Hunting, fishing and gathering activities lead men and women far away from the villages, into the forest. All forest societies alternate between spending some time in camps in the forest and living in the village for rather longer periods.
All forest societies have a mobile and changing habitat throughout the annual cycle, alternating between living near the fields and in forest camps.
The activities they engage in imply a certain amount of spatial constraints, due to the fact that the various resources they rely on are spread out accross the territory : hunting territories are always much bigger than the areas used for agriculture.
The families making up the community are divided and dispersed temporarily while they are living outside the village in the forest. The 'social morphology' of forest societies changes throughout the year.
In extreme cases, the community is scattered in family-based hamlets and only comes together for occasional celebrations or religious ceremonies.
There are many different types of organization and there are examples for each of them (even within each geographical area) :
- the basic economic and social unit may be : the conjugal family, the extended family, the community (village, camp), the clan, etc ;
(Among the African Pygmies, the basic unit is the conjugal family ; among the Shipibo in Peru, it is the village) ;
- a community may be made up of an extended family, a clan, a lineage or one or several lineage segments ;
- the village may be led by a headman, the head of a family or of a lineage ;
- there may or may not be a social organization above that of the village, e.g. at clan level or bringing together a group of clans (with a man at the head of the clan, governing with or without the help of a council of elders) ;
(Village confederations in Sulawesi, "chefs de terre" in Zaire) ;
- distant communities may or may not have some kind of relationship with each other, whether they meet frequently or rarely, and whether the relationship be one based on friendship or hostility ;
- one ethnic group may be divided into several scattered more or less autonomous sub-groups (each being based on a lineage for example), and the different sub-groups may or may not be in touch with each other ;
(The Yanomami in Venezuela) ;
- social groups (fragments of scattered ethnic groups) may use geographical criteria to form one big inter-ethnic social grouping ;
(e.g. in the river valleys of Borneo or among the Xingu ethnic groups in Brazil).
For most indigenous forest populations, their relationship to land is based on the community : the community owns the land and its members have a right to work the land and only actually own its produce. Generally speaking, the individual or, more often, the conjugal family has a right to use the land. One of the main implications of this is that no individual may let a stranger have a piece of land, nor may he sell it ; it is only the community as a whole that may decide whether to sell land or not.
The land, or rather the group's territory, belongs to the community. The boundaries, their demarcation and the degree to which they are defined varies with each ethnic group (they also seem to vary with different population densities).
Territory boundaries may be easily recognizable features of the landscape, such as rivers or streams, or on the contrary the mountain ridge separating two catchment areas ; or it may be an axis along which human beings travel (a path, a track, a river) and which crosses through an area that only has vague outer boundaries.
All the members of the community carry out their daily activities within this area. They have the rights to the produce that they obtain by hunting, fishing and gathering, and the rights to clear the necessary plots for agriculture.
Community rights are not restricted to land that has been cleared for agricultural purposes, and there is a big difference between land that is left unused and untitled land[3].
In many societies, rights to use a plot that is left fallow usually remain with the family that cleared the plot in the first place. Besides, in many areas of the world, trees are not considered as part of the plot of land and they then usually belong to the person who planted them. They are therefore individual private property. A useful wild tree often 'belongs' to the person who first found it.
In societies based on oral tradition, rights of an individual over a particular piece of land are defined according to the individual's relationship with the members of the group holding the rights over the area and according to his status within the group. In such societies, established kinship relationships and genealogy are the main references used for the legitimation of one's rights.
It is important to realize that an individual's position within a classificatory kinship system is basically 'negotiable' -a social group can always incorporate an indivudual held in esteem by all, through different types of adoptions- consequently, rights over land are also flexible.
Several factors are combined to define rights to use land : age and sex of an individual, his descent and residence.
A useful distinction is made between 'primary rights' (when an individual belongs to the group holding the rights over the land, both by descent and residence), 'contingent rights' (when an individual has full primary rights through descent but does not reside in the area in question), 'secondary rights' (when someone is related to an individual holding contingent rights) and finally 'tolerated rights' (when someone is married to a member of the group holding the rights over the land) (CROCOMBE, 1974).
An individual inherits the right to use the land depending on the group to which he is affiliated, maternal or paternal, and often inherits them from both sides. As a result, an individual may make use of the land of one or the other of the lineages ; this allows for temporary mobility for those who go and stay with groups to which they are only vaguely related.
