Hunters Gatherers And Practitioners Of Powerlessness

The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.

In light of negotiations now going on between people who rely on wild plants and animals and the governments of their territories about civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights, anthropologists explore dimensions of culture and pressures as they are manifested in particular peoples. Their 27 papers, from an August 1993 conference in Moscow, Russian, cover warfare and conflict resolution; resistance, identity, and the state; ecology, demography, and market issues; gender and representation; and world-view and religious determination. The examples come from most of the world's continents. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book compiles a collection of case studies analysing drivers of and responses to change amongst contemporary hunter-gatherers. Contemporary hunter-gatherers’ livelihoods are examined from perspectives ranging from historical legacy to environmental change, and from changes in national economic, political and legal systems to more broad-scale and universal notions of globalization and acculturation. Far from the commonly held romantic view that hunter-gatherers continue to exist as isolated populations living a traditional lifestyle in harmony with the environment, contemporary hunter-gatherers – like many rural communities around the world - face a number of relatively new ecological and social challenges to which they are pressed to adapt. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are increasingly and rapidly being affected by Global Changes, related both to biophysical Earth systems (i.e., changes in climate, biodiversity and natural resources, and water availability), and to social systems (i.e. demographic transitions, sedentarisation, integration into the market economy, and all the socio-cultural change that these and other factors trigger). Chapter 10 of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

"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.

Political, social, and economic transformation is a complex historical phenomenon. It can adequately be analysed only by a multidisciplinary approach. The Handbook brings together an international team of scholars who are specialists in their respective research fields. It introduces the most important areas, theories, and methods in transformation research, with particular attention placed on the historical and comparative dimension. Although focussing on post-communist and other democratic transformations in our epoch, the Handbook therefore presents and discusses not only their problems, paths, and developments, but also deals with the antecedent 'waves', beginning with the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868 and its aftermath. The book is structured into six parts. Starting with basic concepts as systems, actors, and institutions (Section I), it gives an overview over major theoretical approaches and research methods (Sections II and III). The connection of theory and method with their application is essential, allowing special insights into the past and opens analytical avenues for transformation research in the future. Section (IV) provides a historically oriented description or interpretation of particular 'waves' or types of societal transformation. With a clear focus on present transformations, the contributions to Section V provide a description and discussion of the problems, structures, actors, and courses of the transformations within different spheres of (civil) society, politics, law, and economics. Finally, brief lexicographic entries in Section VI delineate research perspectives and facts about relevant issues of societal transformation. Each of the 79 contributions contains a concise list of the most important research literature.

A collection of papers given at a conference in London to mark the 20th anniversary of the Man the Hunter Symposium. The two volumes resulting from this conference present new information on the structure and evolution of hunter-gatherer societies.

Since the early 2000s, authoritarianism has risen as an increasingly powerful global phenomenon. This shift has not only social and political implications, but also environmental implications: authoritarian leaders seek to recast the relationship between society and the government in every aspect of public life, including environmental policy. When historians of technology or the environment have investigated the environmental consequences of authoritarian regimes, they have frequently argued that authoritarian regimes have been unable to produce positive environmental results or adjust successfully to global structural change, if they have shown any concern for the environment at all. Put another way, the scholarly consensus holds that authoritarian regimes on both the left and the right generally have demonstrated an anti-environmentalist bias, and when opposed by environmentalist social movements, have succeeded in silencing those voices. This book explores the theme of environmental politics and authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The authors argue that in instances when environmentalist policies offer the possibility of bolstering a country’s domestic (nationalist) appeal or its international prestige, authoritarian regimes can endorse and have endorsed environmental protective measures. The collection of essays analyzes environmentalist initiatives pursued by authoritarian regimes, and provides explanations for both the successes and failures of such regimes, looking at a range of case studies from a number of countries, including Brazil, China, Poland, and Zimbabwe. The volume contributes to the scholarly debate about the social and political preconditions necessary for effective environmental protection. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental history and politics, environmental humanities, ecology, and geography.