92 Before Agriculture
of deduction: the theory knows what it is going to find, then relies on a thorough
but predictable exposition to find it. It is very striking that when Edmund Leach
wrote about the Bible, and gave himself the task of explaining the nature of much
of the text, he showed how a particular complexity of the stories is in the interest
of a priestly class. Here is an explanation, but it is to do with function, not struc-
ture.
A further objection to structuralism in anthropology is more down-to-earth.
The use of binary pairs to create an analytical grid is at odds with the way in which
indigenous cultures, starting with hunter-gatherers, achieve so much by avoiding
dichotomies. Hunter-gatherers also reject any complete reliance on deductive rea-
soning. So the structuralist analysis that commits from its outset to display the
inner workings of dichotomies is in a perplexing, and somewhat imperial, relation-
ship to its subject matter. The anthropologist’s ways of thinking here occupy the
intellectual territory, obscuring and ousting the people’s own modes of thought
and discourse. An irony of Lévi-Strauss’s achievement is that it yields much more
insight into his own culture, so centred on binary logic and attempts to create
rational order, than into those of the tribes he examined.
Postmodern work in literature and social science has emerged in part from
frustration with this structuralist reliance on dichotomies and its attendant pseudo-
scientific qualities.^20 These new approaches to history, culture and knowledge
centre on meaning rather than on mind. And they pay close attention to the ways
in which meanings themselves are constructed by the would-be analysers. Thus
postmodernists deconstruct the accounts, be they myths or theories of myths,
allowing presuppositions, intentions and colonial purposes to disclose themselves
in whatever array of complexity or contradiction may emerge. It is easy to imagine
the intertwining puzzle that this exercise in scrutiny can yield.
The postmodern task is the analysis of analyses – an approach that can indeed
yield insightful theories about theory. Its problems, like those of structuralism,
stem from a failure to describe a world whose reality would be recognized by those
who spend their days living in it. The deconstruction of hunter-gatherers has con-
tributed to the view that they do not exist at all; they become, instead, a myth of
colonial theory, a part of someone else’s ideology, or, at best, an edge of some other
way of life. To those who live, or whose ancestors have lived, by hunting and gath-
ering, this deconstruction must come as a surprise.
13
Let me return for a moment to dichotomies, this time to the pair of terms that I
have relied upon not only for the writing of this book but in much of my thinking
about the world. In my notes and letters, places where writing is not laundered for
fear of critics, I have long used the pair of abbreviations h-g : p-g. These stand for
hunter-gatherers and potato growers. This pairing began as a small and rather