This type of access to land resources has also been shown to exist in hunter-gatherer societies such as the Pygmies and in many societies of the Amazon Basin.
The majority of the populations mentioned in this report are egalitarian and their social organization is based on kinship ; it is especially important that one should understand this fact and its implications.
- Saying these societies are egalitarian implies that individuals of both sexes (and in many cases without even taking sexual distinction into account), are considered equal.
- A social system based on kinship implies that, from birth, an individual's social world and his position within it are defined by kinship.
Kinship links members of a society into a network of social security which ensures that their basic material and emotional needs will be taken on by others (whenever necessary and possible, of course). Though these factors may appear very simple, they are part of the social structure and even more fundamental when these societies have to face changes and development.
Leaders
In egalitarian societies[4], men earn a position of leadership through their ability and experience. This implies that a group may have several leaders, each specializing in his own sphere. Equality is maintained through a levelling process : those who try to use their superior status and the respect due to them in order to dominate over the other members in the group, are rapidly criticized and brought back to a more modest attitude through this criticism. They may even be ostracized. This is one of the reasons why these societes are said to be acephalous.
The leader is responsible for the community's well-being and is therefore the one who has to distribute most wealth. Influential positions are maintained by being as subtle as possible in maintaining a consensus within the group.
Despite the fact that this is a true democratic system (though without elections), this type of leadership and the process of decision-making that goes with it, often make it difficult for the members of a community to agree over problems that are beyond their own experience and to trust a representative or spokesman with their requests.
Another problem is due to the fact that the village may only be an administrative division that has no connection whatsoever with an endogenous reality. It is therefore often difficult for a stranger to work out who might be representing the group. Arousing group consciousness and developing some form of group representation to deal with the outside world can be a long and laborious process. The career of leaders can be very brief indeed, and they then return to being ordinary group members. The levelling process regulating leadership often implies that communities are split up into groups, each representing itself, and they do not necessarily rally when one particular group makes a decision.
Kinship
Social organizations based on kinship present characteristics that often conflict with the implementation of development projects.
For example, even when land belongs to a lineage, kinship allows many other individuals to use this land. The development of one small piece of land leads to strong reactions among a large proportion of the population and not just one or two families. The same applies for other belongings. Since kinship entails many obligations, both social and financial, money that has been earned (wages or other) is distributed, and the accumulation of capital is difficult, and even near impossible.
Because of the demands set by kinship and the weight of social organization, it is often very difficult for individual members within these traditional societies to seize opportunities to develop their own resources. What is often termed as laziness or lack of initiative is quite simply hesitation : as people commit themselves to change, they also get bogged down in kinship obligations.
Such negative aspects of an egalitarian social organization based on kinship, affecting a group's relationship with the outside world, are often pointed at, while the positive aspects are not even mentioned. Though it does entail some problems for development, the system of social security based on kinship does at least imply that sollicitude and attention are given to all from the moment they are born and until they die. It would be very expensive to replace this kind of social security with other systems -and anyway, it is emotionally irreplaceable.
When indigenous populations face the sort of changes that break up this family network, when they have to move or split up for example, they loose the support they traditionally relied on when things were getting difficult. By trying to replace it, they often lapse into criminality or are made to accept policies of hand-outs.
It is fundamental that all development projects leading to major changes should :
1) take into account the decision-making process of egalitarian societies and their mode of representation ;
2) assess the effects of these changes on kinship networks, and, should the latter be destroyed, they ought to think of how much it would cost to replace them.
[3] see NORONHA & LETHEM, 1983
[4] Though most equatorial forest populations have egalitarian social systems, there are hierarchical societies in parts of South-East Asia, especially in Borneo and Sulawesi. Where there is a hierarchy leaders inherit their position and do not belong to the same social class as the rest of the population. But even here, headmen usually try to consult the populations and to find some form of consensus, usually with the help of a council of elders. In Equatorial Africa, there are even a few rare examples of systems of castes among forest populations : the Mongo, from the equator to Zaire, have leaders who are more like kings and have sacred status ; or the Ekonda, in the same area, Pygmy hunter-gatherers and cultivators have been integrated but not at the same hierarchical level.