Kings of the Forest- The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-Gatherers

About the Author JANA FORTIER received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was a tenured associate professor at Southwest Minnesota State University until 2003 and is presently a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego. She has published extensively on endangered cultures and languages of the Himalayan region with support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Introduction Ten thousand years ago, all the people in the world lived on wild plants Tand and animal foods. They were hunters and gatherers who collected food rather than produced it. Even though the practice of hunting and gathering was universal, there were many cultural and technological variations in for aging that were determined by differences in the environment, wildlife resources, cultural technology, surrounding politics, and prevailing patterns of trade with others. From the perspective of the human species, this was a highly successful way to live.

Even with the rise of agriculture, hunting and gathering did not simply wither away. Only five hundred years ago, with the beginning of European incursions into other countries, people who relied upon food collecting rather than food production continued to occupy almost half of the world. Hunters and gatherers, also known as foragers, occupied all of Australia, most of North America, and large areas of South America, Africa, and Asia. But by the turn of the twentieth century, while dozens of foraging societies remained viable, most others had been encapsulated into surrounding dominant agrarian regimes. Post-foraging societies, many located in North America and Australia, were subject to intense pressures to assimilate, and many faced the imminent demise of their cultures and languages. They were pressed to settle down, learn the dominant language, attend majority culture schools, and intermarry into other families. These assimilative mea sures largely succeeded, yet memories of foraging lifestyles have persisted and have even formed the basis of indigenous people's political movements worldwide as they struggle to preserve their cultural autonomy.

As the twenty-first century or, from an environmental perspective, the eleventh millennium of the Holocene begins, we can see all contemporary foraging societies being assimilated into agrarian state systems on every continent of the world.

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