Mind 97The hunters want to go hunting; gatherers like to gather. Hunter-gatherers tend
not to plan and manage surplus. They need food or money now, not in several
weeks’ time. In the modern world, the hunter-gatherer often appears to be restless
as well as poor.
The genius of hunter-gatherers is not rooted in their readiness to learn from or
to work for others, however widespread these attributes may be. The compelling
expression of hunter-gatherer culture lies in the balance of need with resources; the
reliance on a blend of the dreamer’s intuition with the naturalist’s love of detailed
knowledge; and the commitment to respectful relationships between people.
The hunter-gatherer within the modern, urban world is not extinct. Remain-
ing hunter-gatherer societies continue to exhibit the qualities they have always
possessed. And there are also hunter-gatherer points of view, beliefs and habits of
mind within the farmers’ world, inside the nations and towns that the exiles from
Eden have established and from which they continue to press outwards with a
nomadic imperative. Some anthropologists have pointed to the presence of people
who forage at the urban community’s social and economic margins – men and
women, even some families, who make do on a day-to-day basis, relying on
resources that are found here and there rather than earned from the routines of
daily labour. This portrayal of the hunter-gatherer in the modern city accords with
widespread images of hunter-gatherer destitution and landlessness. It speaks to loss
rather than to achievement.
But there are more optimistic views of the hunter-gatherer in the urban set-
ting. Indeed, there are eruptions of the hunter-gatherer mind in the farmers’ world,
as evidenced in the many voices raised in opposition to the unquestioned domi-
nance of the agricultural way: protests against repressive order, bureaucratic plan-
ning, chronic inequality, patriarchal conceit, poisonous pedagogy and the denial of
all that is essential to art. These are arenas in which a rival mind seeks expression
and longs for its particular forms of freedom. Throughout the Western world, there
are men and women who consciously choose low levels of material comfort and
small numbers of children to avoid the need for large incomes, thereby pursuing
lives in which they may survive without regular jobs and devote themselves instead
to creative work and family life. This way of being encompasses a concern about
the destruction of the natural world by the ever-growing pressures to reshape it in
the interests of surplus and profit. And dissident voices within mainstream culture
have long criticized the use of repression and violence both in maintaining social
order and in raising children. In all these we can hear echoes of hunter-gatherer
ideas and practices.
Men and women galloping on horses across the countryside in pursuit of foxes;
men with shotguns who fire at pheasants, grouse or partridges driven towards
them by a line of beaters; those whose wealth allows them to trawl the seas for
game fish in their powerful boats – these people may claim to represent the hunter-
gatherer within us all. Yet their habits and minds are fixed firm to the farming
condition. Their hunting, shooting and fishing is evidence of the very characteris-
tics that agricultural development has exaggerated, with the help of capitalist and