4.3.3 Other Aspects Of Hunter-Gatherer Societies

This post will focus on how anarchy is a feature of hunter-gatherer societies. (In a later Chapter I include a post on the implications of anarchy in respect of energy available to humans). 

Because of the dominance of the top-down centralised Western World and the primacy of our way of being, hunter-gatherer societies are nowadays very rare in the world in general. For good or bad, better or worse, more and more tribal societies that once lived at one with nature are moving to farming and/or towns and cities to go to school or work.

On this note, I always feel a little guilty when I am watching programmes about the Amazon rainforest and such places where the (always a Western World) presenter is tut-tutting at farmers cutting down trees to grow cash crops or logging companies doing the same to use the wood to make a profit. Since humans became farmers, in every part of the world, trillions of trees have been cleared for farming, profit and thereafter, human habitation.

I don’t have a solution to this problem and I truly understand the importance of the rainforests, the lungs of the world, as they are known. But for us well-fed Western Worlders to be criticising those who are trying to do the exact same as we did over many centuries is a little hypocritical.

It does bring it home to me though that hunter-gatherers are the only societies that truly respect the environment and are in relationship with it rather than trying to dominate it.

Getting back to anarchy, one anthropologist, the Russian Piotr Kropotkin, who lived from 1842 to 1921, linked the lives of hunter-gatherer societies to a kind of positive anarchy. In the best case scenario, Kropotkin argued that the level of mutual support that is evident in such societies can be an example to modern, developed society.

He argued (as I do, in a different way, in this website) that very little in the way of positive substantial change for people who need it most will arise from initiatives from Governments as we know them.  (The Pillars of his time)! Of course this was Russia (and Switzerland, where Kropotkin also lived for a time) in the late nineteenth century, but I don’t think that things have changed that much really.

He also argued that voluntary organisations (the TSO’s – remember them) had much more potential to bring about change in people’s lives than organisations set up by Government.  In his writing he argued that what he called Bushmen, or savages (for example those in the Kalahari Desert) had been terrorised and subjugated by so-called civilised society (agriculturalists) who saw the nation state as the only valid society. 

(Just as an aside, Kropotkin used the term savages in a very positive way – but then it began to have negative connotations.  I have, however, heard young people nowadays describe very positive experiences as savage, so perhaps there is a little positivity coming back to the term or else Kropotkin was way ahead of his time)!

He was also a proponent of systems theory, maintaining that history, ecology, geography, ethnicity, culture, politics etc. were all interrelated and interdependent.  His notions of mutual aid and sharing are relevant for our time and in particular supporting vulnerable people.

He pointed out that anarchists did not want to end society but instead envisioned a completely different society,  not simply a clone of the top-down society typical of that era – and that is still, in a different guise, popular today.  And, how it suited the bureaucratic centralised nation states of his time to promote the centrality of the family to society – to better exercise control.

He concluded that because the origins of mutual aid among humans stretched back to the days of hunting and gathering, it must be of great value to humankind, and it has survived to the present day. This resonates with modern studies on attachment, as we have come across already – in particular our care-giving tendency.

In another Chapter I state that the family is the basic unit of society as we know it today – and our support should be designed to include the family if we are to protect the children who need it most.  Obviously, the typical family that prevails nowadays (Mammy, Daddy and children) was not how children were/are brought up in hunter-gatherer societies.

Mostly, Kropotkin, (like modern anthropologists) drew on personal observations of tribes that had not been modernised positing them as examples of the sharing and co-operation ethos which he deemed to be most desirable for society to thrive. 

In most hunter-gatherer societies, killing of children and allowing elderly people to die (i.e. not doing much to help them stay alive – perhaps even hastening their passing) was permitted if it was felt that they would not survive anyway, and/or would bring some disadvantage or even threat to the tribe.

We mentioned already that the ultimate sanction of execution could be visited upon those who became so dominant that they upset the egalitarian ethos that prevailed.  And the tribe would obligate the family of the person who becomes the threat to carry out the execution – so that there would be no reprisals.

So the sharing and generosity did not apply, apparently, if the tribe deemed their survival, viability or even the general well-being that would arise from maintenance of their ethos, to be under threat.

This behaviour is in stark contrast to the efforts that are made nowadays to care for infants who are never going to be able to fend for themselves when they grow to be adults; and/or the lengths to which we go to prolong the life of the elderly, when, without pharmacological/technological means, life would end naturally.

