Women, hunting and cherry-picking

The fol­low­ing text is the Eng­lish ver­sion of this post orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in French.

A recent arti­cle pub­lished in Plos One, which has been wide­ly report­ed in the inter­na­tion­al press and which fol­lows in a now well-estab­lished vein, sets out to decon­struct what it calls “The myth of Man the Hunter” (the title of a famous col­lec­tive work on hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties pub­lished in 1968). The point is to reject as ille­git­i­mate the vision of a gen­dered divi­sion of labor which, in hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties, reserves hunt­ing for men alone ; eth­no­log­i­cal data would indeed demon­strate that women are (and, prob­a­bly, were also in the past) large­ly involved in this activ­i­ty.

In their abstract, the study’s authors (Abi­gail Ander­son, Sophia Chilczuk, Kaylie Nel­son, Rox­anne Ruther and Cara Wall-Schef­fler, who, curi­ous­ly, seem to be more biol­o­gists than anthro­pol­o­gists) announce that :

These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gath­er­er par­a­digm to account for the sig­nif­i­cant role females have in hunt­ing, thus dra­mat­i­cal­ly shift­ing stereo­types of labor, as well as mobil­i­ty. (my high­lights)

Do they real­ly ?

1. The article : thesis, method and results

The method adopt­ed was to use D‑place, an online data­base based on Peter Mur­dock­’s Ethno­graph­ic Atlas and its 1,291 soci­eties. Inci­den­tal­ly, the arti­cle odd­ly attrib­ut­es this Atlas to Lewis Bin­ford, who had built his own data­base of 339 soci­eties, also present in D‑place. In any case, the authors have iden­ti­fied 391 hunt­ing and gath­er­ing soci­eties and explored relat­ed sources. They say they iden­ti­fied only those cas­es in which women “were hunt­ing” or took part in the killing, and elim­i­nat­ed those that sim­ply referred to the fact that they accom­pa­nied the hunters.

They found infor­ma­tion on wom­en’s involve­ment in hunt­ing in 63 of them. In 13 cas­es, the women did not hunt at all ; of the remain­ing 50 cas­es, 45 also pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion on the size of the game hunt­ed, which the authors divid­ed into three cat­e­gories (small, medi­um, large). They came up with the fol­low­ing fig­ures :

The type of game women hunt­ed was vari­able based on the soci­ety. [Of the 45 soci­eties where infor­ma­tion is avail­able] 21 (46%) hunt small game, 7 (15%) hunt medi­um game, 15 (33%) hunt large game and 2 (4%) of these soci­eties hunt game of all sizes. In soci­eties where women only hunt­ed oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly, small game was hunt­ed 100% of the time. In soci­eties where women were hunt­ing inten­tion­al­ly, all sizes of game were hunt­ed, with large game pur­sued the most.

From these facts, the authors draw the fol­low­ing con­clu­sions :

The preva­lence of data on women hunt­ing direct­ly oppos­es the com­mon belief that women exclu­sive­ly gath­er while men exclu­sive­ly hunt, and fur­ther, that the implic­it sex­u­al divi­sion of labor of ‘hunter/​gatherer’ is mis­ap­plied. Giv­en that this bimodal par­a­digm has influ­enced the inter­pre­ta­tion of arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence, which includes the reluc­tance to dis­tin­guish pro­jec­tile tools found with­in female buri­als as intend­ed for hunt­ing (or fight­ing), this paper joins oth­ers in urg­ing the neces­si­ty to reeval­u­ate arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence, to reassess ethno­graph­ic evi­dence, to ques­tion the dichoto­mous use of ‘hunt­ing and gath­er­ing,’ and to decon­struct the gen­er­al “man the hunter” nar­ra­tive.

And a lit­tle fur­ther on, they insist that :

The col­lect­ed data on women hunt­ing direct­ly oppos­es the tra­di­tion­al par­a­digm that women exclu­sive­ly gath­er and men exclu­sive­ly hunt.

2. General points of criticism

Before turn­ing to more spe­cif­ic points, it should be not­ed that these pas­sages raise two major prob­lems.

