Page 68 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

tfw-8 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing.What is worth knowing is mostly
uncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never
happened and those which do not matter. • WILLIAM RALPH INGE (1860–1954)

that smoothed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas
For more on these topics, please see the following articles:
between neighboring groups.
Animism p. 90 (v1)
Studies of modern foraging societies suggest that
Shamanism p. 1696 (v4)
notions of family and kinship provided the primary way
of thinking about and organizing social relations. Indeed, human relationships were personal rather than hierar-
in Europe and the People without History (1982), the chical. In a world of intimate, personal relationships peo-
anthropologist Eric Wolf proposed describing all small- ple had little need for the highly institutionalized
scale societies as “kin-ordered.” Family was society in a structures of the modern world, most of which are
way that is difficult for the inhabitants of modern soci- designed to regulate relationships between strangers.
eties to appreciate. Notions of kinship provided all the Burials and art objects of many kinds have left us tan-
rules of behavior and etiquette that were needed to live talizing hints about the spiritual world of our foraging
in a world in which most communities included just a ancestors but few definitive answers. Modern analogies
few persons and in which few people met more than a suggest that foragers thought of the spiritual world and
few hundred other people in their lifetime. the natural world as parts of a large extended family, full
The idea of society as family also suggests much about of beings with whom one could establish relations of kin-
the economics of foraging societies.Relations of exchange ship, mutual obligation, and sometimes enmity. As a
were probably analogous to those in modern families. result, the classificatory boundaries that foragers drew
Exchanges were conceived of as gifts.This fact meant that between human beings and all other species and entities
the act of exchanging was usually more important than were less hard and fast than those we draw today. Such
the qualities of the goods exchanged; exchanging was a thinking may help make sense of ideas that often seem
way of cementing existing relationships.Anthropologists bizarre to moderns, such as totemism—the idea that ani-
say that such relationships are based on “reciprocity.” mals, plants, and even natural geological objects such as
Power relations, too, were the power relations of families mountains and lakes can be thought of as kin.The belief
or extended families; justice and discipline—even violent that all or most of reality is animated by spirit may be the
retribution for antisocial behavior—could be imposed fundamental cosmological hypothesis (or model of the
only by the family. Hierarchies, insofar as they existed, universe) of foraging societies, even if particular repre-
were based on gender,age,experience,and respect within sentations of spirits differ greatly from community to
the family. community.The hypothesis helped make sense of a world
Studies of modern foraging societies suggest that, in which animals and objects often behave with all the
although males and females, just like older and younger unpredictability and willfulness of human beings.
members of society, may have specialized in different
tasks, differences in the roles people played did not nec- Living Standards
essarily create hierarchical relations. Women probably In an article published in 1972 the anthropologist Mar-
took most responsibility for child rearing and may also shall Sahlins questioned the conventional assumption
have been responsible for gathering most of the food (at that material living standards were necessarily low in
least in temperate and tropical regions, where gathering foraging societies. He argued, mainly on the basis of
was more important than hunting), whereas men special-
For more on these topics, please see the following articles:
ized in hunting, which was generally a less reliable source
Disease and Nutrition p. 538 (v2)
of food in such regions. However, no evidence indicates
Diseases—Overview p. 543 (v2)
that these different roles led to relationships of domi-
Food p. 757 (v2)
nance or subordination. Throughout the era of foragers