Hunters and Gatherers

“The book spells out the great human achievements that have been brought about by humans who hunt and gather – across the millennia. It also shows that these achievements go beyond hunting and gathering alone. They depend on particular ways of understanding the human environment and the world at large. Barnard points out that there is a lot to be learned for our own lives when getting to know a life based on hunting and gathering. This also has to do with the fact that their mode of living in many ways continues to be deeply enshrined in what we are and what we do. At the same time, learning from hunter-gatherers helps to unsettle us in a positive way. Maybe your and my way of doing things is not without alternative after all. And getting to know alternative ways of life that have been successfully put into practice by the people described in this book are a better start than fantasy and science fiction. However, the biggest lesson of all is to understand how things are connected and how people are connected. This also means that it would be naive to think that one could simply import isolated practices from elsewhere without there being effects that reach far into all domains of life. The living hunter-gatherers that Alan Barnard introduces us to in this book are often prevented to continue their way of life because of what the rest of us do: the amount of resources that we use and waste, the grabbing of land that serves a world economy banking on unsustainable growth, the power that we abuse when dealing with indigenous minorities and a false sense of superiority towards hunter-gatherers.”

Thomas Widlok, University of Cologne

 

Alan Barnard FBA is Emeritus Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa in the University of Edinburgh. He studied in the United States, Canada and England and has taught at the University of Cape Town, University College London and the University of Edinburgh. Since 1974, he has conducted field research with Bushmen or San in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. He served as an Honorary Consul of Namibia for eleven years, and in 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his many books are Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (co-authored, 1984), A Nharo Wordlist with Notes on Grammar (1985), Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples (1992), Kalahari Bushmen (children’s book, 1993), History and Theory in Anthropology (2000), Social Anthropology (2006), Anthropology and the Bushman (2007), Social Anthropology and Human Origins (2011), Genesis of Symbolic Thought (2012), Language in Prehistory (2016) and Bushmen: Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers and Their Descendants (2019). His works were all written in English, but have been translated into 18 other languages.