ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the anthropological treatment of the peoples classically regarded as operating within a natural economy, namely societies of hunters and gatherers. It also considers how certain tropical hunter-gatherer peoples perceive their relations to their forest environment, and looks at the way northern hunters, in particular the Cree of northeastern Canada, understand their relations to the animals they hunt. Drawing on ethnographic material from Aboriginal Australia and subarctic Alaska, the chapter describes the way hunters and gatherers perceive the landscape. It explains how anthropological attempts to depict the mode of practical engagement of hunter-gatherers with the world as a mode of cultural construction of it have had the effect, quite contrary to stated intentions, of perpetuating a naturalistic vision of the hunter-gatherer economy. The animals figure for the northern hunters very much as the forest figures for such tropical hunter-gatherers as the Mbuti, Batek and Nayaka: they are partners with humans in an encompassing ‘cosmic economy of sharing’.
