This course deals with both the erroneous concepts of lost tribes and primitive peoples, and the real people who make their living by hunting and gathering wild foods. Using ethnographic and archaeological sources, we explore hunter-gatherer economies, cultural beliefs, relations to nature, and political struggles.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will complete additional readings that follow
the schedule of topics. They will meet with the instructor on
alternating weeks for discussion of these readings. Students
will be assigned two professional-level term papers.
Athena Title
Hunters and Gatherers
Prerequisite
ANTH 1102 or ANTH 1102E or ANTH 2120H or permission of department
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
Students will critically evaluate popular images of primitivity and modernity in scholarship, media, and daily discourse.
Students will apply alternative cultural understandings of the relations among persons, animals, land, and the unknown to contemporary socioecological issues.
Students will critically examine Indigenous rights legal cases or policies from the U.S. and other countries and explain them to others.
Students will research and write original scholarly arguments using peer-reviewed journal articles and proper citation practices.
Topical Outline
PART 1: Myth and reality
1. The Tasaday controversy
2. Three views of Kalahari foragers (films: The Hunters, the Gods Must be Crazy, and Death by Myth).
3. Hunter-gatherers in Euroamerican Imagination
4. Paleo-fantasy (paleo diet, paleo exercise)
5. Four lives: Sara Baartman, Ota Benga, Allakariallak, Ishi
