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Emergence of Civilizations: Class 2
_
Society without civilization: The foraging way of life
_
م Copyright Bruce Owen 2003
* General outline of today's class

* Consider the society of the !Kung, from the film and the reading
* Consider how our own society and others like it differ from the
!Kung
* Can we call this difference "civilization"?
* Civilization's place in human history

Consider the society of the !Kung, from the film and the reading
* First, let's get a few concepts and terms under control

* These are described in the Reader; we will look at them more
carefully later.
* Subsistence

* "How people get their groceries"

Foraging, also known as "hunting and gathering"
* Living off the land without intentionally altering it

Kinship system
* One's system of rules for identifying, naming, and interacting
appropriately with relatives

Division of labor
* Who does what; the rules and patterns by which different tasks are
done by people of different ages, sexes, specialties, etc.

Intro to the !Kung, the people in the film
* !Kung = San = Bushmen: Terms for the general ethnic and language
group of the people in the film
* Ju/'hoansi (pronounced "jhu-wahnsi") and variants spelled slightly
differently: a subgroup of the !Kung that speaks one of the three
major language variants, filmed by Marshall and studied by Lee
* Many !Kung names and words are written with odd punctuation marks
and other symbols. These represent various different clicks. For
those of us who don't speak the !Kung language, it is customary to
just ignore these sounds.
* Live in the Kalahari desert of Botswana, Namibia, Angola, South
Africa
* Lee (in the Reader) describes a group living in modern Botswana
* The film was shot with a different group living in Namibia, but
the culture is similar
* We are talking about the recent past. Since the film was made,
virtually all of the !Kung have been settled in permanent camps
* These are modern people, not fossils

* They know about the industrialized world, but it is remote
* They know farmers and pastoral people who live around them, trade
with them, intermarry, etc.
* In fact, as a separate group, they may be a modern creation,
originally just the members of a society that included some
herders and some foragers, with people shifting from one lifestyle
to another as their fortunes and desires led. The !Kung with herds
became recognized as a distinct group (Khoi), treated differently
by colonial governments.

But they can serve as an example of how people can live as foragers
* this is presumably roughly how all people _did_ live before the
spread of agriculture and, later, "civilization".

What is distinctive about the foraging lifestyle, especially in
contrast to what we are used to?
* Subsistence by foraging

* gathering

* most of the food is plants (70% of calories for !Kung)

hunting
* occasional meat (30% of calories for !Kung)

these proportions have probably varied a lot from group to group in
different places and times

Small groups
* one or a few families, typically 10-50 people
* group membership changes over time: groups split, merge,
individuals shift from group to group
* groups can't be big, or food around the camp would get depleted
too fast

Very mobile
* use up the food in one place, then move to another
* moves may be irregular or in a seasonal round
* camps typically set up in a few hours or days

Few possessions
* nothing you don't want to carry
* many things can be made as you need them
* so no hoarding, long-term storage, or accumulation of wealth
* so there are few differences in wealth; everyone has roughly the
same kinds and amount of stuff
* no one "owns" the land or the water, although people do have
recognized rights to certain territories that are associated with
their families or bands

* they can try to control access to it (although in practice access
is almost always granted)
* but they can't sell or trade it

Little division of labor or specialization except by age and sex
* i.e. little kids and old people gather but don't hunt
* women handle most child care, since men can't breast feed
* men do most of the hunting, since women are usually burdened by
children
* some limited specialization: skilled people may make and fix
tools, or perform curing ceremonies, in exchange for gifts, etc.
* but overall, with minor exceptions, everyone has basically the
same roles, determined by sex and age

* no careers, jobs, positions that strongly differentiate one person
from another
* every family includes people who do all the things that are
necessary to survive
* families are fairly independent, self-sufficient, and economically
equivalent

Minimal social hierarchy (no powerful leaders)
* no chiefs or other people with special power (according to Lee)
* although some are more respected than others
* and some have special skills (curing, making arrows, etc.)
* i.e. no significant hierarchy of status or power

* !Kung society is essentially egalitarian

Did you notice a claim to the contrary in the film? How might you
explain that?

