ABSTRACT

The contrasts in diet between one people and another may be extreme. The Eskimo and the Plains hunters living almost entirely on meat, and the British Columbian coast and river peoples, with their east Siberian counterparts such as the Goldi living so largely on fish, differ fundamentally in their regulation and exploitation of natural resources, in their tools as well as in their food customs from groups which, like the Semang or the Paiute and Californians, only occasionally obtain meat food. Such specialization or limitation is of course never complete. The pure 'gleaner', a type of primitive food-gatherer once postulated, who knows neither hunting nor fishing and lives entirely on gathered fruits, insects and the smallest of animals caught by hand, remains a hypothesis unconfirmed by ethnographical investigation. The Semang who perhaps approach most closely to this condition use simple nets and have a specialized weapon of the chase, the poisoned arrow, even though it is directed mainly against small animals and birds. The Tasmanians whose equipment was still more meagre, nevertheless organized drives against game more considerable than anything known to the Semang. On the other hand the Eskimo, who exhibit the closest approach to a purely hunting and fishing economy, regularly gather berries in such quantities as they can during their summer travels. There is nearly everywhere a wide range of auxiliary foods, and it will be noted that these are often provided by the women, while the specialized production is in the hands of the men. Where, however, no single resource predominates, the food quest is more diversified irrespective of the richness of total resources. The Semang in equatorial forest and the Paiute on a semi-desert plateau gather equally diverse supplies. Among such peoples, although hunting remains a male prerogative, vegetable produce is not gathered by women alone; the durian harvest and the digging of yams in Malaya, and the pine-nut harvests in the Great Basin are achieved by the joint labour of a household, men and women together.