And most modern, forward-thinking countries have disavowed capital punishment as a method of deterring people from criminality – i.e. putting our well-being under threat.  And imagine what we might think of a country that demanded that the family of a criminal execute him!

It is easy for us to condemn making a demand on a family to kill one of its members, as vicious, cruel and uncivilised.  But then again, as I mentioned in a previous post, nation states and great civilisations have been killing people who they deem to be a threat to them both by executing them and killing them in wars, for many thousands of years.  Some countries that call themselves civilised still execute people.

I thought about this for a while.

I concluded that one of the principal differences between modern society at war and a hunter-gatherer tribe demanding that a criminal’s family kill him is that we are usually not in contact with the bereaved family when killing a foreign enemy, whereas we are when ending the life of a person who has become a liability in, or a threat to our own tribe or extended family – and the immediate family who are bereaved will need our support.

And when someone is executed in the modern world, there is firstly the yawning gap of the entire judicial system and secondly abhorrence of the criminal by society which keeps the family of the executed person both physically and psychologically far away from the person or people employed by the state to do the killing.

In respect of allowing non-viable children and elderly die, I am sure that, being human, hunter-gatherers love their children and their elderly as much as we do. So the obvious answer to the question as to why we save infants that we know will be dependent adults, or prolong elderly people’s lives is, of course, that we have the technology to do it nowadays whereas hunter-gatherer societies in past times did not – and if they could have, they would have.

I don’t know enough about the lives of modern hunter-gatherer tribes-people to comment as to whether they use modern medicine that is available in their countries to either assist ill infants or prolong the life of the elderly – my intuition would suggest to me that they do.

(If you are from a hunter-gatherer tribe I’d love to hear more about this topic as it interests me greatly).

But I believe that there is something else going on too.

Perhaps that something is, as we develop technologically, we tend to become non-accepting of reality and the inevitability of suffering when those who are going to suffer are close to us and particularly if they are in our own family.

And we begin to believe the myth that we can sort everything.

It has been noted that sharing and reciprocity [1] not only fosters equality (and the socialisation that comes from eating together) but also has implications for our understanding of how relationships work.

It is not easy for us in the 21^st Century to visualise ourselves owning nothing, but your average hunter-gatherer would not have a problem with the line ‘imagine no possessions’, as John Lennon challenged us to do in his song ‘Imagine‘.

A major aspect of sharing is reciprocity.  When I think of it I think of the modern term social capital. 

Reciprocity among many hunter-gatherer tribes is not totally altruistic, and it is important to view its widespread existence in proper perspective.  Indeed, it is broadly similar to insurance that we know in our modern world.  While generosity is certainly motivation for giving, there is also the understanding and expectation that if I give when someone is in need, someone will give to me when I am in need [2].  This is expected in the sharing of resources.

The culture of some tribes, rather than sharing, involves borrowing which probably serves the same function as sharing.  Once again there is expectation built into the exchange.

But the exchange/sharing/borrowing culture has more than economic advantages!

It has a significant social function too, and can be viewed as active promotion of harmony in the tribe.  When behaviours have both economic and social purposes, they are very powerful in respect of engendering enduring relationships.  These behaviours might be looking after resources that they have, and of the land, (that they occupy but don’t own) etc., and are more common among those who are in extended families than they are between strangers.

When I was reading about reciprocity in such contexts I was reminded of neuroscientist Dan Siegel’s term, mwe, which promotes the notion that humans are not me or we, but mwe! (Click on the link to find out more).

It is not all sweetness and light however.

There is also negative reciprocity, where someone tries to get something without giving anything back.  Many observers have suggested that this happens more with strangers than with relatives or members of the tribe.

Contrast how different sharing is to accumulating, storing and then transporting food and items necessary to live.  Firstly there is the necessary social interaction not to mention the responsibility of doing your bit properly.  And of course, there is a lot less work in it too!   

I find it fascinating how sharing and reciprocity has evolved over many hundreds of generations to boss and paid labourer – wage giver and wage earner.  While reciprocity exists (I give my time and expertise to make profit for you and you give me money); sharing is not exactly high on the agenda – in most for-profit employments anyway.

[1]. Reciprocity is a cultural norm where it is expected that we give back what we receive.

[2]. Many contemplative orders of nuns, brothers and priests are self-sufficient but if they have a bad year, crops failing etc. they ring a bell so that the townspeople will come to their aid – bringing food. 