"Simple" social organization based on kinship
* everyone is related to everyone else

* so you deal with others according to your relationship with them

* you know how to treat them, what their obligations are to you, and
yours to them

social dynamics are like going on a trip with your extended family
and a few friends
* except that the !Kung have much more practice at getting along
with each other
* and they really depend on each other much more directly than we do

another analogy is to a small town, where everyone knows everyone
else
* everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and talks about it
* almost nothing is private

interactions are on a personal level
* foragers like the !Kung tend to be very aware of interpersonal
matters like jealousy, pride, trustworthiness

* take elaborate steps to prevent social problems
* "insulting the meat"

thus little room for anyone to take advantage

conflicts can be defused by someone just leaving to hang out with
another band, usually with a kin connection
* the way you might go to stay with your uncle if things got too hot
between you and your parents

occasional violence, but only at a personal or family level (no
warfare). Very occasionally group violence by general consent, as
described in the reading

although the kinship system is extremely complex (much more complex
than ours, extending much further out and with some wild variations),
this is often called "simple" social organization.
* Because some kind of kinship system exists in all societies
* "Kinship-only", then, is a minimal kind of organization, "simple"
in the sense of there being just one system for categorizing
people and relating to them
* in more "complex" societies, additional layers of organization
like classes, educational status, family prestige, inherited
titles, etc. are added
* complex, in the sense of having many parts, refers to society
organized by kinship _plus_ other, more or less independent
systems... as we will see next time.

also called a "band" society, in reference to the size and nature of
the groups in which people live

Answering some questions about the !Kung that people have asked in
previous semesters
* do they have a patrilineal or matrilineal kinship system (or
"descent": method of naming and discussing family relationships)?

* note that this is different from "patriarchal" and "matriarchal"

* patriliny and matriliny have to do with how you think of your
descent ("blood") relationships (there are also "bilateral" and
other arrangements)
* patriarchy and matriarchy have to do with which side of the family
or couple has more decisionmaking authority (also not necessarily
a simple issue)

the !Kung have a very complex kinship system: "strongly bilateral"

Single names only; children named after specific ancestors by
complex rules
* 1st son named after father's father
* 1st daughter after father's mother
* 2nd son after mother's father
* 2nd daughter after mother's mother
* then father's brother and sister, mother's brother and sister,
etc.

relationships are made more complicated by optionally using the
relationship to another person with the same name; ambiguities
resolved by the older person in the interaction

are they patrilocal or matrilocal?
* Matrilocal at first: a new couple usually lives with wife's
people, so the new husband can help support her parents for 8-10
years; the couple often does not stay permanently

weapons: poison-tipped arrows, can be deadly

rates of violence
* Mostly between men, with men killed (unlike many other places
where women are the most common victims)

* of three recorded women killed, two were innocent bystanders

Fights are mostly over women or previous deaths (feuds)

22 homicides recorded in 35 years (1920-55) in the Dobe area
* There were 466 Dobe region !Kung individuals in 1965
* i.e. 135 homicides / 100,000 / year
* US in 1990: 9.4 homicides / 100,000 / year
* !Kung homicide rate was 14 times greater than US

drugs and alcohol
* !Kung occasionally plant marijuana and tobacco
* Alcohol problems where sugar (to brew) or liquor available

What should we think of this lifestyle?
* Marshall Sahlins called foragers "the original affluent society"

* argues that the !Kung and other foragers actually live very well
* lots of free time

* average 17 hours/week getting food (2.5 hr/day)
* average 6 hours/week making and fixing tools (54 min/day)
* average 19 hours/week "housework" (cooking, cleaning gear and
camp, gathering wood and water) (2.7 hr/day)
* total 42.3 hr/week = 6 hrs/day
* leaves lots of time to sleep, talk, gamble, etc.
* and this is in a very harsh environment

* in the past, foragers also lived in better environments, where
they presumably would have to work even less

Sahlins argues that your material standard of life depends on your
expectations
* two ways to be satisfied:

* have a lot
* want little

the !Kung met all their needs with less work than we do today,
leaving them satisfied and with lots of leisure time to hang out,
talk, dance, sleep, gamble, play with the kids...

of course, they don't have the pleasures of literature, television,
organized sports, nice clothes, cars, effective medicine,
understanding physics, etc.
* and now that they are familiar with some of those, it is less
likely that they would be content to return to their old foraging
lifestyle

Consider how our own society and others like it differ from the
!Kung
* By others like ours, I mean

* modern societies: Europe, Mexico, India, China, Peru...
* historical or ancient societies: the US of 1776; the Roman empire,
classical Greece, etc.

