Mind 93obscure joke about the romantic appeal of hunter-gatherers in their vast territories
opposed to the confined, harsh lives of peasants in their fields of potatoes. The
joke – if it can claim to be more than a piece of grim and private humour – needs
some explanation.
I began anthropological work in the west of Ireland. I spent long periods of
time living and working with men and women whose lives centred on small gar-
dens and a few fields. This was an experience of peasant life. And all the notions
and tensions of what it means to be a farmer in Ireland turned my attention to
potatoes. The history of the families I knew, and the stories of their farms, had
been shaped by the potato. Peoples’ attachment to their fields, their occupation of
the hillsides and bogs and islets of the west coast, were made possible by potatoes.
They could live on ever smaller areas of ground and still feed large numbers of
children thanks to the potato’s remarkable productivity and nutritional value. The
shattering of this system, the breaking of the cycle whereby each family would
divide its holdings to allow the sons to inherit land, and in which sons and daugh-
ters would marry young and begin their own households, was the result of the
potato famine of 1846–1851.
The Ireland I knew had its roots in the changes after the famine.^21 Not that the
potato was gone; rather, it could no longer be the basis for an ever-increasing farm-
ing population. Modern Ireland was born of potato blight and a population that
was declining fast. The language of modern Irish writing (some of James Joyce,
Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, Patrick Kavanagh, even Seamus Heaney) reflects
all this, though I know there is a harking back to the ‘real’ Irishness of pre-famine
days in Yeats and Synge. These Irish ‘traditions’ were of short duration, but the
potato was always there. It shaped the harshness of the work and became the con-
dition of both attachment to the farm and the inevitable emigration of so many to
other places. The history of the potato in Ireland provided a chance to see, in stark
and clear form, the reasons for and consequences of the exile from Eden. Here
were peoples who were indeed enduring the curses of the God of biblical creation.
They lived by the sweat of their brows, gave birth to many children, then had to
go forth and multiply elsewhere.
After living in and writing about Ireland, I travelled to the lands, lives and
stories of hunter-gatherers. I have already described the intense feelings this gave
me of making a journey to a very different kind of human condition. The immense
landscapes were matched by human beings who seemed to be free and at home. I
had made a move from the realm of troubled exiles to the other side of Eden.
Through this move I was to discover a contrast that was both personal and anthro-
pological: I felt liberated from the anxious inner landscapes of middle-class Europe,
and I was able to experience the warmth and ease of people who have the deepest
possible sense of being in the best of all possible places. So the h-g’s came to oppose
the p-g’s, the hunter-gatherers the potato-growers.
One absurdity of this construct is obvious enough. Potatoes came from the
Americas, and were domesticated there, I would imagine, by peoples more in the
hunter-gatherer mould than in any other. There must be a better agricultural