necessary attention.

Their interdisciplinary approach was particularly noteworthy. Even if the title of the event might imply a focus on “men who hunt”, whole social structures were in focus (including women and children). A certain romanticization of the subject cannot be denied if the researchers in the hunter-gatherer societies wanted to discover essential features of human existence in their original form. It was often assumed that the human condition could be better demonstrated in these social formations (compare essentialism ).

The conference brought together the most important anthropologists and archaeologists of their time. A total of 67 scientists from 14 countries took part (including one woman), most of them from North America. The proceedings were a milestone in the history of hunter-gatherer research. At the same time, it is considered the starting point of the International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Society (CHAGS: " International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Society "), which has since discussed topics at conferences at several annual intervals (see research history ); for some of the conference volumes published.

Gender bias effects

In a 2014 study, the American anthropologist Kathleen Sterling examined the proportions of gender studies on hunter-gatherer cultures in anthropology , ethnology and archeology . This was moored at the CHAGS conferences, beginning in 1966 with Man the Hunter . At that time, the " second wave " of the feminist movement was active, but still purely political and not academic. In contrast to this was the choice of title of the conference : Man (“the man”) as a generic masculine for “man”, and Hunter (“the hunter”) for all hunters. On top of that, the subsistence economy of the hunters and gatherers was limited to the element of hunting - the gathering was neglected and left unspokenly to the women. Even here, Sterling highlights the gender bias in the research approaches of that time: the actions of men are the most important thing, and their hunting is seen as the essential contribution to livelihood. The proceedings of the conference, published two years later, explained this discrepancy by saying that all people and hunters, both hunting and gathering, were meant. In terms of content, however, the role of women in the horde societies and the social significance of collecting were hardly discussed. The only participant in the congress, the American ethnologist Lorna Marshall , made the only contribution to the social aspects of collecting . Overall, the social life of hunters and gatherers was not considered in almost all of the articles, even in the chapter on marriage rules, summarizes Sterling.

Feminist anthropology had developed from the end of the 1970s , and Sterling quotes the assessment of two female anthropologists in 1981: “Man the Hunter, which we believed to be our myth, turned out to be a mark of their conception of masculinity”. It was not until 1983, at the 3rd International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Society (CHAGS) in Bad Homburg , Germany , that the topic of "women" could no longer be ignored in the hunter-gatherer societies and was discussed in more detail. The American anthropologist Polly Wiessner was one of the organizers of this conference .

literature

  • Richard Lee, Irven DeVore (Eds.): Man the Hunter. The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development - Man's Once Universal Hunting Way of Life. Aldine, Chicago 1968 (English; proceedings).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Review by Don Brothwell : Book review: Man the Hunter. In: Journal of Biosocial Science. Volume 2, Issue 3, July 1970, pages 293-295 ( online at cambridge.org).
  2. ↑ Richard Lee, Irven DeVore (ed.): Man the Hunter. The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development - Man's Once Universal Hunting Way of Life. Aldine, Chicago 1968 (English; proceedings).
  3. ↑ Summary of the book: Man the Hunter on WorldCat (English).
  4. ↑ Overview: CHAGS History. In: chags. univie.ac.at . 2020, accessed on March 17, 2020 (English).
    International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS): Official website (English).
  5. ↑ chags 10: 10th Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. University of Liverpool, June 2013, accessed March 17, 2020.
  6. ^ CHAGS 11: Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. University of Vienna, 7. – 11. September 2015, accessed on March 17, 2020 (English; overview, program, archive).
  7. ↑ CHAGS 12: Twelfth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, April 23-27 July 2018, accessed on March 17, 2020.
  8. ↑ CHAGS 13: UCD School of Archeology to host CHAGS13. University College Dublin, June 27 to July 1, 2022, accessed March 17, 2020.
  9. ↑ Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, Marek Zvelebil (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of the Archeology and Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-955122-4 , p. 8 (English; page preview in Google Book Search).
  10. ↑ International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS): About CHAGS and the ISHGR. In: chags.usm.my. 2020, accessed on April 13, 2020 (English).
  11. ^ A b Kathleen Sterling: Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer? The Impact of Gender Studies on Hunter-gatherer Research (a Retrospective). In: Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, Marek Zvelebil (Eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the Archeology and Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-955122-4 , pp. 151–173, here pp. 153–157 (English; page previews in the Google book search).
  12. ↑ Jane F. Collier, Michelle Z. Rosalso: Politics and gender in simple societies. In: Sherry B. Ortner, Harriet Whitehead (eds.): Sexual meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Cambridge University Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-521-23965-6 , pp. 275–329, here p. 275 (English); Quote: "[...] Man the Hunter, which we thought to be our myth, turned out to characterize their conception of maleness".
  13. ↑ Kathleen Sterling: Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer? The Impact of Gender Studies on Hunter-gatherer Research (a Retrospective). In: Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, Marek Zvelebil (Eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the Archeology and Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-955122-4 , pp. 151–173, here pp. 158–159 (English; page previews in the Google book search).
  14. ^ Polly Wiessner : Curriculum Vitae. Arizona State University , January 2020, p. 7 (English; PDF: 185 kB, 12 pages on asu.edu ).