Subsistence
* Agricultural production
* lots of exchange of goods
* Few or no people produce all that they need to survive

* people exchange their labor or products for food and goods
* often, but not always, using money as an intermediary

Extreme interdependence of people on each other for the food, other
goods, and services they need to survive

Relatively little free time compared to foragers

Huge groups
* Towns, cities, states, countries
* Many or most people live in places with a very high density of
people per acre
* Very large numbers of people interact with each other
* Lots of interaction with strangers and non-kin

Not very mobile
* People tend to have long-term homes, permanently constructed

Lots of possessions, unevenly distributed
* Even poor people accumulate lots of stuff
* the minimum amount of stuff you need to live in an acceptable way
is much greater

* in our extreme case, you "need" shoes, a bed, several sets of
clothes, a telephone, a car or some other form of transportation,
a stove (microwave, etc.), refrigerator...
* things many people recently lived perfectly well without, but now
are indispensable to our way of living

Huge differences in wealth between the poorest and the richest

Virtually all the land, water, and other resources are owned and
controlled by individuals or groups (businesses, governments, etc.)

Very complex division of labor
* by age and sex
* but also by education, experience, interest, abilities,
contacts...
* thousands and thousands of different jobs and roles, all dependent
upon countless others

Very pronounced and complex social hierarchy with powerful leaders
* lots of variation in individual power
* complex hierarchies of leadership and authority
* in cross-cutting spheres of influence

* police / government / businesses / religious institutions, etc.

those at the top have vast power over those at the bottom
* your boss at work can make you change your hairstyle
* the IRS scares you into paying your taxes
* and if you don't, an IRS agent can take away your house
* the President can send 18 year old soldiers to their deaths
* etc.

"Complex" social organization based on kinship plus many other,
often overriding factors
* most interactions are with non-kin
* most interactions are impersonal, structured by jobs and other
roles, rather than by kinship relations
* complex systems for resolving conflicts (courts, etc.)
* violence is often at the group level: wars
* "complex" social organization, in that it is comprised of more
parts:

* a kinship system (in our case, drastically simplified), _plus_
* economic classes
* ethnic groups
* status groups by education, birth, etc. partially apart from
wealth
* self-defined groups by political views, social preferences (marked
by musical tastes, clothing styles, ways of speaking, etc.), and
other criteria
* all of which contribute to determining how people behave and
interact with each other

"state" society: an extreme form of complex society
* we will look more closely at states later
* but in general: large societies with a complex hierarchy of
political power

Can you think of anything else that differentiates our way of living
from that of the !Kung?

Can we call this difference "civilization"?
* For the sake of talking about our kind of society, we have to call
it _something_

* and we will be able to think about "our kind of society" more
clearly if we specify what, exactly, about "our kind of society"
we think is so distinctive

Civilization, like any other word, just means what we agree it
means.
* There is no "true" definition
* It is just a category or a description for one kind of society
that we are interested in.
* "Civilization" as we will be using the term does not imply
anything about how much we like a society, nor about how good,
fair, peaceful, pleasant, sophisticated, or artistic it is.

* Nor does saying that a society is NOT a civilization imply
anything about how wise, humane, happy, sophisticated, etc. those
people are

Instead, when we call a society a "civilization", we are simply
classifying it as socially, politically, and economically complex,
usually large, usually with a relatively complex technology, and
usually with a variety of other features.

