The Cultural Logic of Hunger and Scarcity

Food storage, whether practiced in the short term or the long term, levels the temporal fluctuations in resource availability, introducing thereby an assured constancy in rates of consumption over time. In delayed return foraging societies, those of the Northwest Coast and California, for example, localized and seasonally abundant resources were intensively harvested and preserved (cf. Testart 1982). From the perspective of optimal foraging theory, food preservation and storage is "adaptive" behavior, allowing the energy from seasonally aggregated resources to be appropriated throughout the year (Yesner 1981:164-165). This would explain the Montagnais' practice of storing eels—an abundant and seasonal resource—but not their decision to consume the entire surplus at the first winter camp. In ecosystems that contained either the possibility or the assurance of protracted hunger during winter, why did boreal forest Agonquians not preserve and transport or cache more food than they did? There were no technological or ecosystem conditions that would have made more intensive preservation impossible. For the Crees of the Churchill River, there was even a proximal model of a foraging society with delayed return orientations: the Chipewyans hunting north of the river in the late 1700s practiced, according to Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]:106), a "steady frugality," preventing the starvation crises to which the Crees were subject. In the boreal forest, the variable of storage could assume diverse values. In terms of Rappaport's (1984) distinction, there existed a "goal range" for storage below which Crees were at objective risk of hunger and starvation and also a Cree "reference value" that determined how much storage was actually practiced. From a Western per-

spective valuing continuity and predictability in subsistence, the two measures appear seriously discrepant: the Montagnais and the Crees were storing little food in ecosystems and during periods in which many of them were starving to death.

The disparity can be explained in part as the product of historical changes in resource strategies. Prehistorically and during the early food trade, resources were probably obtained with sufficient predictability to make intensive food storage unnecessary to group survival. As Sahlins observed, the characteristic prodigality of hunters must be predicated on at least a usually reliable food supply: "if hunters and gatherers really favored gluttony over economic good sense, they would never have lived to become the prophets of this new religion" (1972:31). At the same time, greater use of food storage could have prevented hardships and occasional tragedies caused by fluctuating resource populations and accidents. The levels of resource uncertainty reported for Crees and Montagnais in these sources were probably not typical of the aboriginal situation. The Hudson Bay lowlands may not have been permanently occupied before the fur trade because of scarcity, and the Montagnais of the 1630s and the Churchill River Crees of the 1820s were occupying depleted environments. One would expect experimentation with food storage in such circumstances. That certain Crees were adopting European cache strategies in these circumstances is readily understandable, although the majority who did not pose the more interesting ecological issue. These latter groups were seemingly living out foraging contradictions, reproducing immediate return strategies predicated on the more reliable resources of earlier periods.

From the perspective of a delayed return economy, the reliability introduced by more intensive food storage would have been "adaptive" both prehistorically and in the fur trade, the more so as resource uncertainty increased. It is clear that French and English observers thought the Algonquians desperately in need of it. Equally dearly, the Indians usually thought it not worth the trouble. Restricted mobility (the cache system) and a diet of smoked meat were high prices to pay for reliability. Not to mention the additional labor. The author of the 1822-23 Indian Lake journal (HBC B.91/a/8) observed that the Crees stored food only when "the meat can be preserved with little trouble," and this provides some insight into the values organizing their prodigality. The effort, or, in the ecological idiom, the energy costs entailed by drying meat and then pulling it through the snow on toboggans or positioning it in caches, would appear excessive if the hunters hoped to

kill additional animals in the near future. If meat "wasted" by nonstorage was ordinarily recouped by fresh kills, storage would maximize reliability only at the expense of additional labor.

The corollary of such optimism is a tolerant resignation to transient hardship. Ellis (1967 [1748]:90), after observing that the Crees possessed "no notion of frugality or of providing against privation" to which they were "sure to be exposed every winter," allowed that they underwent hunger with patience. Drage (1968 [1748-49], 1:216), noting the Crees did not go hunting until all supplies on hand were exhausted, wrote that "they sometimes fast for a time which they bear with patience." Robson (1965 [1752]:51) wrote that Crees could fast three or four times as long as the English. Boreal Algonquians expected intermittent periods of hunger during the winter, and these fasts—and even the possible threat of death—were preferable to the planning and labor entailed by food storage. The definition of the resource situation was one in which animals were ordinarily available and hunger a predictable, endurable, and usually transient aspect of the winter round. It is precisely in this arbitrary weighting of risk aversion and optimism that the operation of the cultural logic of Cree labor is specifiable. The costs of the labor, always potentially superfluous, entailed in storage was reckoned disproportionate to the reliability ensured by the surplus. Before approximately 1900, boreal forest Algonquians often fasted and sometimes perished for lack of food. These tragedies would have occurred less frequently if more intensive food storage had been practiced. Experiencing long-term game shortages as though they were new instances of transient scarcity, the Algonquians continued, with some concessions, "to let tomorrow provide for itself." The decision to store less and starve more (or, among Chipewyans, to store more and starve less) was not objectively determined by the Canadian Shield ecosystem, the limits of the technology, or caloric efficiency. The paradox of the starving Montagnais consuming all their preserved eels in autumn feasts is a particularly forceful example of the meaningful construction of utility, efficiency, and the entire structure of foraging labor and consumption. This skepticism toward advanced planning and reliability is not limited exclusively to foragers. Audrey Richards's (1932) classic monograph on the Bemba is a detailed exposition of an agricultural society whose members preferred transient hunger to what they deemed excessive labor.

