Archeological Papers of The American Anthropological Association, 2008

This chapter presents an overview of 40 years of research on hunter-gatherers and attempts to situate Susan Kent's oeuvre within this larger body of work. Some of the main contours of the economic, social, and political life and core ideologies of foraging peoples are outlined. Then the key debates around questions of the historical autonomy of hunter-gatherers are explored along with Kent's position on these issues. All hunter-gatherer groups have undergone a series of changes under the impact of states and markets and the processes of incorporation into the global system. While none have escaped the devastating effects of these impacts, strong evidence exists for the persistence of core values and institutions. Susan Kent's research, with her unique positioning in archaeology and development studies, influenced these debates in important ways.

American Anthropologist, 1992

In the complex history of hunter-gatherer studies, several overlapping and at times antagonistic discourses can be discerned. However, one critique has emerged that would render all huntergatherer discourses irrelevant and do away with the concept altogether. The paper explores the poststructuralist roots of this "revisionism" and then argues why the concept of hunter-gatherer continues to be politically relevant and empirically valid. However, if they are to fulfill their promise of illuminating an increasingly fragmented and alienating modernity, hunter-gatherer studies will have to become more attuned to issues ofpolitics, history, context, and reflexivity. HUNTER-GATHERER STUDIES HAVE HAD a rather stormy history. The field has always been marked by controversy, and even the concept of hunter-gatherers itself has waxed and waned in importance. There have been periods in the history of anthropology when the very concept was tabooed, others when it was popular. Within the discipline today, the idea of hunter-gatherer has radically different receptions. Some see it as totally absurd, a derivative of outmoded evolutionary theory, while others see it as an eminently sensible category of humanity with a firm anchor in empirical reality. I noted a strong tendency toward the latter view at the Sixth Conference on Hunter-Gatherers (CHAGS) at Fairbanks, May-June 1990. At least no one advocated canceling the sixth CHAGS for lack of subject matter. Even if it is agreed that hunters and gatherers exist, almost everything else about them is a matter for contestation. While some fields have crystallized a canon, there is no danger of that in hunter-gatherer studies; the field remains as fractious and controversyprone as ever. And in recent years a new element has been added to the many voices within the field, a body of opinion that would call into question the entire enterprise and abolish the concept of hunter-gatherers altogether. It would be hard to imagine a more fundamental challenge. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to define the range of anthropological practices that constitute hunter-gatherer studies today and to explore the roots-social, ideological, and epistemological-of the field's crisis in representation. Some of these difficulties become apparent at the outset when we try to define what we mean by hunter-gatherers.' Economically we are referring to those people who have historically lived by gathering, hunting, and fishing, with minimal or no agriculture and with no domesticated animals except for the dog. Politically gatherer-hunters are usually labeled as "band" or "egalitarian" societies in which social groups are small, mobile, and unstratified, and in which differences of wealth and power are minimally developed. Obviously there is a degree of fit between "forager" subsistence strategies and "band" social organization, but the fit is far from perfect. Strictly economic definitions of foragers will include a number of peoples with ranking, stratification, and even slavery-the Northwest Coast groups-while the notion of"egalitarian bands" will include a number of small-scale horticultural and pastoral societies-in Amazonia, for example, and some Siberian "small peoples."

Hunter-gatherer studies had long been the last vestige of anthropology's quest for natural man (Barnard 2004) Although they are no longer the dominant form of human sociality and adaptation, and exist today in relatively minor numbers, hunter-gatherers continue to be the focal point of fundamental debates in anthropology and related fields of inquiry. From the romanticism of Rousseau and the rhetorical extremism of Hobbes, to the evolutionary baseline of Morgan and the ecological idealism of 1970s ethnographers, perceptions of "hunter-gatherers" have both conformed to and effected changes in anthropological inquiry and western society. Having undergone so many and so frequent conceptual shifts in the past two centuries, "hunter-gatherer" is a construct, some have argued, with no empirical or evolutionary validity. Clearly people have lived off the land without the aid of agriculture or animal husbandry, so at the level of subsistence, "huntergatherer" is a meaningful category. However, none of the essentialist qualities once assigned to this mode of subsistence hold up to serious cross-cultural analysis. That is, hunter-gatherer subsistence is not structurally linked to egalitarianism, generalized reciprocity, and settlement mobility, to name a few of the more prominent features. Moreover, hunter-gatherer populations once believed to be deeply rooted in evolutionary time are now understood as historical consequences of state expansion and political oppression. So, what does the concept of "huntergatherer" mean these days and what does anthropological knowledge of people living off the land tell us about long-term evolutionary trends, on the one hand, and modern power relations, on the other?

Annual Review of Anthropology, 1988

Technology and Culture, 2004

This 1984 article was my Inaugural Lecture as a full professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979, it discusses the humanistic approach to anthropology that has informed my research and teaching.