Bernard Dov Cooperman, “Review of ‘Altopascio: A Study in Tuscan Rural Society, 1587-1784’, by Frank McArdle,” Journal of Economic History 38:4 (December 1978): 1027-1028 (original) (raw)
Predators and Pests: Settler Colonialism and the Animalization of Native Americans
Environmental Ethics, 2020
The tethering of Indigenous peoples to animality has long been a central mechanism of settler colonialism. Focusing on North America from the seventeenth century to the present, this essay argues that Indigenous animalization stems from the settler imposition onto Native Americans of dualistic notions of human/animal difference, coupled with the settler view that full humanity hinges on the proper cultivation of land. To further illustrate these claims, we attend to how Native Americans have been and continue to be animalized as both predators and pests, and show how these modes of animalization have and continue to provide settlers motive and justification for the elimination of Native peoples and the extractive domination of Native lands.
Early Paleoindian big-game hunting in North America: Provisioning or Politics? (2013)
We question several common elements of conventional descriptions of Early Paleoindian adaptations. Specifically, we examine the presumed scales of residential mobility, the role of high-quality lithics in these movements, and the extent to which First Americans hunted large game as a fundamental part of their food-getting activities. We compare the Early Paleoindian data to relevant information on hunting, mobility, and weaponry documented ethnohistorically and ethnographically. We then construct an alternative explanation for the Early Paleoindian record based on the premise that the hunting of large mammals, presumably by men, may have been motivated more by social and political factors than by the need to regularly and reliably provision a family or band with food. By proposing a plausible alternative explanation for the available data, we suggest that there is good reason to think critically about several of the basic components of the conventional view of Early Paleoindian adaptations.
Early Paleoindian big-game hunting in North America: Provisioning or Politics?
We question several common elements of conventional descriptions of Early Paleoindian adaptations. Specifically, we examine the presumed scales of residential mobility, the role of high-quality lithics in these movements, and the extent to which First Americans hunted large game as a fundamental part of their food-getting activities.We compare the Early Paleoindian data to relevant information on hunting, mobility, and weaponry documented ethnohistorically and ethnographically. We then construct an alternative explanation for the Early Paleoindian record based on the premise that the hunting of large mammals, presumably by men, may have been motivated more by social and political factors than by the need to regularly and reliably provision a family or band with food. By proposing a plausible alternative explanation for the available data, we suggest that there is good reason to think critically about several of the basic components of the conventional view of Early Paleoindian adaptations.
Ethnobiology Letters
We respond to Mech (2019) “Do Indigenous American Peoples’ Stories Inform the Study of Dog Domestication” and point out a number of errors and omissions in Mech’s essay. These include: 1) assuming that the behavior of all wild wolves is the same, and can be characterized according only to Mech’s personal experience; 2) assuming that the domestication of wolves took place in only a single location at one time (14,000 yrs BP); 3) misrepresenting the statements and findings of other scholars; 4) assuming that all wolves that have ever encountered humans have experienced persecution; and 5) dismissing all accounts of interactions with wolves by Indigenous Americans. The last of these is particularly egregious and seems to represent a form of neocolonial thinking, in which only accounts and findings by Europeans are considered to be acceptable evidence. Mech’s own work on Ellesmere Island seems to support the idea that wolves can be curious and unthreatening to humans. We suggest that th...
Quaternaire
This work reviews the anthropogenic exploitation of small mammals during a crucial time span for the reconstruction of human behavior at the dawn of the Middle Upper Palaeolithic boundary in the Northern Mediterranean region. Data are sourced from faunal assemblages recovered in the final Mousterian levels of Grotta di Fumane (A5A6 complex) and the Late Mousterian levels of Riparo Tagliente (levels 35 and 36) and Grotta di San Bernardino (units II and IV), in the North of Italy. As a whole, these records mostly comprise ungulates, rather than bird and carnivore bones, and derive from primary accumulation processes more than from postdepositional activities or direct carnivore actions. Broadly, the taphonomic analyses reveal the presence of human modifications referable to different butchering activities on almost all of the ungulates. Small mammal bones are present throughout the late MP sequences in variable quantities, with canids and rodents represented in each of the assemblages. This work highlights new qualitative taphonomic records produced by humans within a large area that reveal Neandertals' exploitation of small mammals as game. At Grotta di Fumane, foxes have been butchered in order to exploit fur and meat. Similarly, at Grotta Maggiore di San Bernardino and Riparo Tagliente some large rodents bear cutmarks related to the same purposes. Krapina Cave is the only other Mousterian site containing evidence of small game exploitation (beaver and marmot) that is in close geographical proximity to the caves analyzed here.
Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to the Present [and Comments and Replies]
Current Anthropology, 1989
It is widely assumed that modern hunter-gatherer societies lived until very recently in isolation from food-producing societies and states and practiced neither cultivation, pastoralism, nor trade. This paper brings together data suggesting a very different model of middle to late Holocene hunter-gatherer economy. It is argued that such foraging groups were heavily dependent upon both trade with food-producing populations and part-time cultivation or pastoralism. Recent publications on a number of hunter-gather societies establish that the symbiosis and desultory food production observed among them today are neither recent nor anomalous but represent an economy practiced by most hunter-gatherers for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Psychological and political reasons for Westerners' attachment to the myth of the "Savage Other" are discussed.
The Hunting in the Province of Elassona
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Analysis of socio-economic characteristics of hunters with the use of econometric methods and logit regression……………………………………………………Page 6 1.1 The model of preys and the father of hunter with the method Logit………………………………………………..Page 6 1.2. The model of age that they removed for first time authorisation of hunting and father of hunter…………………………………Page 9 1.3 The model of increase of preys………………………………………………Page 9 1.4. The model of reduction of preys……………………………………………Page 11 1.5. The models of arms, the dogs and the number of hunting animals………Page 13 1.6. Models for the role of ecological organisations, the hunting organisations and the state for the protection of environment concerning ages of hunters………………………..Page 14 Chapter Second……………………………………………………………………Page 16
HUNTERS AND GATHERERS IN THE INDUSTRIALISED WORLD
Introduction to the Special Issue of "Hunters and Gatherers in the Industrialised World", Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, XXXII, 4-2016 Intro: The idea of this edition basically stemmed out of the Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), organised at the University of Vienna in Autumn 2015. It was part of a loose series of conferences on this topic staged in various cities and continents (Lee/Daly 1999: 10; Hitchcock/Biesele 2000: 1f), inspired by the ground breaking and highly influential academic conference called “Man the Hunter” in Chicago in 1966, which was proclaimed as a “watershed of knowledge about foragers” (Kelly 1995: 9). All these events had a fairly common point of departure: the – mainly but not exclusively – anthropological investigation of people, many of whom – though not all – researchers assume to live a clearly identifiable way of life, which is based more or less on subsistence-related hunting, gathering and fishing without efforts at domestication. The obvious ambivalences inherent in this preliminary attempt to pin down the scientific knowledge production in the form of a “minimal definition” (Lee/Daly 1999: 3), as well as the different concepts used to describe such societies (among others, “foragers”, “hunters”, and “gatherers”), already hint at the fierce controversies which shake this field and debate. With this edition, we want to highlight the fact that many of the hunting and gathering societies live in mixed economic ways and under a broad range of political regimes. Furthermore, we state that “sole” hunters and gatherers live in a (post-)industrial world, the rationales of which impact on micro- and macro-scales of indigenous livelihoods as well as on their everyday lives. This brings about to greater or lesser degree intense instances of contact between neighbouring groups, as well as with stakeholders from state and industry. In the following, we explain why a static approach to hunters and gatherers societies (and sometimes their comparison with stone-age societies) is rejected by the authors of this volume. Why do we draw attention to this apparently very specific academic field? What is it about these societies that could be of interest in a journal dedicated to questions of North-South relations and the deeply problematic notion of ‘Development’? The task of this introduction will partly consist in the cautious effort to sketch some fundamental points of connection between the academic reflection on hunters and gatherers on one hand, and the appraisal of the notion of ‘Development’, as well as of the ideological foundations of so-called ‘advanced’ modern capitalism and its contradictions – including the historically produced North-South divide – on the other. We try to show that both currents – anthropology and the idea of ‘Development’ – share a dark and often ignored core, which is rooted in the basic material and epistemological power relations of the contemporary dominant form of social becoming........