"To acquire resources efficiently, foragers must organise themselves to be in the right place at the right time, with the right numbers of people" (Peoples and Bailey, 87). Discuss

Authors Avatar

Tom Burridge

“To acquire resources efficiently, foragers must organise themselves to be in the right place at the right time, with the right numbers of people” (Peoples and Bailey, 87). Discuss, using examples, some of the ways in which foragers have achieved this result.

        Foragers, or hunter-gatherers are defined as groups of people who exploit the wild plants and animals of their territory for food. However, these people do not try to expand their available resources by farming crops or breeding livestock. Despite this, foragers do attempt to acquire resources more efficiently in a number of ways, including razing forests to the ground, creating pasture land for wild animals. Also foragers in the Dobe area of Botswana, the !Kung, have a very simple, small scale, self-contained economy of a type that may have been characteristic of early man. The Dobe region is surrounded by waterless desert and the bushman population therein is largely self-sufficient in terms of subsistence. Extreme isolation and a marginal environment have been largely responsible for the persistence of this people to the present. Homo Sapiens has been said to have been in existence for up to 200,000 years, but farming was not practiced until 10,000 years ago, therefore the existence of the !Kung before this proves that foraging is a viable survival technique. Compared to other peoples, foragers exercise no control over their environments, and so renders a number of foragers as nomadic peoples. Therefore, although “foragers” is a very broad term, the statement that foragers must be in the right place at the right time to acquire resources efficiently is an accurate analysis of the situations of many hunter-gatherer societies.

        Firstly, the bushmen must arrange themselves so that the right number of people are employed to forage efficiently. This division of labour among the foraging peoples, is usually organised relating to their age and gender, although special knowledge and skills also serve as a basis for assigning tasks. Among many hunter-gatherer peoples, it is the male populace that perform the hunting tasks and the women who do most of the gathering. However, despite this, it is not unusual in any of these cultures for either sex to aid the other. For example, among the BaMbuti of the tropical forest of Zaire, the women and children help the men in the hunting by driving game animals into nets. Therefore, it is clear to see how the hunter-gatherer societies divide themselves, but not why they do it. In most of the foraging environments, people are necessitated to reside in nomadic groups of below fifty, known as bands. These bands have a unique form of cultivating kinship. The !Kung distribute artefacts among themselves mainly in a quite different way, called hxaro. Hxaro is used to build relationships. Property is put to work explicitly to develop symmetrical ties of friendship between the people. The average person among the !Kung has sixteen hxaro partners with whom he or she exchanges personally owned objects such as beads, arrows, clothing or pots, but not food. All personally owned, non-consumable items can enter the system. Gifts are given, often on request, and are then reciprocated over a delay of weeks or months. A person’s hxaro partners include most of his or her close kin – parents, children, siblings are all eligible as well as more distant kin. In general hxaro relationships are superimposed on kinship relationships. As in many other societies with instant return systems, kinship, by itself, implies little in the way of commitment. By giving property to each other as gestures of friendly intent, hxaro exchange partners build up selected kin relationships into more committed ones, some of which will be useful in providing access to groups and to the food resources of groups in areas other than one’s own. Most personally owned possessions enter into hxaro but people do not come to depend on hxaro for access to the type of goods which are transmitted through it.

Join now!

Members of these bands usually co-operate in production, and often share the rights to forage and gather in a certain region. The !Kung of southern Africa illustrate these points about band organisation. The bushman economy lacks trading posts, trade in foodstuffs, wage labour, cash, conversions and markets – the features which are commonly taken to indicate economic interdependence. Because the !Kung are hunters and gatherers, without agriculture and domestic animals, and because they don’t amass a surplus of foodstuffs, the relation between local food production and consumption is an immediate one. A diagnostic feature of their subsistence economy is: food ...

This is a preview of the whole essay