41. Subsistence Practices and the Ways of their Transmission toFuture Generations.
16210 - Hunting for subsistence? : Sihan's hunting practice between tradition andmodern way of life
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Kato, Yumi (Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan)
This research reports the change and continuity of hunting practice in modern way of life.
Natural and social environment of hunter-gatherer communities change in these decades. In
Malaysian Borneo, forest logging, and plantation development change natural environment. On
the other hand, sedentarisation, and market economy affected hunter-gatherer’s socialenvironment. Main question of this paper is how people practice current hunting with thebalance of traditions and modern way of life. Sihan hunters living in Malaysian Borneo isreported in this paper. Along with environmental changes Sihan shifted their living place fromforest camp to settled village, town, and road side resettlement village. This research considers
the consequences of current hunting practice in multiple places and in their modern way of life.

16170 - Learning subsistence skills among BaYaka children ¿ the examples of nut
cracking and coco leaf slicing skills.
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Bombjakova, Dasa (Anthropology, University College London, London, Un. Kingdom/ Ver Königr.)
This paper presents the occurrence of teaching of subsistence skills in one community ofMbendjele BaYaka Pygmies in the rainforest of the northern of Congo. In contrast to traditionalquestioning methods I conducted long-term focused observations of the interactions between 10
women and children of their community, as well as those among children, for a period of 18months. My studies reveal that in addition to observational social learning, active teaching ispresent and most frequently takes the form of correction and demonstration. In addition, I foundthat teaching occurred through horizontal as well as vertical and oblique transmission. I illustratethese findings with examples of subsistence skills, such as nut cracking and coco leaf slicing.
The results of my studies question the validity of questioning methods for enquiring about
learning, and stress the need for more long-term observational studies on the interactions ofhunter-gatherer children.

16143 - Stone, Shell, Scale: Heiltsuk Material Practices and the Making of Placesand History on the Central Coast of British Columbia
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Mathews, Darcy (University of Victoria, Brentwood Bay, Canada / Kanada)
Archaeologists do not often think of complex hunter-gatherers as monumental workers of stoneor radical modifiers of landscape, yet over 3000 years, the Heiltsuk peoples of the central coastof British Columbia reshaped the landscape with stone constructions to promote the growth,
productivity, accessibility, and predictability of their most economically important intertidal
resources. The Heiltsuk produced and maintained hundreds of stone intertidal fish traps
throughout the mid to late Holocene in a variety of shapes, sizes, and contexts. Furthermore,they manufactured ‘clam gardens’—low intertidal boulder terraces that promoted the growth andabundance of clams and other bivalves. This paper synthesizes existing archaeological andtraditional knowledge about these monumental places, and offers new insights based atriangulation between ongoing archaeological fieldwork, community knowledge, and the spatial,temporal, and morphological analyses of these fish traps and clam gardens.
The Heiltsuk and other first peoples of the Northwest Coast were renowned workers of wood on
a grand scale—producing longhouses, ocean-going canoes, and totem poles. In contrast to theperishability of their terrestrial wooden counterparts, the intertidal monumental stone
constructions have a palimpsest quality that indelibly shaped the Heiltsuk coastlines.
Transcending the lifetimes of their builders, these traps continue to temporarily catch fish twice
a day in the absence of anyone there to spear them, and the clam gardens continue to serve as
humanly created homes for communities of bivalves without anyone residing there to dig them.
While the Heiltsuk peoples became centralized by a colonial reserve system after European
Contact, this community is again reengaging these ancestral places in light of present-day
questions concerning food security, community identity, and territorial sovereignty. These areplaces that have never stopped working. These stone constructions are the intentional products
of not only ecological management; they are enduring and visible constructions that speak toemergent and changing practices of ownership, tenure, and relationships of power over the past
3000 years. The materiality of Heiltsuk fish traps and clam gardens also makes these sites ofresistance to colonialism—they are resilient places anchoring both traditional and novel ways for
a community reengaging with the temporarily truncated making of histories and connections toplaces.

