94 Before Agriculture
abbreviation, one that refers to some resource other than potatoes. The obvious
candidate is g-g, grain-growers. At least this makes a childlike pun on the existence
of the horse (gee-gee), though this is a creature that can leap across the divide – as,
of course, it did when Indians in the Plains and the North-west got hold of horses
in the 1600s. In fact, the h-g : p-g abbreviation, along with its alternatives, should
be put aside so that other weaknesses of this dichotomy may be confessed.
Hunter-gatherers rely on wild animals and plants. But there are many indige-
nous societies that depend on domesticated animals and crops – tribal peoples who
are not hunter-gatherers. Relations between these two forms of indigenous econ-
omy are often marked by mutual suspicion and animosity, with tribal agricultural-
ists tending to despise their hunter-gatherer neighbours. James Woodburn, the
British academic who has made some of the most important contributions to
hunter-gather anthropology, summarized the kind of discrimination that hunter-
gatherers have suffered from their pastoralist neighbours in southern Africa, not-
ing that they tend to be described as ‘dirty, disgusting, gluttonous, ignorant, stupid,
primitive, backward, incestuous, lacking a proper culture and language and even
as animal-like, not fully human.’^22 He goes on to explain how these attitudes are
often accompanied by deep fears about the apparent exotic powers of hunter-
gatherers. The important point here, however, is that the divide between agricul-
turalists/pastoralists on the one hand and hunter-gatherers on the other appears
between indigenous societies as well as between hunter-gatherers and European
settlers. Both the sociology and the colonial histories of Australia, North America
and southern Africa justify, and can be illuminated by, some version of the h-g :
p-g distinction.
In the Americas, some indigenous agriculturalists developed the dense popu-
lations, severe inequalities and military aggression that I have linked to settler
farming. Similarly, to reflect on the ancient history of Europe, where farmers
occupied hunters’ lands millennia ago, is to contemplate the possibility of many
mixed economic systems. Farming peoples moving into new lands would have
relied on herds and hunting while they established fields and waited for crops to
grow. Some hunter-gatherer societies, having exhausted their supplies of wild
game, either adopted a form of agriculture or pastoralism or entered into complex
dependence on neighbours who were farmers or herders. And hunters in many
regions may well have tried to farm or make use of domestic animals as adjuncts
to their hunting systems. The evidence of language, as I have said, argues that the
farmers overwhelmed the hunters. But this does not mean that farmers were not
also hunters or that the hunters, before being overwhelmed, did not attempt some
farming.
Anthropological accuracy requires, therefore, a great deal of caution about the
hunter : farmer dichotomy. In reality, there is a possible spectrum of economic
systems – with hunters at one end, farmers at the other, and many kinds of mixture
in between – rather than two exclusive categories, some pairs of opposites that
between them include all possible human societies. In this respect, the hunter-
gatherer : farmer divide is itself a form of myth.