So now, let's think about how you would define "civilization"
* We will hold off on defining "civilization" exactly until we have
looked at some different societies and discussed some other
concepts.
* But you can start thinking about what the category of
"civilization" entails

* Think of Athenian Greece, the Roman Empire, Egypt of the Pharaohs,
Dynastic China... everyone agrees that these were "civilizations"
* And almost everyone would agree that the society of the !Kung is
not a civilization

you will find some suggestions in the Reader if you look a few
classes ahead

many of the definitions of "civilization" (and "complex society",
which we can treat as roughly synonymous) involve the concepts of
"city" and "state". So we will also have to figure out what exactly we
mean by those terms.

Just keep these questions on your mental back burner. We will get to
them a few classes from now.

you may not agree with all the definitions; I'll want some opinions
in class!

This is important, because throughout the class we will often have
to decide when civilization arose in different places; you will have
to use these definitions (or other reasonable ones) in your written
assignments.

Civilization's place in the human career
* whatever we mean by civilization, of course...
* For the vast majority of humans' existence on earth, people have
lived as foragers, more or less like the !Kung

* In fact, their lives were probably even easier and more
comfortable, since population density was very low and they had
not been driven out of the best areas by farmers

* our few remaining examples of foragers all live in places so
hostile that no farmers or pastoralists have driven them off (yet)
* so we are seeing foragers at their most hard-pressed, and even
then, Sahlins could reasonably call them "affluent"

Look at the chart in the Reader: "Civilization's Place in the Big
Picture"

Analogy to this semester-long class
* if the class covered just our own species, from the first archaic
_Homo sapiens_ to the present, it would start about 100,000 years
ago

* a semester-long class has 30 meetings of 75 minutes each, or 2,250
minutes; that is 44.4 years/minute

* that is about one generation every 30 seconds for the whole
semester...

we would study foragers for 27 class meetings, totaling 34 hours, or
90% of the course

we would not get to the first farmers (10,000 years ago) until the
28th class meeting

and we would only get to the first sizable cities, states, and
civilizations (about 5,500 years ago) well into class 29, with all of
written history fitting into the last two hours of the semester

if we started with _Homo erectus_, which was our immediate ancestor,
made stone tools, and had a foraging lifestyle not so different from
that of the !Kung, albeit a somewhat smaller brain
* beginning around 1.6 million years ago; that would be 711
years/minute
* we would study foragers for 29 class meetings during three months,
or 99.4% of the course
* and we would only get to the first farmers (10,000 years ago)
about 14 minutes before the end of the last class period
* and we would only have the last eight minutes to look at cities,
states, and civilizations (about 5,500 years ago)

so: farming and civilization are very recent aberrations for the
human race.
* we evolved biologically as foragers
* that includes not only our bodies, but also our capacity for
thought and planning
* our propensities for social relations
* and our emotions

So how did we get from foraging to civilization? Why change after
such a long run of success?

Or, to look at it from a more personal angle:
* Most people would say that we live in a "civilization"
* look around you and think about

* how dependent we are on countless thousands of other people we
have never even met
* the incredible complexity of our social and economic relations

think about the way the !Kung live, and then consider:
* how you and your parents work for some organization, which gives
you a piece of paper every month, which you use to get housing and
food
* McDonald's hamburgers and Safeway supermarkets
* the engineers, factory workers, managers, and salesmen who made it
possible for you to buy a car in which you travel faster, farther,
and more comfortably than the richest person on earth could do
just 100 years ago
* and the gigantic, complex web of people and things that make it
possible to fill that car with precisely the right kind of refined
petrochemicals in almost any town on earth
* the city, state, and federal government

* a huge number of people who we elect and others that they hire
* that build the system that brings fresh water to every house
* that hire police
* that pay your grandparent's medical bills (maybe)

income taxes and the legal system that makes you pay them

the US air force, and the FBI

this is not natural!

people have not always lived this way!

How did we get into this mess?

That is the main point of this class:
* How did we get into this mess?
* Or: why and how did "civilization" arise?
* Or, as a !Kung man said when Richard Lee asked why they didn't
take up farming: "Why should we farm when there are so many
mongongo nuts?"
* I'll suggest a few possible answers for this first step when we
look at the origins of agriculture