16092 - Environmental knowledge transmission among the Agta of San Mariano,
the Philippines
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Hagen, Renee (Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands / Niederlande)
Hunting and gathering societies depend on extensive knowledge of their natural environment for
their survival. Yet, we know little about what specific knowledge is required by whom, and how
such knowledge is transferred between individuals and generations. At the same time, theenvironmental and social changes that these societies currently experience may well affect boththe type of knowledge that is valued for the present and future, as well as the learning systems
themselves.
This paper examines valuation and transmission of environmental knowledge among the Agtaof the Northern Sierra Madre, the Philippines. The Agta’s total population is estimated at around
10,000 individuals, living in small, scattered settlements along the rivers and coasts of theProvinces of Cagayan, Isabela and Aurora. As a consequence of deforestation, immigration andagricultural expansion, over the past 100 years they have had to adjust their hunting andgathering mode of subsistence to a radically altered natural and social environment. Some Agta
groups, notably in Aurora, are known to have resettled in road-based sedentary villages,working as tenants or mining company workers. Others have maintained a livelihood strategy
consisting of a combination of swiddening and the exploitation of forest and marine products.
We focus our analysis on an Agta population living on the forest frontier in the municipality of
San Mariano, Isabela Province. More specifically, we look at around sixty individuals of all ages
from Kamerasitan and Gab-gab, who make a living from hunting, fishing, subsistence as well as
commercial gathering, swidden cultivation and various forms of paid labour. In addition to theconversion of forest in farm land and the rapid growth of the agricultural population in this area,
another factor of change is the recent introduction of formal education. Over the past five years,
the percentage of Agta children attending elementary school has increased from zero to an
estimated 30%.
The study seeks to understand whether and how these changes affect 1) domains of knowledge
that Agta parents, children and adolescents consider important, and 2) pathways of learning,that is: how and from whom Agta individuals learn. Data collection took place from January toApril 2015, in the transition period from wet to dry season. Research methods include semistructured and informal interviewing, systematic observation of learning processes, video
registration and the collection of life-histories. The study is part of long-term ethnographic
research on Agta resilience and vulnerability that has taken place since 2002 and which covers
the entire Northern Sierra Madre.

16054 - The Influence of plant gathering and agricultural practices on theformation of local identities of Yezidi and Kurdish societies in Armenia
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Melkumyan, Hamlet (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Yerevan, Armenia /Armenien); Hovsepyan, Roman; Harutyunyan, Lili (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography,Yerevan, Armenia / Armenien); Stepanyan-Gandilyan, Nina (Institute of Botany, Yerevan,Armenia / Armenien)This interdisciplinary research project, launched in 2013, focuses on the ethnobotanicalpractices of Armenian Yezidis and Kurds. The project makes possible the discussion andpresentation of economic and cultural transformations in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
Earlier, Soviet period studies of Yezidis and Kurds were concerned mainly with the traditions ofanimal husbandry of these communities and only some of them touched on plant breeding
activities in a partial way. The question of plant gathering culture as an aspect of economic
activity was left in shadow. Investigations in various regions and communities of Armenia
revealed that plant-gathering traditions should be emphasized as one of the important aspect of
Yezidis' and Kurds' everyday life and culture. Analysis of the oral histories of elderly
representatives of Yezidi and Kurdish communities shows that plant-gathering practices werecommon within these cultures before Sovietization and were continued during the Soviet era,
despite official agricultural policies that discouraged gathering. We observed that plantgathering skills are currently kept alive through everyday practices. These informal traditions aretransferred from older generations to youth without special gender priorities, but mostly elderly
women are mentioned as plant-gathering knowledge transmitters. The seasonal transhumant
lifestyle, particularly long term stays in vegetation-rich mountains, greatly contributes to thesurvival and enrichment of gathering traditions. At the present time, plant-gathering traditions
are so strong and so valued in Yezidi and Kurdish communities as to have become an elementof their cultural identities. Moreover, the gathered plants tend to "migrate" to various countries ofEurope and Russia where Yezidi and Kurdish migrants from Armenia themselves settle.
Therefore the gathered plants, as well as the foods, condiments, teas, medicaments and othergoods made from those plants, become part of the global identity of these cultural communities.

16020 - Revisiting "Circumpolar Bear Ceremonialism": Traditions,Transformations and Extinctions
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Wiget, Andrew (Visiting Professor, Moscow State University, Moscow, Austria /Österreich); BALALAEVA, Olga (Consultant, Duma Native Assembly, KMAO-Iugra, Moscow,
Russian Fed. / Rus Föd.)
Bear ceremonialism has been taken as a distinctive feature of northern hunter-gatherers since
Hallowell's landmark 1926 article. Yet in the nearly ninety years since that article, it has beensummarily taken for granted, although both the physical and sociocultural environments of theindigenous peoples whose bear ceremonies were the focus of Hallowell's inquiry have changed
dramatically. The perpetuation of these traditions is threatened, including the most elaborate
western Siberian form, the Bear Ceremony of the Ob'-Ugrian Khanty and Mansi peoples. Theco-authors were engaged by the Native Assembly of the Duma of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous
Okrug-Iugra to develop materials for a nomination of the Ob'-Ugrian Bear Ceremony toUNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Properties Requiring Urgent Protection. As part of thiswork, and as a complement to their own Siberian field research on the topic, the authors
thoroughly reviewed new sources of information, new lines of research and new forms ofdocumentation from Eurasia and North America that have been developed in both English andRussian languages since Hallowell. The resulting analysis of bear ceremonialism, focusing ondiscrete acts, their organization into component rites, and the combination of these into complex
ceremonial structures, is much more finely-grained than Hallowell's. Where possible the authors
also directly contacted anthropologists working in Eurasia and North America to assess theviability of bear ceremonialism in the communities where they worked. The authors are also
working to develop strategies to support the perpetuation of the tradition. Finally, we havereviewed the present state of archaeological knowledge about antecedents of bear
ceremonialism.
This paper presents a number of conclusions from this first comprehensive review of bear
ceremonialism since Hallowell supplemented by data from our own fieldwork in western Siberia.
First, we demonstrate that the familiar understanding of bear ceremonialism as having twoforms--a Pacific (Ainu) form and Siberian (and perhaps North American) form--does notadequately account for the meaningful regional variations to be found in the latter form. Second,a more careful analysis of ethnographic data on bear ceremonialism gathered in the twentiethcentury after Hallowell reveals that these previously overlooked regional and intraregionalvariations have significant implications for understanding not only the forms but the historical
distribution of bear ceremonialism. Third, the illusion of the viability of bear ceremonialism
created by the ethnographic literature is indeed illusory, especially if one distinguishes morecomplex, occasional bear ceremonials from practices widely associated with hunting in thecircumpolar north, such as preserving skulls of harvested animals, and we identify a variety of
causative factors for the failure of cultural reproduction.