In the Chapter on Systems Theory I discussed self-organisation and I will revisit this topic in respect of hunter-gatherer societies now.

Pierre Clastres the French philosopher/writer proposed that the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the state.

In other words, the nation state is continually taking over peoples without history and oppressing them – then writing their history from the point of view of the oppressor.  I mention in the Chapter on Power and Control in Society that all nation states (that I know of anyway) come into being by violence.

Sometimes hunter-gatherer people are described as stateless, implying that their societies are not real societies.

Virtually all societies eventually become nation states, but not some modern hunter-gatherer bands, some of whom have resisted the urge to evolve into a nation state for thousands of years, and some of whom are untouched by the nation state anyway.

In such societies, social and economic control are still within the hands of the majority, and did not become centralised for the benefit of a few strong, smart ones, as a political economy does. 

This required a high degree of self-organisation, and a sophisticated outlook in respect of power and control.  Centralisation is a lot easier, when you think of it – and it implies Government, with all the trappings of political power.

Getting back to Kropotkin, he argued (as did, in later years, people such as Clastres mentioned above) that while the nation state cannot exist without government, governance can take place in a society that is stateless. He maintained that the nation state did not protect the rights of individuals; rather it trampled all over them for economic, political and military reasons, and particularly when they felt that their power was under threat.

Anarchists of his time did not want to destroy society; they merely wanted to replace the state with something that might work a little better for ordinary people, with sharing and reciprocity to the fore rather than top-down domination.

This was of course in the late nineteenth century, when conscription was the norm for most of what were then called the Great Powers in Europe. The idea of self-organisation would have been very frightening to the people at the top – it is no wonder that anarchy was deemed to be a very bad idea!

Once again you may be wondering why I am going on about hunter-gatherer societies – fascinating stuff – but, like symmetry and resonance in earlier posts, what relevance has it to child protection in 21st Century Ireland? (Or anywhere, indeed)!

The reason can be found earlier in the website when I discussed corporate closed-ness and the domination of Pillars thinking in respect of supporting families in the Focus Group.

Both the corporate world and the world of the Pillars strongly favour top-down centralisation.

And the opposite of top-down centralisation is bottom-up doing-what-we-think-needs-to-be-done-ourselves. This has always been the essence of volunteering in any countries with a strong volunteering tradition.

On the subject of self-organisation it is interesting to note that one of the philosopher Piotr Kropotkin’s most far-seeing suggestions was that small, local industries would have a much better chance of success in developing countries than branches of vast corporations that would be transplanted from giant headquarters back in the developed country.

Almost a century after Kropotkin’s death, these have proven to be effective in empowering local communities transitioning from tribal to nation state norms and values.

And in respect of mutual aid and volunteering he was right on the button too. 

Generally, volunteering and voluntary organisations emanate from needs evident to people in touch with the grassroots.  Non-state organisations (nowadays called NGO’s) always existed in some shape or form.  Until recently they were mostly religious, and, as I described already, may have started bottom up but after a while became very top-down – almost a mirror image of the nation state, under the thumb of whatever established church they were affiliated to.

The Catholic Church has been the most prominent NGO in Ireland in the past two and a half centuries, and that has recently been riven with various scandals. The anger that ordinary people felt on hearing about these scandals was undoubtedly deepened by the fact that the Church set itself up as a model of good, upright, ethical and honourable living.

And apart from the Church, there have been many scandals and troubles (mostly financial, but also involving improper behaviour) that have sullied the reputation and integrity of the community and voluntary sector over the past number of decades. Here is just one of many articles on the subject.

Of course there are very good things happening too! Community and voluntary organisations have a far higher level of accountability than in decades past – and many compassionate people in the established Church – who might have been, a generation ago, voices in the wilderness – are now being heard.

But there is still plenty to be done. At community/voluntary level we need to work to be better and more accountable to ourselves and others, but mostly to the people we set ourselves up to care for.

Many of the self-organisation and communitarian values that are the norm in the hunter-gatherer world could be very useful in our work supporting families in distress.

Some pointers as to how we can include them, have passion, creativity, high morale and motivation, and still maintain integrity and propriety will be a theme that will run through all the Chapters in Section Five – Practical Applications.

To sum up, we need to organise ourselves better so firstly we won’t be organised by anyone else and secondly we can hold our heads high and be proud of what we do and how we do it.