Kim Hill et al., “Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure,”
The quotation on page 477, about the difficulties of interpreting field observations of modern traditional societies, comes from page 15 of Ian Keen’s 2004 book cited above.
Pioneering studies of methodologically rigorous oral history are two books by Jan Vansina:
For a detailed case study illustrating the difficulties of transferring one society’s practices and lessons to another society, see Elizabeth Watson,
Sources of knowledge about traditional societies
On pages 23–24 I briefly summarized our four sources of information, blurring into each other and each with its own advantages and disadvantages, about traditional societies. For readers (especially scholars) interested in learning more about these various sources, I now provide a more extended discussion.
The most obvious method, and the source of most of the information in this book, is to send trained social or biological scientists to visit or live among a traditional people, and to carry out a study focusing on some specific topic. The scientists variously identify themselves as practitioners of different disciplines, including anthropologists, biologists, economists, ethnographers, geneticists, historians, linguists, physicians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. The authors publish their results as scientific articles or books, often frame their study at the outset in terms of some particular question or hypothesis to be tested, and often (especially nowadays) gather quantitative data to be presented in tables of numbers. As applied to traditional human societies, this is the scientific approach that has evolved over centuries as the best approach for obtaining reliable knowledge of the real world, whether it’s the world of human societies, or else the worlds of bacteria, molecules, rocks, or galaxies.
Two main types of difficulty have arisen in applying this approach to the study of traditional human societies. Naturally, these difficulties do not invalidate such studies; they merely need to be borne in mind in interpreting the conclusions, and they explain why we resort to other sources of information as well. The Australian anthropologist Ian Keen introduced his book on Aboriginal Australian societies by summarizing these difficulties as follows: “The main issues of interpretation arising from the work of professionally trained anthropologists are that they are late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories, and particular paradigms strongly shape (and limit) their interpretations. However, within their fields of interest these works tend to be the most thorough and systematic.”
Keen’s warning about studies late in colonial/post-colonial trajectories refers to a dilemma inherent in cultural anthropology, analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in physics. That principle states, in effect, that any physical measurement inevitably perturbs the system being studied and thereby introduces uncertainty into what the true value would have been if the system had not been perturbed. (Specifically in particle physics, the principle states that it’s impossible to measure simultaneously the exact values of both a particle’s position and its velocity.) To appreciate the corresponding dilemma in cultural anthropology, recall that modern anthropological studies of Aboriginal Australia began in the 20th century, and ethnographic accounts began in the 19th century before the rise of modern professional anthropology. However, Europeans had already landed in Australia in 1616 and founded their first settlement in 1788, while Macassans (Indonesian fishermen) had regularly been visiting northern Australia for many centuries before European arrival, and unidentified Austronesian people from Indonesia somehow introduced dogs (dingoes) and possibly other life forms and technologies into Australia several thousand years ago.
Modern studies of Aboriginal Australians have thus been of societies radically changed from their pre- European or pre-Macassan condition, because most of the population had already been killed by European- introduced and perhaps also Macassan-introduced diseases, conquered and subjected to the control of Euro- Australian state government, prevented from exercising traditional fire management (i.e., burning) of their landscape, driven off their prime lands targeted for European settlement, and deprived of part of their subsistence base by the impacts on native animals and plants of European-introduced cats, foxes, sheep, and cattle and Austronesian-introduced dingoes. Similarly, while the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are often taken as models of hunter-gatherers, the detailed studies of the !Kung that began in the 1960s, and that I cite frequently in this book, have been of people who had already given up their traditional bone arrow-points for metal points, had stopped raiding each other, had recently been trading with and encroached on by Bantu herders, and must somehow have been influenced by other Bantu herders who reached southern Africa almost 2,000 years ago.
More generally, all 20th-century studies of hunter-gatherers have been of societies in actual or potential contact with food producers (farmers and/or herders). Until around 11,000 years ago, however, all human societies were hunter-gatherers, so that hunter-gatherers were in contact only with other hunter-gatherers. Only in a few parts of the world, such as Australia, the Arctic, and western North America, did even the first non-scientist Western explorers encounter hunter-gatherers still living in a world of hunter-gatherers. These facts have provoked heated arguments about the relevance of modern studies to past societies: are modern hunter-gatherers too different from past hunter-gatherers to have any relevance to understanding them? That view is surely too extreme: as anthropologist Melvin Konner has expressed it, if today one could take a group of Westerners and dump them naked and without tools in isolation somewhere in the African savannah, within two generations either they would all be dead or else they would have independently re-invented many observed features of hunter-gatherer societies. But at minimum, one must recognize that modern traditional peoples are not frozen models of the distant past.
As for Ian Keen’s other warning, within any science at any particular time there are preferred research areas for systematic study and funding, and other areas that remain neglected. For instance, until recently few anthropologists carried out studies focusing specifically on childhood or old age among traditional peoples. Field observers are discouraged from going out on scientific “fishing trips” and recording everything that they notice; they are expected to produce books and articles on some specific subject. At a given time there are also certain interpretations and phenomena that tend to be preferred, and others that are considered unpalatable. For example, there has been vigorous controversy over whether or not the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead skewed her descriptions of Pacific Islander sexual behavior to fit preconceptions held by a then-current school of anthropology; and there are still strong views that traditional peoples aren’t warlike, or that if they are warlike it’s an artifact of European contact, or that if they really are warlike one shouldn’t describe their wars because it’s politically harmful to do so.
A second source of knowledge about traditional societies seeks to peel back some recent changes in modern traditional societies, by interviewing living non-literate people about their orally transmitted histories, and by reconstructing in that way their history over several generations. Naturally, this method poses its own problems, and its practitioners have gained much experience of techniques (pioneered especially by Jan Vansina) to cross- check and ensure the reliability of the information elicited.
For example, the American anthropologist Polly Wiessner and the Enga artist Akii Tumu collaborated to study the oral history of the Enga people, the largest language group in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. While