15975 - Explaining livelihood strategies among contemporary Rungus farmers: areturn to the household, time and money
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): PORODONG, Paul (Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia)
Among swidden farmers, an ability to negotiate contemporary institutional, infrastructural andtechnological developments within the limitations imposed by their ecological context plays animportant role in shaping their subsistence strategies. This negotiation becomes visible in theway they optimise their labour resources. In this process, demographic characteristics are alsoa critical consideration in determining the particulars of a household’s subsistence strategy. The
anthropological research reported here was undertaken to investigate the contemporary
circumstances and motivations of Rungus households in OntolobVillage in Kota Marudu, Sabah,
East Malaysia in organising and strategising their livelihood activities. A total of 38,304 hours ofactivities, or 10.4% of one-year, were monitored and recorded from 84 individuals in atime/labour allocation survey. Surveys were also conducted on household income andexpenditure, household goods and swidden size and productivity. Despite sharing similar
cultural backgrounds and livelihood activities, ethnographic accounts and empirical data showthat the contemporary Rungus in Kota Marudu employed a diversity of subsistence strategies
that can be loosely grouped under three categories: swiddening, wage labour and swiddening,
and wage labour alone. An investigation of these strategies suggests that households areintensively pursuing all available subsistence opportunities, while creatively managing
limitations imposed by the specific demographic characteristics of the household, such assicknesses or absence of both adults and dependents. However, the challenges are far fromover; increasing market influence, a greater emphasis on non-farming futures for children and ashortage of land are among the growing concerns that are affecting decisions about future
livelihood strategies, decisions that different generations are facing in different ways. This study
emphasizes that household strategies are an important aspect of comparative research among
today’s farming communities, which can explain new economic behaviour such as participationin oil palm plantations. Ultimately, this understanding can be utilized by the community itself in
dealing with their future, especially with regard to their relations with wider issues and initiatives
such as development and conservation.

15890 - A Reassessment of Ainu Subsistence Leading to Revitalization of theAinu Culture in a "Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony"Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Tezuka, Kaoru (Hokkai-Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan)
Situated on the boundary between the farming domain and the hunting-gathering domain,
Hokkaido has seen the incessant coming and going of people, objects, and technology sinceancient times. One well-known example of this is the migration of ancient farmers from northern
Honshu to central Hokkaido, changing the way of life of local Epi-Jomon people from nomadic tofarming in the latter half of the 8th century, even though this change didn't last long. In recenttimes, as more archaeological surveys are conducted throughout Hokkaido, more evidence ofagricultural sites relevant to the Ainu cultural period has been found. This strongly contradicts
the solid hunter-gatherer image of the Ainu constructed from modern ethnography. Bothhypotheses remain controversial. Simplistic generalizations based on limited and unreliable
evidence can lead us to an incorrect appraisal of the Ainu's subsistence, so a thoroughreexamination of past studies is needed. An accurate understanding of Ainu subsistence will
greatly contribute to the Ainu people gaining a deep understanding of their own culture in a zone
which is to be developed around Lake Proto in Shiraoi, Hokkaido by 2020. In July 2012 themaster plan for a “Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony” was set by the Japanese Government.
The Symbolic Space will consist of two types of areas: the core area (with museums etc.) andrelated areas. The latter is expected to contain zones for the handing down of and hands-on
experiences of Ainu traditions and culture, while regenerating natural resources including
traditional agricultural plants. Ideal experiences in both areas will ultimately lead to therevitalization of the Ainu Culture today.

15832 - Selkup Folklore on Magic Hunt with Forest Spirits
Presentation type: Oral presentation
Author(s): Kim-Maloney, Alexandra (Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russian Fed. / Rus Föd.)
Hunting was the most important mode of subsistence among the Selkups in Western Siberia
until recent time. Selkup stories romanced hunting activities by eliminating borders between
sacred and profane. Forest male and female spirits acquired anthropomorphic features whileserving as hunting and sexual partners to Selkup men and women who persuaded their hunting
luck.