![]() ![]() Like Boehm, Gardner suggests that hunter-gatherers dislike being dominated and disdain conforming to norms that restrict their individual freedom. In a related hypothesis, Peter Gardner suggests that foraging societies tend to have strong cultural values that emphasize individual autonomy. Boehm finds that reverse dominance and related political processes are widespread in band societies, reinforcing patterns of egalitarianism. Reverse dominance i practiced through criticism and ridicule, disobedience, strong disapproval, execution of offenders or extremely aggressive males, deposing leaders, or outright desertion (an entire group leaving a particularly dominant leader). Reverse dominance ensures that the whole group will have control over anybody who tries to assert political power or authority over them. Boehm suggested that there is a pattern of reverse dominance in these societies, which keeps anyone from becoming coercive or politically dominating the group in any manner. In recent extensive cross-cultural studies of the political processes of hunting-gathering societies, Christopher Boehm 0993, 1999) developed an imaginative hypothesis to explain the lack of political power and domination in these egalitarian societies. In Sahlins's view, foragers do not value the accumulation of material goods in the same way that people in modern capitalist societies do. He suggested that the sharing oriented economy of people such as the ju/'hoansi or !Kung San demonstrates that the forager's needs are few and are easily satisfied by a relatively meager amount of labor time. ![]() Sahlins, for example, argued that the worldview of foragers differs radically from that of capitalist societies. These findings have led some anthropologists to refer to foragers as "original affluent societies" or "leisured societies" (Sahlins, 1972). Finally, the life expectancy in these societies turns out to be much greater than was once thought. The data also indicate that these foragers expended minimal labor to provide for their basic physical needs. ![]() Lee 0972a, b, 1979, 1993), for example, has argued that the !Kung San or ]u/'hoansi diet was nutritionally adequate. The ethnographic data reported in Lee and DeVore's work indicate that contemporary foraging societies usually have an adequate and reliable food base. ![]()
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