Dlawbailey wrote:
Clean water, comrade, not just water, clean water. That means springs and maybe fast-flowing streams well up in the water table, not rivers. Even rivers we think of as clean have all sorts of creatures that find your gut a wonderful place to play.
Hunter-gatherer societies are absolutely the worst-case scenario in economic terms. Moving around with the seasons doesn't mean you'll find anything to eat. Just because there's game, doesn't mean it's yours for the taking in nice, regular amounts. Hunters with high-powered rifles and telescopic sights fail to fill their deer tags season after season. Now imagine you have to do it every week. The natives of the American Pacific Northwest who were famously well-to-do hunter-gatherers suffered terribly when salmon runs periodically failed. The Inuit of Alaska had salmon runs, caribou migrations, sea mammals that feed on one of the richest oceans on the planet, abundant clean water and a natural refrigerator 9 months out of the year. Ask them how much fun hunter-gatherer life was.
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There are, again, I several misconceptions with this. As you mentioned, chlorination is one way we maintain a reasonably clean supply of water in our cities; other important technologies which allow us to build big cities without the occasional black death or cholera epidemic are complex sewer systems and reservations for water collection. These technologies have only become widespread within the last two hundred years, and chlorination is a very recent introduction. I was certainly not suggesting that 20th century waterworks loose to h-g sewer disposal. I was suggesting hg's are not succeptable to as many water-born illnesses as pre-modern urban dwellers and agriculturalists.
Yes, rivers, and sometimes tapwater (at least here in Sydney), which we consider clean to drink contain nasty little critters. This is well known to the hunter-gatherers I have read about, incidentally. But really seriously bad ones, like cholera, more or less require human pollution to recirculate into the water supply. (At least that is the impression I have - am I wrong in this?) Such recirculation is far less likely with the much lower population densities and dispersed lifestyle of hg's.
The comment about hunters not filling their deer quotes is a bit of red herring. One problem is that I have no idea how many times over the deer quota would fullfill the modern hunters's nutritional requirements, but this is really very trivial. Another problem is that you seem to think that hg's didn't manage their hunting, which they did with varying degrees of sophistication, but this is also fairly trivial. The serious issue is that most hg societies relied very heavily on collection of vegetable stuffs and eating things we don't really think are 'food' - lizards, bugs and so on. (Other than yuckyness, there ain't no reason why these aren't perfectly good food.) The exceptions to this rule are the Sabmi, Inuit and other artic peoples, who had just about no plant life in sight.
(The hunting part of hunting-gathering, incidentally, was something undertaken by men, and the figures I have seen on this suggest that it a relatively smaller proportion of total nutrition than that produced by women and children.)
This is not a trivial point at all. The fact of the matter is that hg's in semi-marginal habitats could meet their nutritional requirements and have spare for feasts working comparatively short hours. Marshal Sahlins wrote a little summary of this in his "Stone Age Economics", which is still good reading. Accounts of Australian Aborigines by the first folks to observe them are replete with comments about their lazy lifestyle. The same goes for the people of Melanesia. There is a delightful book from about 1924 called "The Labour Problem in the Pacific" by someone whose name escapes me now, which is entirely devoted to the problem - ie. that primitive shifting agriculture and hg in plentifull environments was so effective these guys could not easily be induced to working. The author thus proposed importing coolies from South Asia - a proposal defeated because, bizarrely enough, the White Australia policy of racist immigration applied to PNG...
The stuff about the salmon runs failing is not very relevant either, since agricultural societies suffer horribly when their crops fail. Worse, they suffer horribly when their crops don't fail, due to maldistribution problems which simply do not occur in "propertyless" hg societies. Arguably, over-reliance on one resource is a bad idea (for any mode of production, really), which is why hg folks in extremely marginal areas eat a little of just about everything that moves or grows.
In my opinion, there is not point trying to make hg seem hellish , since no one in their right mind would suggest it is a possible rearrangement of our society. The basic problem is one of "footprint": a much larger area is required to support a person in hg than in intensified agriculture. Bluntly, we could not all fit on planet earth, hence we can discard the entire political argument about whether it would be desirable... Unless you are an ominously cryptic former owner of a clothing company. 'Primitivist' anarchists and advocates of 99% population reduction generally have their own ideas of a "primitive" society which has next to nothing to do with actually existing hunter-gathering, other than a 'low' level of technology. That's at least judging from the corkers primitivists come up with, about 'egalitarianism' the absence of sexism and so on. Perhaps there could be legitimate debate about *their* sense of primitivism, if only they stopped screwing up with bad anthropology)
As for asking the Inuit what they think of hg, again you have many problems. Ravi's post raised some of those - if they have the information to choose, they already are in no position to do so. I raised a similar point in my last post, which is that economic dependence appears before people can realise that they are no longer autonomous. Ravi's point, I think is particularly good. What is an 'Inuit'? Is it (implausibly) someone who is a descendent of Inuits who now lives in Florida working for a pretty good wage and is totally absorbed into the western way of seeing things? Or is it some disenfranchised guy living of handouts in the north pole? Or is it someone with serious diabetes or alcoholism - classic diseases of modernization for hg's?
This cuts both ways too: Australian Aborigines often glorify their past. This is a common phenomenon. In Orlando Villas-Boas account of Xingu Myths , there is a story about the Kaiapó, who believed their pre-contact relatives were stronger and lived to be 150 years of age. In Melanesia there is a common belief amongst the acculturated sea-side folk that the mountain "bus kanaka" (ie. Backward hillbillies) whilst primitive, retain superior magical powers and are healthier. Should we ask them if they prefer to go back? How about the miserable folks near the Ok-Tedi mine? You will get a mixed and confusing answer - or rather, many different answers.
One last point: I agree completely with the posting which suggested this discussion risks homogenizing hunter-gatherer societies. There are all sorts of issues, for instance the disenfranchisement of young men in gerontocratic societies, which makes modernization highly appealing to them. There are also very wide differences between such societies, and there are extreme variations in the histories of contact. Kalahari bushmen traded with nearby pastoralists for millennia, apparently. In New Guinea, hunter gatherers lived side by side with agriculturalists. The Sabmi in Norway, correct me if I am wrong, managed to retain some sort of political independence whilst being part of a trading network that joined them up, ultimately, with the Hanse. (If I remember it right the trade was fur for firewood and iron tools) On the other hand, the Tasmanians were hunted with dogs and nearly wiped out.
Thiago