MODERN HUNTER GATHERERS: GENERAL RESEARCH TRENDS
As explored through this handbook, for complex historical and intellectual reasons anthropological debates about global cultural diversity moved into different directions (pluciennik, Part I). Within the framework of nineteenth-century social evolutionary thinking, it was commonly assumed that all foragers represented a similar kind of society and that these 'modern hunter gatherers represented a rather straightforward analogue to 'ancient peoples, for example, the hunting societies of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Anthropologists and archaeologists went on to become interested in identifying the com mon features of both modern and ancient hunting and gathering societies living in different parts of the world, whether in terms of subsistence, social organization, ideology, or gen eral mode of existence. This task was thought to be somewhat easier for anthropologists as they could directly observe these behaviours during fieldwork. but it was also assumed by archaeologists that these kinds of ethnographic insights could be applied relatively uncriti study of prehistoric foragers past and present foragers constituted the same kinds of society, and occupied similar stages of general cultural progress The current consensus is that modern forager lifeways are inherently flexible and histori- cally contingent. Populations can switch quickly between different subsistence strategies in ways that defy older assumptions of simple linear progress from one economic stage to another, from relatively simple to more complex forms of social organization. At the same time, there is growing appreciation of the cultural resilience of modern hunter-gatherers within a rapidly changing and relentlessly globalizing contemporary world. For many groups, the foraging lifestyle also entails strong moral, ethical, and ideological commit ments to the land, and meeting these obligations is a central part of group identity and belief gathering, even moving through the forest and across the ancestral landscape, all form a fundamentally important expression human existence and spirituality