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If you ask a BaYaka Forager in the Central African rainforest, “Where do you live?,” they often reply with a question of their own: “Mouanga or Pela?”
You’ll get the same response for nearly any question about their lives: Who do you live with? Who is this camp’s leader? How do you mourn the dead?
“Mouanga or Pela?”—meaning, “dry or wet season?” The BaYaka’s social world shifts throughout the year. The location and size of their homes, the materials used to build them, leadership, funerals—all transform depending on the season.
As an evolutionary anthropologist working with the BaYaka, I initially presumed people simply adjusted because of the seasonal availability of different foods. But their changes extended way beyond sustenance into the realms of politics, economics, rituals, and relationships.
These shifts starkly contrast with my own homes in the U.K. and Spain, countries seemingly locked into fixed sociopolitical and economic orders. BaYaka flexibility made me rethink my assumptions about what is “natural” for human societies, including gender roles, hierarchies, and social group sizes.
And the more expansively I looked, I realized BaYaka flexibility isn’t the anomaly: The rigidity of industrialized, capitalist societies is. Across history and geography, societies have restructured their sociopolitical and economic lives in response to seasonal shifts—and perhaps not solely due to fluctuating resources. People may also do so because they recognize the dangers of stagnation.
As I see it, regular restructuring keeps communities adaptable and resilient. Solving today’s greatest challenges—inequality, authoritarianism, the climate crisis—may require embracing this flexibility as part of the fabric of our societies.
CATEGORIZING SOCIETIES
Humans, for most of our existence, have lived as hunter-gatherers. Today only a small number of societies still rely on foraging. But studying how these groups adapt to different environments helps evolutionary anthropologists understand how our species became so widespread and successful.
Like our great ape relatives, human foragers often live in what anthropologists call “fission-fusion” societies—fluid systems in which groups come together or split apart depending on the availability of resources. But for chimps, territorial boundaries and rigid dominance hierarchies constrain the possibilities for various social arrangements. Humans, on the other hand, can negotiate their relationships through language, shared conventions, and cultural institutions. This capacity allows for more flexible—and often more egalitarian—forms of social life.