The first is that we hard­ly know what exact­ly is this “dis­course on the male hunter” that needs to be decon­struct­ed, and which there­fore asserts that women are every­where and always exclud­ed from hunt­ing. In any case, this is not at all what appeared in the famous book bear­ing the title that is used here as a foil. On page 74, for instance, Watan­abe wrote :

Hunt­ing of small ani­mals by women is not a rare phe­nom­e­non. Among such peo­ples as the Shoshoni (Stew­ard, 1938) and the abo­rig­i­nal Aus­tralians (Berndt and Berndt, 1964 ; Spencer and Gillen, 1927), it is, in fact, a wom­an’s occu­pa­tion.
In case of rel­a­tive­ly large mam­mals there is infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous peo­ples that women take part in com­mu­nal hunts (Turn­bull, 1965a, 1965b). Occa­sion­al cas­es are not unknown of women hunt­ing large mam­mals alone. Some Cop­per Eski­mo women (Jen­ness, 1922) hunt­ed seal and the cari­bou occa­sion­al­ly ; Ainu women and chil­dren (Watan­abe, 1964a) some­times hunt­ed deer with sticks, ropes, and/​or dogs when they had oppor­tu­ni­ties. But there is no soci­ety in which indi­vid­u­al­is­tic or non­com­mu­nal hunt­ing of larg­er mam­mals is the social­ly rec­og­nized reg­u­lar occu­pa­tion of women. It is this indi­vid­u­al­is­tic hunt­ing of larg­er mam­mals that is invari­ably the task of males. Com­mu­nal hunts, how­ev­er, do not always exclude females.
Among mod­ern hunter-gath­er­ers, exclu­sion of females from the indi­vid­u­al­is­tic hunt­ing of larg­er mam­mals seems to be close­ly relat­ed to the mak­ing and using of hunt­ing weapons, and asso­ci­at­ed eco­nom­ic and/​or reli­gious ideas. Women have no weapons of their own which are spe­cial­ly made to hunt ani­mals. If they want to hunt they must do so with­out weapons or oth­er­wise with some pro­vi­sion­al weapons such as sticks. Rarely do they use spe­cial­ly made hunt­ing weapons such as har­poons or spears, although these might be bor­rowed tem­porar­i­ly from males. Under these restric­tions wom­en’s hunt­ing activ­i­ties are con­fined to small ani­mal hunts, com­mu­nal hunts in which they take part in dri­ving, and, very rarely, indi­vid­ual hunts of larg­er mam­mals.

Thus, the “tra­di­tion­al par­a­digm” men­tioned ear­li­er, and which this arti­cle would shat­ter, has much more to do with a straw man (or woman?).

But whether or not the the­sis the arti­cle claims to demol­ish has actu­al­ly been defend­ed by any­one, the oth­er ques­tion is to what extent the data it col­lects actu­al­ly inval­i­dates it. For — and this is the sec­ond major prob­lem raised by its con­clu­sion — iden­ti­fy­ing wom­en’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in an activ­i­ty (in this instance, hunt­ing) in no way means that this par­tic­i­pa­tion occurs on the same scale as that of men, nor that it is car­ried out accord­ing to the same modal­i­ties.

It’s quite pos­si­ble (and in this case, indeed it is the case) that in many soci­eties, women occa­sion­al­ly hunt one game or anoth­er, but that what is for men a cen­tral occu­pa­tion remains for them an acces­so­ry or occa­sion­al task. And what many eth­no­log­i­cal data show, but which the method fol­lowed in the arti­cle makes total­ly invis­i­ble, is that women and men can per­fect­ly well take part in the same activ­i­ty (here, a col­lec­tive hunt) on a gen­dered basis — in a very banal way, women do the dri­ving and men do the killing. To say that women don’t hunt would cer­tain­ly be mis­lead­ing. But to say that they hunt on the same foot­ing as men is at least as mis­lead­ing. It’s some­what like point­ing out the towns in France host­ing wom­en’s soc­cer clubs and, hav­ing found a num­ber of them, con­clud­ing that the out­dat­ed idea that soc­cer is a gen­dered sport needs to be chal­lenged.

So when archae­ol­o­gists a pri­ori attribute sharp-edged or pierc­ing weapons to men, they’re cer­tain­ly tak­ing a short­cut ; in each case, this attri­bu­tion should be ver­i­fied if pos­si­ble, and not just assumed. But this attri­bu­tion is not arbi­trary : it cor­re­sponds to a very gen­er­al pat­tern. Deny­ing it does not advance our under­stand­ing of real­i­ty – quite the con­trary. In oth­er words, it’s a mat­ter of trees and woods.

3. A few more specific points

It’s all the more impor­tant to take the mea­sure of these issues since, in sci­ence, there’s a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple accord­ing to which the revi­sion of estab­lished knowl­edge requires all the more abun­dant and sol­id evi­dence the more rad­i­cal that revi­sion is. In the present case, how­ev­er, a cur­so­ry exam­i­na­tion of this evi­dence casts doubt on this.

