326

p Dear Sir,

p In my preceding letters I have frequently used the expressions "hunting peoples”, "lower hunting tribes”, etc. Did I have the right to use them? In other words, is the well-known old scheme 327 according to which peoples are divided into hunting, pastoral and agricultural peoples a satisfactory one?

p Many people nowadays think that it is quite unsatisfactory. Biicher is one of them. He says that the scheme in question was based on the tacit assumption that primitive man began with an animal diet and only gradually went over to a vegetarian one. But in fact man began with a vegetarian diet: he ate fruit, berries, and roots. As a natural supplement to this vegetarian food small animals appeared: shell-fish, worms, beetles, ants, etc. "If we are to look for the transition to the next stage,” Biicher continues, "on reflection we can assume that it would not have been hard for primitive man to notice how a plant grew from a bulb or nut that dropped into the ground, and that this would at least have been no harder than taming an animal or making a fishing-rod and the bow and arrows needed for hunting."  [327•*  Further on Biicher expresses his conviction that nomadic pastoral peoples should be regarded as tillers turned savage, and adds that excluding the Far North, one will not find a single people today for whom vegetarian food docs not constitute a considerable part of their diet. In another passage he says that the course of economic development in primitive peoples depends entirely on the geographical environment and that it would therefore be pointless to try and provide a scheme of the stages of development "equally suitable for Negroes and Papuans, for Polynesians and for Indians".  [327•** 

p Precisely the same view was expressed a few years ago by another German scholar of primitive economy, Hellmuth Pancow, in his article "Betrachtungen iiber das wirtschaftliche Leben der Naturvolker”, published in No. 3 of the journal of the Berlin Geographical Society for 1896. According to Pancow, the scheme which divides peoples into hunting, pastoral and agricultural prevents a proper understanding of the economic life of primitive mankind. True, this life is always very narrow with respect to its foundation, but nevertheless it is far broader than is assumed by the "deeply rooted scheme" which we are discussing. In it hunting is combined with agriculture and agriculture goes hand in hand with cattle-breeding. In general, mankind’s progress does not take place so simply and schematically that the movement of all peoples is subject to one and the same law. In one place it proceeds in one way, in another place differently.

p Pancow thinks also that the "deeply rooted scheme" gives an incorrect picture of the order of the historical emergence of the various ways of obtaining food. Like Biicher, lie believes that agriculture preceded the taming of animals for an economic purpose. 328 Pancow’s general conclusion is that the usual scheme corresponds very liltle to the actual course of economic and cultural development and that the achievements of scholarship now demand urgently that we reject it.

p This conclusion is fully supported by A. Vierkandt who suggests a new classification of the forms of development of primitive economy.  [328•*  I consider it useful to acquaint you with this new classification, sir.

p Vierkandt says that the lower tribes are those which confine themselves to simple gathering of the gifts of nature that are ready for consumption. He calls them gatherers (die Sammler). The gatherers include, for example, the aborigines of the Australian mainland who subsist by gathering the roots of wild plants and shell-fish, and also by hunting in which they engage in its most primitive form. They also include the Bushmen, the Tierra Fuegians, the Botocudos, the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, the Negritos of the Philippine Archipelago, in brief, all the tribes which I have called lower hunting tribes.

p At the next stage of development we see hunting, fishing, cattlebreeding and a special form of agriculture to which German scholars have recently given the name of Hackbau (tilling the soil with a pick-axe). Pure hunters and fishers are found only in exceptional geographical conditions, only where "tilling the soil is impossible for climatic reasons”, for example, in the far north of the Old and New World. South of this cold belt lies an extremely broad belt in which hunting, cattle-breeding and tilling the soil with a pick-axe is combined, or was combined in the age preceding the appearance of the Europeans.

But for each particular people each of these particular ways of obtaining food is or was combined with others in different proportions. The Indians of North....