The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World

Rating:
Summary: 3 cheers for hunters, 4 groans for farmers
Review: I read this book with growing impatience. In a nutshell, what Brody says is: hunters = good!! Farmers = BAD!!! (Hunters, mind you, rely for most of their protein on women's gathering, which Brody relegates to two footnotes. Yeah, women do a lot work, but hey, I'm a man in a man's society, so that doesn't have anything to do with me.)

I was puzzled by Brody's totally ignoring anybody but hunters and farmers, until I read (p236) ¡§There is no intermediate figure, no third term, sitting between God and Satan.¡¨ It seems that in Brody's mind, boxed in by Judeo-Christianity, God = hunters and gatherers, farmers = Satan, and that's the whole story, all cultures are either hunting angels or demonic potato grower. Never mind that for some reason I had labored under the delusion that the early Jews were herders. My Biblical history is weak, and for Brody, that sort of category does not exist.

Brody combines some profound ideas with bizarre notions. Thus (p176) ¡§Perhaps all education has as its objective some form of breaking.¡¨ Anybody not thoroughly indoctrinated in Romantic ideology is sure to scream at this sentence, and think of dozens of refutations. But even if we do accept education as breaking. An eagle chick has to break its shell and lose its baby feathers in order to soar. So?

The author devotes considerable energy to trying to prove that hunter-gatherers are settled, farmers not. I have a friend who is the 82nd recorded generation of his family; the previous 81 were all born in the same farming town (before the Communists took over China). I don't have the exact names and places at hand, but I read about a man in England whose DNA showed him to be descended from a person buried nearby 9,000 years ago. Isn't that enough stability?

Humanity's main dispersion, from Africa to all over everywhere else, was accomplished by hunter-gatherers. Brody tries to get around this by saying the Indians believe their own creation myths, which say they were created in situ.

This is not to deny tension between farmers and hunter-gatherers: it is a problem of how the land is to feed people, a matter of life and death. However, I feel we could justifiably say that our ancestors were not willing to sit back and admire the cultural achievements of hunters because they were scared to death. A farmer plants a seed, tends the crop, and harvests, bringing life. No surprise they were terrified when confronted with people who live by stalking and killing living things, existing by blood and gore. A farmer with a hoe has good reason to be afraid of a hunter with an arrow.

Again and again, Brody indignantly accuses farmers of considering hunting people ¡¥not quite human.¡¦ Well, he also tells us that a hunter is in touch with the animals, visits them, and can come to an understanding with them (p103), and obviously admires their ability to achieve brotherhood with wild beasts, so why shouldn't farmers consider them not quite human? This is hardly their monopoly. Brody tells us that hunting tribes refer to themselves as Humans, implying that others are not quite human. But that's all right, see, because Hunters = good!!

I was shocked on page 198 to see reference to chiefs. What? How could hunters have chiefs? Brody told us over and over how egalitarian they are.

This is not the only contradiction. Hegel is rightly scorned for considering two million Indian lives a worthwhile price for progress (p267), but on the very next page the Spaniards are held to scorn for destroying the Aztecs who practiced human sacrifice, hundreds of thousands of Indian lives ended on bloody altars. Brody cannot bring himself to credit the Spaniards with repugnance at this dreadful religion. Spaniards are farmers, so they must be bad. We conveniently hide in a footnote that the Aztecs were hardly hunter gatherers. Neither were the Incas. Did they fare any better under the Spanish heel?

I do not have space here to examine Brody's muddled arguments thoroughly, and frankly, I got so bored and exasperated that I did not read the last third of the book with extreme care. I think the crux of the matter is stated baldly on page 290: ¡§I felt liberated from the anxious landscapes of middle-class Europe.¡¨ Like a modern Rousseau, Brody discovers a noble savage to save himself from his own anxieties.

It is highly ironic that Brody's glorification of hunters, and thus meat-eating, contributes to the annihilation of the few hunting societies left. Very few readers will go out and hunt seal in the environmental and psychological balance Brody extols. Most will buy their meat. To produce meat for these consumers, big business buys cheap grazing land in Central America, where they chop down the rain forest and displace the Indians.

Brody is to be commended for standing up for the dispossessed, but a greater service would be rendered their cause by a less dogmatic, less absolutist treatise.

Rating:
Summary: A superbly presented, anthropological study
Review: The Other Side Of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, And The Shaping Of The World by anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Hugh Brody is a meticulously researched, superbly presented, anthropological study that looks closely at the life of hunter-gatherers in prehistory. Comparing the hunter-gatherers to farmers, Brody persuasively proposes that it was the farmers and colonizers who were the true nomads, whereas the hunter-gatherers adapted a strong attachment and sense of place to their lands. The Other Side Of Eden is a simply fascinating, iconoclastic, thought-provoking, highly recommended study re-examining long-standing anthropological beliefs about the nature of early human life.

Rating:
Summary: a part of everyone's education!
Review: The road less travelled in this case is that of hunter gatherers. in a world presently dominated by agriculturalists (that's us), it's easy to overlook the lives and cultures of hunters and gatherers. When we do think of them, there's a tendency to triumphalism - a sense of inevitability about the rise of the farmers, and a sense that agriculture is simply superior.

Anthropologist Hugh Brody's newest book is an antidote to all that. Without sentimentalising or romanticising them, Brody describes with the utmost sensitivity the lives of the Innu and Inuit he has lived among during his significant career.

He challenges with fairly hard evidence the view that hunter-gatherer cultures are necessarily destined to become agricultural, and that population pressure makes this shift inevitable. He calls us to examine our prejudices - just think of how we use the terms 'civilised' and 'uncivilised' and the implications of this for the latter group.

His main hypothesis is that we cannot know what it is to be human unless we take seriously the 'alternative' world of hunter-gatherers. For Brody, theirs is in no sense an 'inferior' culture, but a series of cultures of infinite richness and vitality. Moreover, many of the virtues of agricultural society can be regarded as the merest vestiges of much older qualities, dependent on our hunting and gathering origins.

Brody's argument, the point at which he becomes polemical, is hinted at in the sub-title of the book, 'Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World'. Brody holds that farmers have shaped the world we have inherited, largely at the expense of hunters, who have been disposessed, re-educated and exterminated, often 'for their own good'. While it may not be possible to turn back the clock, we can at least examine what is happening in the here and now, rather than dismissing it as the march of progress. The litany of misdeeds recorded by Brody is painful but necessary. Because the process he decries is even now continuing, Brody's book is essential reading.

Rating:
Summary: Skip this book!
Review: This author pushes his personal and anthropological views on his reader in a big way. Had this book not been a required text for a class, I would have put it down after the first chapter. This is not a linear book, meaning Brody skips around sometimes over periods of years while recalling his experiences. It is a boring read and Brody is pushy with his ideas, to an almost sickening degree. I wouldn't recommend this book at all.