from a dozen countries, one of whom was an indigenous Siberian, then
the Dean of the Faculty of the University of Yakutia ( Leacock and Lee
1982). A second CHAGS meeting was held in Quebec in 1980, and it, too,
included representatives from hunter-gatherer societies, several of whom
were Inuit.

The next two CHAGS meetings were held in Europe, one in Bad Hom-
burg, Germany ( CHAGS 3) in 1983 and the other, CHAGS 4, in London
in September 1986 (see Ingold et al. 1988a, b). A major issue raised at the
third CHAGS meeting was whether or not the concept "hunter-gatherer"
is a valid one, given that these populations had been dominated by more
powerful societies and that they were seen as part of a poverty-stricken,
marginalized underclass in the societies in which they lived ( Schrire 1984;
see also Wilmsen 1989). There is no question that hunter-gatherers have
been affected significantly by outside forces. In some cases, they became
the proverbial "victims of progress," while others transformed themselves,
engaging in activities such as specialized hunting or wild resource col-
lecting, a process seen, for example, among some of the Adivasis (the
"Scheduled Tribes") of India and among Southeast Asian foragers such as
those in Thailand, Laos, and Malaysia.

The Fifth Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS 5)
was held in the Southern Hemisphere, this time in Australia in 1988 ( Altman
1989; Meehan and White 1990). This meeting included a number of
Aboriginals, some of whom were working on conservation and economic
development issues. CHAGS 6 was held in another hunter-gatherer strong-
hold, Alaska, in 1990 ( Burch and Ellanna 1994). Again, indigenous people,
including Inuit, Aleuts, and Alaskan Indians, played significant roles in
this meeting. Together, these meetings have provided a series of stimulat-
ing discussions of issues relating to hunting and gathering peoples involv-
ing both scholars and representatives of hunter-gatherer groups, and they
have contributed to important theoretical developments in anthropology
and archaeology. Topics such as politics, economics, social organization,
gender, symbolism, and ideology were explored in detail.

The Seventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, which
was held in Moscow in August 1993, was no exception. This meeting had
significant representation of members of hunter-gatherer groups, many
of them from the former Soviet North, who spoke about their resistance
to state oppression and their internal political dynamics. They also out-
lined their roles in the growing activism of indigenous northern peoples
in seeking self-determination and self-representation. This was a historic
meeting, as it was the first extensive East-West scholarly exchange in
anthropology since the demise of the USSR. There were discussions of the
interactions between foragers and modern states, cosmology and world-
view, ideology and consciousness. A related, significant area of debate at

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