Hugh Brody is an English anthropologist. His parents were Jewish, and a number of
their relatives died in the holocaust.
Brody spent three decades in Canada hanging out with natives raised in hunter-gatherer
societies. He worked for the government,
and made documentary films.
Brody was raised in a nutjob civilization. He found the hunter-gatherers to be
fascinating, because they had many virtues that were missing in modern society. The natives were kind and generous
people. They radiated a profound love
for the land of their birth, the home of their ancient ancestors. They deliberately had small families. Nobody gave orders to others. Everyone made their own decisions. Children were never disciplined.
He described his experiences in The Other Side of Eden, an excellent
book. It examined the vast gulf between farming
societies and hunter-gatherers — the broken and the free. In many ways, it was a predator-prey game. Wild people were useless obstacles to the insatiable
hunger of the powerful empire builders and soil miners.
Conquered hunters had to be broken — turned into educated, Christian,
English-speaking wageworkers. They had
to be made dependent on a farm-based civilization, and this required turning
their lives and minds inside out. It was
different in India, where the British colonized people who were already farmers. These folks were allowed to keep their
language, religion, and culture. The
empire simply skimmed off a portion of the cash flow and became a morbidly
obese parasite.
Brody’s family was Orthodox and Zionist. Later in life, his mind-altering experience
with hunter-gatherers compelled him to reexamine his cultural programming. Genesis was essentially the creation story of
western civilization. Eden was paradise,
and Adam and Eve were provided with everything they needed. There was just one simple rule to follow, and
they promptly disobeyed it. God threw
them out.
They had two sons.
Cain was a farmer, and Abel was a herder. God was not a vegetarian, and he loved Abel’s
offerings of meat. Cain got jealous, and
killed his brother. God condemned him to
a life of endless toil. Eventually, God
came to loath the troublesome humans, and decided to drown them all. Only a few were decent — Noah and his family
were spared. God instructed the
survivors to spread across the world, multiply, and subdue wildness.
So, the descendants of Noah were cursed to be wanderers, with
no permanent home. Soil depletion,
overbreeding, and belligerent neighbors forced them to keep moving. We think of hunters as being nomads, and
farmers as sedentary, but the opposite is closer to the truth. Hunters tend to remain in the same territory
for ages. Farmers commonly pack up and
move when greener pastures become available.
Yes, hunters did eventually migrate to every corner of the
planet, but the diaspora took more than 100,000 years. The new farming game grew explosively, and
spread everywhere in a few thousand years.
It was a huge and tragic change in the human journey, because it was
thoroughly unsustainable, ravaged everything in its path, and created mobs of rootless
broken people.
Over 200 years ago, Sir William Jones noticed that Sanskrit
had similarities to other languages, like Latin, Greek, and German. Other linguists pursued this notion, and discovered
many related languages. These are now
known as the Indo-European family of languages, and they are spoken by half of humankind. They likely originated in the Fertile
Crescent, and spread in all directions, as agriculture expanded.
Brody noted that Genesis made no mention of hunter-gatherers,
it was a story told by the victors. This
Hebrew creation myth was especially peculiar in that it described two-legs as
being superior to all the other animals.
In the stories of wild people, two-legs were often portrayed as the
newbies — clumsy, comical, childlike critters who had much to learn from the
older, wiser species.
The natives of northern Canada believed that they lived in
the most beautiful place in the world.
It gave them everything they needed.
They treated their home with great reverence and respect. They were extremely lucky that their chilly Eden
wasn’t prime real estate for agriculture.
With the exception of horrific epidemics, they were relatively unmolested
until the twentieth century.
But then, hell rumbled into Eden. Obnoxious missionaries told them they were
wicked devil worshippers. The government
built permanent settlements for them, with churches, schools, and stores. Their ancestral land became the property of
the state. Loggers, ranchers, and miners
moved in. A large region of Eden became
a training ground for supersonic low altitude NATO bombers. By and by, the natives became fond of the
pain killing magic of oblivion drinking. The good old days were over.
The residential schools were sadistically cruel. Children were taken from their families and
sent far away. The kids were beaten for
speaking their language. Many were
malnourished or sexually abused. Many
died. The primary goal of school was
ethnocide — eliminating wild culture. They
weren’t really creating improved people; they were breaking them, like ranchers
break wild horses. The children were
taught that they were primitive, and that everything they knew was wrong and
stupid. After a year of English-only,
they forgot their native tongue. It took
years to relearn it, and many never did.
Control is the foundation of the farming mindset. Settlers ravage ancient forests with sharp
axes and plows. They exterminate the
wildlife and build sturdy fences. When
Brody brought an Inuit elder to England, they took a drive in the country. Anaviapik was stunned, “It’s all built!” The original ecosystem was gone. It was unbelievable.
On one project, Brody hung out with alcoholic natives in an urban
skid row. He noted that white drinkers
took great pride in holding their liquor while drinking heavily. It was uncool to stumble around or slur
words. Respectable boozers remained in
control. Natives, on the other hand, let
go. “There is a welcome loss of self, a
flight into another state of being, another kind of person” — a spirit journey.
Control is impossible in the hunting world. Fish, birds, and game go where they wish, and
do as they please. Weather happens and
patterns change suddenly without warning.
Hunter-gatherers must continually pay close attention to the land and
its creatures. A living ecosystem is not
a predictable machine. Intuition and
improvisation are essential for survival.
Folks must be open to many states of mind. Dreams provided important information. “If there is a trail to be discovered, the
dreamer must find it.”
“It is artists, speculative scientists, and those whose
journeys in life depend on not quite knowing the destination who are close to
hunter-gatherers, who rely upon a hunter-gatherer mind.”
Brody, Hugh, The
Other Side of Eden, North Point Press, New York, 2001.
