You Say 'Proto,' I Say 'Para'

In my last post I asked how “revolutionary” the adoption of agriculture really was within the larger scheme of human evolution. In a recent article by Edmond Dounias, “The Management of Wild Yam Tubers by the Baka Pygmies in Southern Cameroon” (2001), the author asks us to consider how the management of wild resources by non-agricultural groups could reshape our understanding of how hunter-gatherers use and impact their environments.

Having observed the in-depth knowledge related to wild yam morphology and reproduction among modern forest-dwelling Baka hunter-gatherers, as well as the yam’s place as a central component of both their subsistence and symbolic systems, Dounias notes that the maintenance of wild yam tuber heads in the soil, and their reburial after harvesting, is a fairly common practice among hunter-gatherers worldwide. For this reason, wild yams are seen to occupy an immediate position between wild resources and crops. Dounias coins the term “paracultivation” to describe “a set of technical, social and cultural practices aiming at managing wild resources while keeping them in their natural environment”. Furthermore, he describes the paracultivation of wild yam tubers as having shaped the evolution of both the technology (e.g. the design of the digging stick) and the social rules (e.g. rights of ownership, possible inheritance of plants, ritual protection, use as prestige food and bridewealth) which structure the exploitation of these plants among Baka.

By terming the concept “paracultivation”, Dounias brings into sharp focus the underlying motivations that have, until very recently, driven research of domestication in prehistory. In contrast to paracultivation, the term “protocultivation” (a term coined in 1936 to describe a transitory step between gathering and agriculture) implies that hunter-gatherer groups engaging in manipulative activities like transplanting are necessarily on the path to agriculture. As Dounias points out, the Baka—despite a strong tradition of manipulating wild yams—have “no wish or expressed purpose” to obtain complete domestication of this resource (2001: 136). As M. Kat Anderson writes in her book “Tending the Wild” (a study of indigenous resource management in California), it is only by abandoning a dichotomous and linear view of nature-human interactions that anthropologists can avoid pigeonholing human use of the landscape into two extremes of intervention: “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturalist” (2005: 125).

The recognition that domestication is not the only way in which humans can influence plants and animals (and vice versa) and shape their natural environments is a central tenet of Niche Construction Theory. While Dounias never explicitly cites niche construction, his general standpoint falls comfortably within this theoretical approach. For example, his observation the paracultivation “seems to provoke production of a supplementary mechanical protection by the plant, and has the effect of reducing competition with humans form other tuber consumers such as bushpigs and rodents.” (2001: 145) echoes Peter Bleed’s description of the dynamic and reciprocal nature of human, plant, and animal systems (2006: 8). Paracultivation, along with the Baka case study, encourages us to rethink long-held beliefs about human/environment relationships, and to conceptualize hunter-gatherers as active shapers of their niche, rather than as opportunists or reactors to a given set of circumstances.


Resources Cited:

Anderson, M. Kat. 2005. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Bleed, Peter. 2006. Living in the Human Niche. Evolutionary Anthropology 15: 8-10.

Dounias, Edmond. 2001. The Management of Wild Yam Tubers by the Baka Pygmies in Southern Cameroon. African Study Monographs, Suppl. 26: 135-156.