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Title
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The 'Primitive' Hunter-Gatherer Conceived as a Version of Economic Man and as a Species of Optimal Forager
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Description
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Is the human hunter-gatherer [. . .] a version of economic man or a species of optimal forager? On the face of it these two figures – both of them, of course, ideal constructs of the analytic imagination – appear diametrically opposed, and their conflation in the archetypal figure of the ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer seems to reflect the ambivalent status of this figure, within the discourse of Western science, as transitional between the conditions of nature and humanity.
Economic man, surely, exercises his reason in the sphere of social interaction, and in so doing advances in culture or civilisation, against the background of an intrinsically resistant nature. The rationality of the optimal forager, by contrast, is installed at the very heart of nature, while the specifically human domain of society and culture is seen as a source of external normative bias that may cause behaviour to deviate from the optimum. Here, then, is the paradox [. . .] of an approach which, while explicitly modelling itself on classical microeconomics, is nevertheless considered applicable to human beings only insofar as their behaviour is in some sense comparable to that of non-human animals. How can we hold, at one and the same time, that the faculty of reason is the distinctive mark of humanity, and that the rationality of human hunter-gatherers, by comparison with that of their non-human counterparts, is compromised by social and cultural constraints?
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Designer
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Ingold, Tim
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Date
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2000
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Source
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The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill.
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Bibliographic Citation
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Ingold, Tim. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
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Ingold-huntergatherer