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Results
In the first two phases of the CRC the focus of the project has been on external constraints regarding forager mobility. Agent-based simulations (PhD Martin Solich) that we have developed were premised on general external ecological constraints influencing mobility patterns and three ethnohistorical studies that were conducted investigated specific external constraints exerted by the larger political and economic system influencing mobility (and leading to the breakdown of mobility). Field research for the three case studies is now complete:
- ethnohistorical study on central African rainforest foragers (Gabon, PhD Dörte Weig),
- ethnohistorical study in the east-African savanna (Kenya, PhD Enid Guene),
- ethnohistorical study of foragers in the southern African savanna (Namibia, PhD Charlie Goodwin)
The case studies bring to light that hunter-gatherers find various strategies of adaptation to changed environmental conditions but do not abandon their subsistence mode in total by switching to agriculture.
The case study in Namibia shows that foragers are more likely to forage on wage labour and the state (food aid) than to switch to growing theirown food and to adopting the mobility regime of their agropastoralist neighbours.
The Kenyan case study suggests environmental factors (competition forspace or resources) result in social adaptations (various degrees of in-termigration, intermarriage and trade with neighbouring non-foragers) rather than in outmigration, annihilation or wholesale cultural shift to farming.
Future Plans: Perception and Decision Making
In the third phase we propose to bridge the research gap between
- formal models (including simulations that are representing no specific case) and
- distinct cultural models (each representing a single ethnohistorically specific case)
through a cross-cultural comparison of cultural models maintained by hunter-gatherers themselves. We will synthesize and combine the available information on decision making and spatial orientation for modelling mobility: both are closely interlinked since hunter-gatherer decision making is based on perceptions of the environment and the orientation therein. In turn, the decision making that governs mobility may effect the environment and the perceptions of it. The synthesis will cover forager mobility patterns in the three large regions of historical hunter-gatherer occupation in Africa:
- the central African tropical forest;
- the southern African deserts and savannas;
- the east African savanna.
Research questions
- How do forager decision making schemas differ from western models represented as decision-trees?
- How does the orientation of foragers in the environment differ from cardinal orientation with conventional maps?
- What is the relation between forager decision making/mobility practices and the modes of perceiving the environment?
- What are the implications of forager mobility practices for „First African Frontier“?
Methods
- Establish similarities across documented cases: Similarities in motivations and justifications for movement, in communicating mobility intentions, in assessing alternatives, and in securing or avoiding commitment vis-a-vis others across cases;
- Establish similarities across documented cases: Similarities in the landscape terminologies, cognitive schemata of the environment, in working with maps and in orientation skills across cases;
- Analyse the findings on decision making in relation to the findings on the modes of perceiving the environment;
- Refine the model of the „First African Frontier“ based on the results.