Mind 95Nonetheless, I believe that within this distinction lies a set of intellectual and
imaginative opportunities. Thinking about the place of hunting peoples in the
human story offers an insight into the history of the world. It provides a parallel
insight into the nature of the human mind. The destiny of the hunter-gatherer is
both an external and an internal process, an issue for societies and for individu-
als.
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The hunter-gatherer mind is humanity’s most sophisticated combination of
detailed knowledge and intuition. It is where direct experience and metaphor unite
in a joint concern to know and use the truth. The agricultural mind is a result of
specialized, intense development of specific systems of intellectual order, with
many kinds of analytical category and exacting uses of deductive reasoning. The
hunter-gatherer seeks a relationship with all parts of the world that will be in both
personal and material balance. The spirits are the evidence and the metaphors for
this relationship. If they are treated well, and are known in the right way, and are
therefore at peace with human beings, then people will find the things they need.
The farmer has the task of controlling and shaping the world, making it yield the
produce upon which agricultural life depends. If this is done well, then crops will
grow. Discovery by discovery, change by change, field by field, control is increased
and produce is more secure. The dichotomies of good and evil, right and wrong
express this farming project: control comes with separating manipulable resources
from the rest of the environment and working with determination and consistency
against all that might undermine this endeavour.
The differences between hunter-gatherers living before agriculture developed
or beyond the later farming frontier, and small indigenous societies based on a mix
of farming, herding, hunting and gathering, may not best be understood as issues
of mind. As noted, ideas about spirituality and the boundaries between the physi-
cal and the metaphysical are shared by many indigenous societies, both hunter-
gatherers and small-scale farmers. However, all agriculture depends on controlling
and remaking the natural world, and farmers have the task of both defending their
fields and finding new ones. These are social and economic reasons for relatively
high levels of organization and aggression. It is no coincidence that in so many
parts of the world, including regions where different indigenous systems live along-
side one another, agriculturalists despise hunter-gatherers for being ‘primitive’ and
hunter-gatherers complain that farmers are belligerent. In the colonial era of the
past 500 years, ‘developed’ agricultural societies have launched themselves with
particular ferocity against all other peoples, and have, in particular, sought new
land in vast territories occupied by hunter-gatherers. However complex the overlap
between different kinds of indigenous societies, the dichotomy of hunter-gatherer :
farmer says a great deal about how the world and the mind have been shaped.