Information and Its Role in Hunter-gatherer Bands

Information and Its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands brings new and expanded insights into the essential and critical place of information in small-scale foraging societies. The contributors to this volume use examples from ethnography, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology to explore how such societies acquire, maintain, transmit, and utilize information. Among some of the many issues addressed are the differential distribution of information by age and sex/gender, its contextual activation, its symbolic and material manifestations, and the variable scales of time and space within which information networks operate. The degree of commonality that crosscuts the various approaches and analyses is noteworthy and allows the work as a whole to make significant advances toward defining a theoretical understanding of the multiple roles of information in band societies. Such definition, at the same time, allows us to isolate some of the major gaps remaining in our knowledge of this subject and to pinpoint those areas where further research will be most productive and important. Book jacket.