Subject: Re: Hunting, Was: The Dreaded Native Peoples Thread
Date: Apr 21 07:38:40 1995
From: Harriet Whitehead - whitehea at wsunix.wsu.edu


Another anthropologist tuning in here. I have acquired a certain
scepticism about the line that small-scale indigenous people typically
live in harmony with their environment since my experience in Papua New
Guinea, but am willing to concede there may be a lot of cultural variance
on this issue. The native North Americans are always most touted in this
regard, and I am inclined to give them some credit, though I wonder if
the agricultural societies were as ecologically correct as the hunter
gatherers. Meanwhile in the part of Papua New Guinea where I lived -
among very small scale horticulturalist-hunters, I could detect no
ecological savvy whatsoever. People were eager to import any form of more
effective hunting technology - even highly wasteful forms - as long as it
increased their hunting score. They laughed at all counter-arguments, and
attributed the virtual disappearance of two species of tree kangaroo and
the decline of game mammals more generally (which they noticed) to the
alternations in their (human) burial practices. They were unwilling to
believe that if a timber company came and cut down their "bush" it
wouldn't just grow back the same way it was in a few years. I could go
on, but summing it up, they showed exactly the same naievete as peoples
of the industrialized world until very recently. Now admittedly, in their
aboriginal state - before there were shotguns and slingshots to be had,
before there were timber companies available to buy up the forest, and
before there was western medicine to abet the population explosion -
their impact on their environment was less. They had no choice in that.
And less doesn't mean non-existent. No matter where you trek in the
Central Mountain Ranges, homeland of these tiny groups, you will find for
the most part advanced secondary regrowth forest, not primary forest: no
people for miles around, just their trace. Villages have cycled through
in the hallowed aboriginal past, bush has been cut down (for gardens and
firewood), then people have moved on.
Mind you, I love these people very dearly, and take every chance
I can to get back and visit them. It saddens me too that without their
'ecological mystique' people of the developed world lose interest in them
or their rights. But I can't participate in perpetuating the great myth
of ecological correctness in simple tribal peoples. It just ain't true
everywhere.

Harriet Whitehead
Anthropology WSU