On the Use of Contemporary “Hunters and Gatherers” as Models for Prehistoric Patterns of Wealth Distribution

Your February 2010 editorial on wealth transfers and inequality (Aldenderfer 2010) notes an important area of research that we should find of great interest, especially with the growing inequality in modern industrial societies. In the recent study published in Science by Borgerhoff Mulder et al. (2009), the authors make some assertions about wealth inequalities associated with adaptive strategies and inheritance patterns that they assume are related. The study uses a number of contemporary social groups—the Ache are one—that it describes as hunter-gatherer. This characterization is not generally accepted by most anthropologists, as the Ache derive only a third of their livelihood from foraging, grow crops, have domesticated animals, and live in or near mission posts, where they receive food from missionaries. This is documented by Hawkes, Hill, and O’Connell (1982) and Hill et al. (1987). The disparity of this one group from the definition given it by the authors is not unique and limits severely the reliability of their work. The study is, nonetheless, still a useful attempt at providing some comparative data on inheritance within contemporary societies. Rather than demonstrating the specific inheritance patterns and their results in producing inequality of wealth, the authors have produced a relative chart of the effects of contact and trade with certain dominant economic and political societies in the past 400 years. The groups they are using have not lived in isolation and are not idealized types but the product of assimilation and hegemony. It is unfortunate that the authors did not include some archaeological assessments of the use of resources or a more thorough critique of the literature on hunter and gatherers, like that produced by Sahlins (1972); see, for example, McCarthy (1957), Bose (1964), and Lee (1965). The authors’ main mistake is to assume that today’s surviving peoples who practice various adaptive strategies associated with traditional societies are representatives of the social organization and cultures described as particular to those strategies in the past. Such an idea of the “frozen-intime” primitive was more characteristic of nineteenth-century historians and missionaries and is not accepted by most of today’s anthropologists. Implicit in the study is the idea that institutions, represented by inheritance patterns, define today’s wealth inequality among the people of their sample. The authors appear to believe that there have been no outside influences in marriage and kinship and that ideas of property are indigenous, functional, and intact. What this study does tell us is how dominant and powerful have been the effects of borrowing in producing fairly uniform patterns of inequality over the past 400 years. It would have been interesting if the authors had tried to use a variety of time-referenced data, especially reports on wealth distribution from antique sources—Greco-Roman and Chinese as well as other ethnohistorical data from the past 400 years on the same people—to determine whether wealth inequality had changed and, if it had, to measure the degree of this penetration of distribution variance.