One additional facet of this logic remains to be explored. We are disposed to think of storage as securing reliability, but for the Algon-

quians it could possess precisely the opposite significance, ensuring present stability only at the cost of future privation. One of my Cree acquaintances always left the village for his trapline unencumbered by food supplies. He took tea, bannock, and sometimes candy bars but never meat or fish. Since he was an expert beaver and lynx trapper, there was usually meat available after he lifted his traps. His father had told him that only an unskilled trapper need take food onto his line, that the experience of hunger is educationally effective, and, finally, that it is "bad luck" to carry meat into the bush. It is not surprising to find other evidence that, in boreal Algonquian thought, the beings who regulate hunting punish those who store food by withholding food in the future. In 1887, a Naskapi hunter responded to the exhortations of a Catholic priest in northern Labrador:

Nos pères mangeaient tout ce clue leur envoyait le Grand-Esprit, et nos pères étaient fins , nous raisons comme nos pères. . . . Je tue dix caribous; c'est le Grand-Esprit qui me les envoie parce qu'il voit que j'ai faim ; il a un gros coeur pour moi, le Grand-Esprit, et il veut que je mange . . . je mange tout . Le Grand-Esprit rit, et m'engraisse encore mille caribous là-bas, dans les terres des Naskapis. Tu voudrais . . . que je cache le pemmican clue le Grand-Esprit m'envoie? Mais cela insulte le Grand-Esprit. Si je meurs cette nuit, après l'avoir fait, je parâitrai devant la face du Grand-Esprit, son oeil sera fâché, et il me dira: tu es un mauvais fils, tu n'as pas eu d'esprit. Tu me traites comme un matshimanitou [evil spirit]. . . . Tu fait pitié à ton père d'en haut. . . . Il n'enverra plus ses caribous dans ton chemin de chasse . (Cooper 1933:55, emphasis added)^[2]

The speaker, as reported or in fact, referenced scriptural conceptions of deity, but the deity's disposition toward food storage was identifiably nonscriptural and Algonquian. Why is the Grand-Esprit —presumably, the Naskapi caribou god—angered and insulted by preserved food? Why would the speaker imagine himself as a "bad son" in the Catholic idiom, and why is storing pemmican from caribou meat spoken about as treating the caribou god like an evil spirit?

Testart (1982), following Sahlins (1972), has suggested that storage constitutes in the social life of foragers a "transgression of the rule of sharing." This depends, of course, on the degree of consensus as to storage. Given generalized sharing, the family that stores cannot long coexist with the family that consumes immediately. But if all co-residential commensal groups store, the preserved food can either be pooled or apportioned and thereafter shared to level ensuing disparities in the same fashion as fresh meat. The Algonquian concept turns, I believe, on a different denial of reciprocity. As between human beings,

so between human beings and animals: meat is routinely "given" when the recipient is in need. To store food may therefore be to question the willingness of others to give. The emotion imputed to the Grand-Esprit is that of resentment for a sacrilegious skepticism: only a macimanitow would withhold food. Stored food usurps the authority of the entities who provision human beings. By using it, foragers acknowledge and anticipate that the generosity of these entities can be unreliable and secure for themselves an artificial substitute through technical means. But in doing so, they disinvite the others' generosity, which is best assured by objectively needing the gift of meat. Animals will not give themselves to hunters who do not need them, and hunters do not need them if they have a surplus already on hand.

Feasting and devouring everything on hand was thus the opposite value of food storage, and the nominally secular scheduling of production and consumption was organized throughout the Algonquian subarctic as a day-to-day replication of the logic of the eat-all feast. I am not suggesting a theological determinism that imposed the design of ritual meals on secular labor. It was not only in sacred feasts that Crees ate their way through all the available food on hand. In both good times and bad, sacred and (relatively) secular, decisions about when to hunt and how much food to consume were organized by the postulate that successful production presupposes an existing shortage that humans must create by eliminating surpluses and maintaining a condition of scarcity. This logic was dominant even at the extremities of survival and explains why the Montagnais described by LeJeune embarked on their winter hunt only after consuming all their preserved food. In the eat-all feast, the surplus was entirely destroyed. In the quotidian round, men went hunting only when the food on hand was nearly or entirely consumed. In a cultural universe so skeptical of the sufficiency of human agency, this disposition for "feasting upon their stock until they have not a day's provision left" (Robson 1965 [1752]:51) appears as a reasonable—if not, indeed, rational—mode of production.^[3]