Hunter-gatherer education special issue: Introduction

This special issue focuses on the role of education in the lives of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Though extremely diverse, hunter-gatherer groups share some common characteristics in regards to their social structure and their relations with surrounding groups and state governments. This issue highlights the ways in which these commonalities take shape with regards to education. The issue is also a part of a larger effort aimed at better understanding, and ultimately addressing, the central, multifaceted and paradoxical role that education plays for hunter-gatherer communities today. The sections below explain this background and introduce the papers in this issue.

Within the literature on indigenous education, there is a relatively large focus on (former) hunter-gatherers from Australia, North America and the circumpolar region, and a somewhat smaller focus on Latin America, much of it in Spanish and Portuguese. There has been far less focus on groups in Asia and Africa. Many countries in these regions face significant challenges to the implementation of universal education, especially in highly diverse countries with multiple languages and ethnic groups. Small-scale hunter-gatherer societies are just a few of many groups facing problems of educational access and cultural barriers, and their numbers are so tiny that, from the perspective of governments, it seems unfeasible to prioritise them, as described in our article in this issue. In addition, many hunter-gatherer groups in Asia and Africa are in the midst of a dramatic transition process that includes participation in formal education. For such groups, this participation is relatively recent and has not yet received the same focus from anthropologists and other researchers as groups in other regions.

The papers in this issue, which provide ethnographic perspectives from these continents on four hunter-gatherer communities, are thus an important contribution to the literature: Noa Lavi describes the Nayaka in India; Jason Sanglir the Moken in Thailand; Man Bahadur Shahu the Raute in Nepal; and Attila Paksi, the Khwe in Namibia. The introductory article, by Jennifer Hays, Velina Ninkova and Edmond Dounias summarises and discusses the common themes that run through these four cases and throughout the literature on hunter-gatherers and their approaches to – and relationships with – education.