Hunting

The term hunting comprehends a broad, complex, and always culture-specific range of human activities. For the purposes of this article, and to capture a sense of the complexity, we shall use the definition first employed by British historian John MacKenzie: “the pursuit, driving, ambushing, and trapping of wild animals of all species with the intention of killing them for meat, other animal products, or purely for sport.” Obviously, for most of the 20th century and in most Western and colonialist contexts, hunting in this sense was not considered to fall under the category of “women's work.”

Indeed, the dominant view of the origins and underpinnings of human society that developed in the latter half of the 20th century-the so-called hunting hypothesis of human origins-established the ...