1. As for the attri­bu­tion of the Ethno­graph­ic Atlas to L. Bin­ford, it may be a detail, but I fail to under­stand how the 63 for­ag­ing soci­eties select­ed include cul­ti­va­tors such as the Kikuyu or the Iro­quois.
2. Many of the sources used, such as Bright­man (1986), are sec­ond-hand, and it’s hard to see why such a work did­n’t sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly seek out infor­ma­tion from direct wit­ness­es. But there’s some­thing more embar­rass­ing : I cer­tain­ly did­n’t car­ry out a sys­tem­at­ic check, but in at least one case, that of the Lardils in the Gulf of Car­pen­taria, Aus­tralia, the cod­ing clear­ly dis­torts the data. Two sources are pro­vid­ed to sup­port the idea that among this peo­ple, women hunt­ed. One is a data­base called DICE. It con­tains the fol­low­ing sen­tence :
   

   Men hunt and fish, women care for child and gath­er or do craft work.

   So let’s turn to the oth­er source, the arti­cle by Mem­mott et al. (2008) on fish traps. While it con­tra­dicts the pre­vi­ous state­ment by high­light­ing wom­en’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in fish­ing, it does­n’t utter a word about their pos­si­ble activ­i­ty in hunt­ing, which does­n’t enter into its scope at all.

3. at no point does the arti­cle spec­i­fy the cri­te­ria used to define small, medi­um and large game. A read­ing of some of the sen­tences sug­gests that the notion of “big game” has been han­dled rather loose­ly. For exam­ple, the authors have assumed that among the Mat­ses, an Ama­zon­ian peo­ple, women hunt­ed big game sim­ply because they were armed with heavy sticks and machetes. I’m not par­tic­u­lar­ly knowl­edge­able about Ama­zon­ian wildlife in gen­er­al and the Mat­ses in par­tic­u­lar, so I may be ven­tur­ing into shaky ter­ri­to­ry here. But out of curios­i­ty, I con­sult­ed an arti­cle list­ing the game hunt­ed in the south-west­ern Ama­zon. It appears that the largest prey is the tapir, weigh­ing in at 150 kg. Next come two species weigh­ing 30 and 18 kg respec­tive­ly, with all oth­ers under 10 kg. The tapir’s size there­fore equals that of the rein­deer, and is still a long way from that of the elk or the horse, not to men­tion the mam­moth.
4. the arti­cle men­tions in pass­ing that these results con­sti­tute a
   

   fur­ther adding to the data that women con­tribute dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to the total caloric intake of many for­ag­ing groups

   How­ev­er, there is a dou­ble flaw here. The first, already men­tioned, is to con­fuse the num­ber of groups in which women hunt with the impor­tance of this activ­i­ty (to use the com­par­i­son employed above, to con­fuse the per­cent­age of towns with wom­en’s soc­cer clubs with the per­cent­age of women among soc­cer play­ers). The sec­ond error con­sists in pre­sent­ing wom­en’s “dis­pro­por­tion­ate” caloric intake as an estab­lished fact. I don’t think there are any reli­able sta­tis­tics on this point, but the few ele­ments we do have point to a very dif­fer­ent real­i­ty. Fab­rien Abrai­ni, who runs the excel­lent blog Anthro­pogo­niques, for exam­ple, drew up the fol­low­ing sketch based on data from F. Mar­lowe, “Hunt­ing and Gath­er­ing. The Human Sex­u­al Divi­sion of For­ag­ing Labor”, Cross-cul­tur­al research, 41–2, 2007 :

   

In conclusion

Final­ly, the arti­cle explic­it­ly aims to con­tribute to :

(…) acknowl­edge the non-sex­u­al divi­sion of labor con­cern­ing hunt­ing and gath­er­ing, in order to devel­op an inclu­sive frame­work for under­stand­ing human cul­ture.

How­ev­er, as we have seen, the data it com­piles in no way allows us to con­clude, against decades of con­ver­gent obser­va­tions, to a “non-gen­dered divi­sion of labor” with­in hunt­ing-gath­er­ing soci­eties. I can only repeat once again what I have insist­ed on many times in my oth­er writ­ings, name­ly that it is seduc­tive, but illu­so­ry, to pin present-day claims on the past, how­ev­er legit­i­mate they may be, in the belief that this would give them strength. Wom­en’s eman­ci­pa­tion need not be based on the fan­ta­sy of a bygone matri­archy, nor black peo­ple’s on elec­tri­fied pyra­mids. Aspi­ra­tions for a non-gen­dered world are the fruit of the upheavals intro­duced by cap­i­tal­ism, not a return to an alleged human nature. To delude one­self about the absence of divi­sion of labor among hunter-gath­er­ers will not make today’s world more inclu­sive ; on the con­trary, it will con­tribute to weak­en­ing the side of those who aspire to such a future, by pre­vent­ing them from prop­er­ly under­stand­ing why and how this mod­el of soci­ety has become think­able.

NB : oth­er col­leagues have begun to react to this study, from dif­fer­ent angles. In par­tic­u­lar, see this text, writ­ten by Vivek Venkatara­man, which review the ethno­graph­ic sources on hunter-gath­er­ers and what they actu­al­ly say.